My experiences of the war between France and Germany

COURCELLES, SPICHEREN, AND GRAVELOTTE. 123

battles of Vionville and Gravelotte were fought. Why,

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slantingly athwart the plain, its right clinging to the wood of St. Amould, its left away in a north-easterly direction, grappled upon Vionville as on a sheet anchor; for was not Vionville the foothold it had achieved on the great Verdun chaussde? Against this left, clung to so limpetlike, and against the whole attenuated line aslant of the plain, the French projected themselves with exces- sive fury over and over again. The hours passed, and still there came no assistance. Vionville had been carried before eleven, and now it was past one. It had been found necessary to interpose the cavaliy as a buffer be-; tween the French and the exhausted infantry men. Rheinbaben, if there were terrible odds before him, saw also before him the sight so dear to a cavalry soldier, a noble stretch of charging ground. He was not slow to make the most of it. Again and again his horsemen dashed themselves against the French masses. Once they galloped so far that men said afterwards they had got to sabring the mitrailleuse gunners that plied their work on the chauss6e before Rezonville. It was the sight of the war to have seen those cavahy charges on the day of Vionville — work of which this I now write of was but a mere episode, gallant and useful as it was. Necessity has no law, but the general must be in sore case indeed who is forced to dash cavalry again and again into the faces of serried files of infantry men handling a weapon like the chassepot. Who shall wonder that when the drafts were sent for to fill up the gaps in Rheinbaben's squadrons, a thrill ran through the Landleute of the dis- tricts whence it is recruited, .when the footing up of the requisition came to be known. But minutes were precious, and the devoted horsemen threw their lives away to gain them.

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The road from Gorze to Rezonville consists, first of an ascent through a narrow gorge into a corner of the Bois de Viomdlle, and then it traverses the plain in a line with the close of the battle of Vionville on the i6th

PUCELLA RAPTA.

a waiter a liar. The room was crowded with French officers. I dined at the same table with Colonel Michel Ney, a nephew of the historical Marshal. He had received some half-dozen sabre-wounds in the cavalry fight at Vionville, and was only half recovered. At the same table also sat General Duplessis, a French officer of dis- tinction, who also had been severely wounded. In the evening there was a tremendous rush of Grerman officers into the hotel, and quarters became impossible at any price. Forty officers were sent bedless away from the Hdtel de I'Europe, and I was indebted to a good-hearted American for half his bed. The French and German officers fraternised a little in the salle after dinner. At first the Frenchmen were a little inclined to be sulky and reserved, but the heartiness of the Germans soon thawed the ice, and the champagne promoted the flow of kindly feeling. I was told that in the forenoon, when the officers of the Imperial Guard said adieu to their men, profuse tears were shed by both. There was no such emotion manifested by Leboeuf s corps.

I08 THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.

occopied the line of villages I have named, covering Metz to the eastward » when Steinmetz's reconnaissance beat up their quarters. The position, with which I had occasion afterwards to become familiar, presents many advantageous features, but is faulty in a military sense by reason of the abundance of cover for an approaching enemy, and of the number of excellent roads at his service for bringing up his forces in parallel columns. The French front and flanks were studiedly covered with numerous rifle-pits and trenches. Steinmetz's attack did not begin till shortly before four o'clock in the afternoon. It was initiated by the ist division (Bentheim) belonging to the I St Army Corps, which had joined Steinmetz since Spicheren; and by the 26th brigade (von der Goltz) of Gliimer's division (the 13th) belonging to the 7th Army Corps. There were strong supports belonging to the ist and 7th corps behind, about Pange, Domangeville, and Frontigny, The 26th brigade began the attack on Colom- bej, while Bentheim's men farther to the north pressed up the Saarbriick-Metz chauss^e, deploying when at the hamlet of St Agnan on the vineyards toward Flanville against Montoy and the ravine of La Planchette. The French were so strong on the slopes and in the woods about their position that the Grerman infantry could make no headway, and lost heavily, experiencing, too, now for the first time a foretaste of tiie idiosyncracies of French fortress guns. Infantry supports came up, but the Colombey-Montoy position was defended with great ob- stinacy and could not be forced. After the infantry had been engaged without eflect for some hours, the horse artillery were galloped up and came into action on the plateau near Noisseville, dose to the brewery, with which the siege of Metz made us so familiar, and looking down upon Montoy from the north-east. There were no fewer

COURCELLES, SPICHEREN, AND GRAVELOTTE. 1 65

The battle of Gravelotte was both positively and re- latively less bloody than that of Vionville. With more than double the number of troops engaged on the former day as compared with the latter, the Germans lost about 14,000 men; the French probably about the same num- ber. What force Bazaine had in the field is difficult to estimate. When he surrendered, his strength, 173,000 men, was as surprising as it was inexplicable on the estimates to which the Germans had access. It seems impossible that he could have had fewer than 150,000 men at his disposal on the i8th of August; and it seems equally impossible that a man in possession of his senses, even without a scintilla of military capacity, should not on such an occasion have mustered out to the last man.

