CHAPTER II.
THE GATHERING OF THE HOSTS.
German Mobilization.
The great contest, thus precipitated by the formal defiance which Baron Wimpfen bore from Paris to Berlin, excited deep emotion all over the world. The hour had at length struck which was to usher in the deadly struggle between France and Germany. Long foreseen, the dread shock, like all grave calamities, came nevertheless as a surprise, even upon reflective minds. Statesmen and soldiers who looked on, while they shared in the natural feelings aroused by so tremendous a drama, were also the privileged witnesses of two instructive experiments on a grand scale—the processes whereby mighty armies are brought into the field, and the methods by means of which they are conducted to defeat or victory. The German plan of forming an Army was new in regard to the extent and completeness with which it had been carried out. How would it work when put to the ultimate test? Dating only from 1867, the French scheme of organization, a halting Gallic adaptation of Prussian principles, modified by French traditions, and still further by the political exigencies besetting an Imperial dynasty, having little root in the nation, besides being new and rickety, was in an early stage of development; it may be said to have been adolescent, not mature. No greater contrast was ever presented by two parallel series of human actions than that supplied by the irregular, confused, and uncertain working of the Imperial arrangement of forming an Army and setting it in motion for active service, and the smoothness, celerity, and punctuality which marked the German “mobilization.” The reason is—first, that the system on which the German Army was built up from the foundations was sound in every part, and that the plan which had been designed for the purpose of placing a maximum force under arms in a given time, originally comprehensive, had been corrected from day to day, and brought down to the last moment. For example, whenever a branch or section of a railway line was opened for traffic, the entire series of time-tables, if need be, were so altered as to include the new facility for transport. The labour and attention bestowed on this vital condition was also expended methodically upon all the others down to the most minute detail. Thus, the German staff maps of France, especially east of Paris, actually laid down roads which in July, 1870, had not yet been marked upon any map issued by the French War Office. The central departments, in Berlin, exercised a wide and searching supervision; but they did not meddle with the local military authorities who, having large discretionary powers, no sooner received a brief and simple order than they set to work and produced, at a fixed time, the result desired.
When King William arrived in Berlin, on the evening of July 15, the orders already prepared by General von Moltke received at once the royal sanction, and were transmitted without delay to the officers commanding the several Army Corps. Their special work, in case of need, had been accurately defined; and thus, by regular stages, the Corps gradually, but swiftly, was developed into its full proportions, and ready, as a finished product, to start for the frontier. The reserves and, if needed, the landwehr men filled out the battalions, squadrons, and batteries to the fixed strength; and as they found in the local depôts arms, clothing, and equipments, no time was lost. Horses were bought, called in, or requisitioned, and transport was obtained. As all the wants of a complete Corps had been ascertained and provided beforehand, so they came when demanded. At the critical moment the supreme directing head, relieved altogether from the distracting duty of settling questions of detail, had ample time to consider the broad and absorbing business problems which should and did occupy the days and nights of a leader of armies. The composition of the North German troops, that is, those under the immediate control of King William, occasioned no anxiety; and there was only a brief period of doubt in Bavaria, where a strong minority had not so much French and Austrian sympathies, as inveterate Prussian antipathies. They were promptly suppressed by the popular voice and the loyalty of the King. Hesse, Würtemberg, and Baden responded so heartily to the calls of patriotism that in more than one locality the landwehr battalions far exceeded their normal numerical strength, that is, more men than were summoned presented themselves at the depôts. The whole operation of bringing a great Army from a peace to a war footing, in absolute readiness, within the short period of eighteen days, to meet an adversary on his own soil, was conducted with unparalleled order and quickness. The business done included, of course, the transport of men, guns, horses, carriage, by railway chiefly, from all parts of the country to the Rhine and the Moselle; and the astonishing fact is that plans devised and adopted long beforehand should have been executed to the letter, and that more than three hundred thousand combatants—artillery, horse, infantry, in complete fighting trim, backed up by enormous trains—should have been brought to specified places on specified days, almost exactly in fulfilment of a scheme reasoned out and drawn up two years before. The French abruptly declared war; the challenge was accepted; the orders went forth, and “thereupon united Germany stood to arms,” to use the words of Marshal von Moltke. It is a proud boast, but one amply justified by indisputable facts.
