How the Generals Rated each other.
While General Reille, who performed his part with so much modesty and dignity, rode back over the Meuse, the Emperor still awaited, in the Sub-Prefecture, the advent of General de Wimpffen, who was fretting and fuming at the Golden Cross within the walls. According to his own confession he had become convinced that the refusal of his sovereign to head a sally from Balan had delivered over the Army to the mercy of the Germans, and violent despair had taken possession of his soul. For had not the Comte de Palikao sent him to overbear Napoleon III. and the set who surrounded him, and had he not failed to bend the monarch to his will? Twice, he repeats, with pride, “I obstinately refused to obey” the Emperor’s invitation to treat with the enemy; and because Napoleon III. had authoritatively interfered with his command he sent in that letter of resignation which the Emperor refused to accept. At first he seemed inclined to resist as well as resent the conduct of his master, who had presumed to consult others and, by hoisting the white flag, to take, as the General haughtily says, “a decision contrary to my will.” Let the Emperor sign the capitulation. Such were the first thoughts of a man whose temper was imperious, but whose better nature was not insensible to reason. He quelled his wrath and threw off his despair, moved, as he says, by the feeling that in defending the interests of the Army he would be rendering a last service to his brave companions in arms, and to his country. So he went from the Golden Cross to the Sub-Prefecture. Still angry, he loudly asserted as soon as he entered the room that he had been vanquished in battle because, addressing the Emperor, “your Generals refused to obey me.” Thereupon Ducrot started up, exclaiming, “Do you mean me? Your orders were only too well obeyed, and your mad presumption has brought on this frightful disaster.” “If I am incapable,” retorted De Wimpffen, “all the more reason why I should not retain the command.” “You took it this morning,” shouted Ducrot, also a violent man, “when you thought it would bring honour and profit. You cannot lay it down now. You alone must bear (endosser) the shame of the capitulation.” “Le General Ducrot était très exalté,” he says in his narrative, and he calls on his brother officers who were present to testify that he used these brave words, which, in substance, appear in De Wimpffen’s account; but the latter adds that he threw back the accusation, saying, “I took the command to evade a defeat which your movement would have precipitated;” and that he requested General Ducrot to leave the room, as he had not come to confer with him! What the quiet and well-mannered Emperor thought of his two fiery and blustering Generals is nowhere stated. The calm language in the pamphlet attributed to Napoleon III., which shows, nevertheless, how deeply he was vexed by De Wimpffen’s selfish wish to shirk his responsibilities at such a moment, takes no note of the quarrel, and simply tells us how “the General understood that, having commanded during the battle, his duty obliged him not to desert his post in circumstances so critical.” Thus, when General Reille returned with King William’s letter, he found De Wimpffen in a reasonable frame of mind and ready to perform, with courage and address, the hard task of obtaining the best terms he could for the French Army from the placidly stern Von Moltke, in whose heart there were no soft places when business had to be done.