I 78 THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.

been cast from a French cavaliy regiment in some remote age, and had since been engaged, judging by the col- lar marks, as a beast of burden. Well, I started with this animal for a third trial, and to do him justice, his conduct did not belie his conscientious aspect. He plodded forward steadily at a kind of compound of a walk, a trot, and a canter; he seemed to be walking with his fore legs, trotting with one of his hind legs, and cantering with the other. The eflfect was novel, if not wholly agree- able, and then he really got over the ground very fairly. On the day of Gravelotte he carried me uncommonly well, his ancient military training making him stand fire like an adjutant's horse, which is generally too depressed in spirits to manifest emotion at anything short of an earthquake. I began to get very sweet on him, although the scarcity of keep was a considerable inconvenience. There was but little bother with him on the Thursday night. When I joined the bivouac I fastened him to the end of a row of cuirassier horses that were picketed close by, and the men gave him of their oats and hay. But they went away next morning, the bivouac broke up, and fresh quarters had to be sought. In one of the houses of the deserted village of Gravelotte I found a room which was tenanted only by two sorely wounded men and an hospital attendant. All the other houses were packed full of wounded, and one was in luck in getting the use of a chair, and of the common frying-pan in which to cook a piece of bacon bought from a marketender. But there was no room for the horse, and if there had been, he would not have been the best company for the wounded men. I tied him up outside while I ate, wrote, and slept, and then late in the afternoon it struck me that he must be thirsty. I rode the brute a circuit of some five miles in search of water, and when I got back it was all

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The siege of Metz, to watch which wm my new duty,

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER IV. Sedan: before and after.

J 82 THE WAR BETWBEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.

It was entirely by chance that, unattached as we were to anything or anybody, while posting letters in Ven- dresse about seven o'clock on the morning of the ist September, we, heard that there was fighting going on to the north, in the valley of the Meuse. The King had been out of bed and away ever since the early morning — gone, one of the Royal gendarmes sagely informed us, to visit the battle of the previous day but one. Of course we started at once, found the road utterly deserted, and, taking the wrong branch at the fork, came down into the valley of the Meuse nearly as far west as Mezi^res, and for the time at least out of view of the great battle that was raging as we trotted rapidly forward. But the whole valley was resonant with the din of battle. Away to our right we could hear the crash of the artillery fire at Sedan. Over against Donchery, midway between Sedan and Mezi^es, the blazing villages sent baleful flakes of flame up into the bright sky. At Mezi^res itself the Wurtembergers, from the top of the heights between us and the town, were replying with shells and musketry to the cannon from the bastions and the spiteful whirr of the mitrailleuses from the glacis. As we came down into the valley we passed through large Frenqh camps

THE SIEOB. 235

Although the route between Rethel and Sedan had been traversed by a large portion of the German host on its south-western march after Sedan, the district, at least as far as Boulzicourt, seemed to have either suffered very little, or to have recuperated with surprising alacrity. As in the valley of the Mame, field operations were going on briskly. Agricultural horses seemed plentiful, and I saw several great herds of cattle in the flat water meadows. I felt a deep interest in the portion of road between Flize and Sedan. I had traversed it several times before — once on the day of the battle of Sedan, when a few scared old women, sitting crouching by their black hearths amidst the crashing of the cannonading, and an oc- casional scanty group of timid-eyed men peeping out from behind the stone dykes, were the only evidences of resident population in villages that bore the red-fresh impress of the fans of the war-dog.

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Other sort of man, he might surely have seriously com- plicated von Moltke's strategy.* Suppose that he had cut his way out in the obviously most eligible direction, somewhere between Plappeville and Maizi^res les Metz, and marched at the pace of the first Napoleon on the track of the Maas army. The Germans can march, but they cannot fly; the hot energy of the Red Prince could not have accomplished the impossibility of drawing in from the fringe of the wide circle an army strong enough to give Bazaine battle before he had won the start by several marches. It was the Maas army which met Mac- Mahon in the teeth at Buzancy and Nouart as he came lumbering through the Argonne into the Maas valley; the third army had swung round, not in time to head him, but to take him on the right flank, extended in dis- hevelled march all along the valley. But if Bazaine had been close on the track of the Crown Prince of Saxony, the latter would have been in a vice. He could not have fought facing both ways. Had he elected to arrest Mac- Mahon, Bazaine would have been upon him from behind ; had he faced about and met Bazaine, the cannon of MacMahon would have been roaring on his new rear. His position, in fact, would have been untenable; and it seems plain that the only course open to him would have been to slip out of the crux to the southward, and thus to have allowed the coalescence of the army of ChUlons and the army from Metz. The outcome of a junction so formidable it would be folly to attempt to define. The French situation would still have been precarious — per- haps nearly as bad as it was the day before Sedan. For on three sides three German armies would still have