French Mobilization.
How differently was the precious time employed on the other side of the Rhine. When the Imperial Government rushed headlong into war, they actually possessed only one formed Corps d’Armée, the 2nd, stationed in the camp of Chalons, and commanded by General Frossard. Yet even this solitary body was, as he confesses, wanting in essential equipments when it was hurriedly transported to St. Avold, not far from Saarlouis, on the Rhenish Prussian frontier. Not only had all the other Corps to be made out of garrison troops, but the entire staff had to be provided in haste. Marshal Niel, an able soldier, and the Emperor, had studied, at least, some of Baron Stoffel’s famous reports on the German Army, and had endeavoured to profit by them; but the Marshal died, the Corps Législatif was intractable, favouritism ruled in the Court, the Emperor suffered from a wearing internal disease, and the tone of the Army was one not instinct with the spirit of self-sacrificing obedience. In time it is possible that the glaring defects of the Imperial military mechanism might have been removed, and possible, also, that the moral and discipline of the officers and men might have been raised. Barely probable, since Marshal Lebœuf believed that the Army was in a state of perfect readiness, not merely to defend France, but to dash over the Rhine into South Germany. His illusion was only destroyed when the fatal test was applied. Nominally, the French Army was formidable in numbers; but not being based on the territorial system, which includes all the men liable to service in one Corps, whether they are with the colours or in the reserve, and also forms the supplementary landwehr into local divisions, the French War Office could not rapidly raise the regiments to the normal strength. For a sufficient reason. A peasant residing in Provence might be summoned to join a regiment quartered in Brittany, or a workman employed in Bordeaux called up to the Pas de Calais. When he arrived he might find that the regiment had marched to Alsace or Lorraine. During the first fortnight after the declaration of war thousands of reserve men were travelling to and fro over France in search of their comrades. Another evil was that some Corps in course of formation were split into fragments separated from each other by many score miles. Nearly the whole series of Corps, numbered from One to Seven, were imperfectly supplied with a soldier’s needments; and what is more astonishing, the frontier arsenals and depôts were sadly deficient in supplies, so that constant applications were made to Paris for the commonest necessaries. There were no departmental or even provincial storehouses, but the materials essential for war were piled up in three or four places, such as Paris and Versailles, Vernon and Chateauroux. In short, the Minister of War, who said and believed that he was supremely ready, found that, in fact, he was compelled almost to improvise a fighting Army in the face of an enemy who, in perfect order, was advancing with the measured, compact, and irresistible force of a tidal wave.
The plan followed was exactly the reverse of the German method. East of the Rhine no Corps was moved to the frontier, until it was complete in every respect, except the second line of trains; and consequently, from the outset, it had a maximum force prepared for battle. There were some slight exceptions to the rule, but they were imposed by circumstances, served a real purpose, and disappeared when the momentary emergency they were adapted to meet had been satisfied. West of the Rhine, not one solitary Corps took its assigned place in a perfect state for action. All the battalions of infantry, and of course the regiments, were hundreds short of their proper strength. Before a shot had been fired, General de Failly, at Bitsche, was obliged to send a demand for coin to pay the troops, adding notes won’t pass—“les billets n’ont point cours.” General Frossard, at St. Avoid, reported that enormous packages of useless maps had been sent him—maps of Germany—and that he had not a single map of the French frontier. Neither Strasburg, Metz, Toul, Verdun, Thionville, nor Mézières, possessed stores of articles—such as food, equipments, and carriage—which were imperatively required. The Intendants, recently appointed to special posts, besieged the War Office in Paris, to relieve them from their embarrassments—they had nothing on the spot. The complaints were not idle. As early as the 26th of July, the troops about Metz were living on the reserve of biscuits; there were sent only thirty-eight additional bakers to Metz for 120,000 men, and even these few practitioners were sadly in want of ovens. “I observe that the Army stands in need of biscuit and bread,” said the Emperor to the Minister of War at the same date. “Could not bread be made in Paris, and sent to Metz?” Marshal Lebœuf, a day later, took note of the fact that the detachments which came up to the front, sometimes reserve men, sometimes battalions, arrived without ammunition and camp equipments. Soldiers, functionaries, carts, ovens, provisions, horses, munitions, harness, all had to be sought at the eleventh hour. These facts are recorded in the despairing telegrams sent from the front to the War Office. The very Marshal who had described France as “archiprête,” in a transcendent state of readiness for war, announced by telegram, on the 28th of July, the lamentable fact that he could not move forward for want of biscuit—“Je manque de biscuit pour marcher en avant.” The 7th Corps was to have been formed at Belfort, but its divisions could never be assembled. General Michel, on the 21st of July, sent to Paris this characteristic telegram: “Have arrived at Belfort,” he wrote: “can’t find my brigade; can’t find the General of Division. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are”—a document probably unique in military records. Hardly a week later, that is on the 27th, Marshal Lebœuf became anxious respecting the organization of this same Corps, and put, through Paris, some curious questions to General Félix Douay, its commander. “How far have you got on with your formations? Where are your divisions?” The next day General Douay arrived at Belfort, having been assured in Paris by his superiors that the place was “abundantly provided” with what he would require. After the War, Prince Georges Bibesco, a Roumanian in the French Army, attached to the 7th Corps, published an excellent volume on the campaign, and in its pages he describes the “cruel deception” which awaited Douay. He writes that, for the most part, the troops, had “neither tents, cooking pots, nor flannel belts; neither medical nor veterinary canteens, nor medicines, nor forges, nor pickets for the horses—they were without hospital attendants, workmen, and train. As to the magazines of Belfort—they were empty.” In the land of centralization General Douay was obliged to send a staff and several men to Paris, with instructions to explain matters at the War Office, and not leave the capital without bringing the articles demanded with them. Other examples are needless. It would be almost impossible to understand how it came to pass that the French were plunged into war, in July, 1870, did we not know that the military institutions had been neglected, that the rulers relied on old renown, the “glorious past” of the Duc de Gramont, and that the few men who forced the quarrel to a fatal head, knew nothing of the wants of an army, and still less of the necessities and risks of war.
War Methods Contrasted.
As the story is unfolded, it will be seen that the same marked contrast between the principles and methods adopted and practised by the great rivals prevailed throughout. The German Army rested on solid foundations; the work of mobilization was conducted in strict accordance with the rules of business; allowing for the constant presence of a certain amount of error, inseparable from human actions, it may be said that “nothing was left to chance.” The French Army was loosely put together; it contained uncertain elements; was not easily collected, and never in formed bodies; it was without large as well as small essentials; it “lacked finish.” And similar defects became rapidly manifest in the Imperial plan for the conduct of the war. Here the contrast is flagrant. The Emperor Napoleon, who had lived much with soldiers, who had been present at great military operations, and had studied many campaigns, could not be destitute of what the French call “le flair militaire.” He had, also, some inkling of the political side of warfare; and in July, 1870, he saw that much would depend upon his ability to make a dash into South Germany, because, if he were successful, even for a brief time, Prussia might be deprived of South German help, and Austria might enter the field. There was no certainty about the calculation, indeed, it was almost pure conjecture; seeing that Count von Beust and the Archduke Albert had both warned him that, “above all things,” they needed time, and that the former had become frightened at the prospect of Hungarian defection, and a Russian onfall. Yet it was on this shadowy basis that he moved to the frontier the largest available mass of incomplete and suddenly organized batteries, squadrons and battalions. He and his advisers were possessed with a feverish desire to be first in the field; and the Corps were assembled near Metz, Strasburg, and Belfort, with what was called a reserve at Chalons, on the chance that the left might be made to join the right in Alsace, and that the whole, except the reserve which was to move up from Chalons, could be pushed over the Rhine at Maxau, opposite Carlesruhe, and led with conquering speed into the country south of the Main. Before he joined the head-quarters at Metz, on the 28th of July, the Emperor may have suspected, but on his arrival he assuredly found that the plan, if ever feasible, had long passed out of the range of practical warfare. He reaped nothing but the disadvantages which spring from grossly defective preparation, and “raw haste half-sister to delay.” He knew that he was commander-in-chief of a relatively weak and ill-found Army, and he acquired the certainty at Metz, that, unless he were conspicuously victorious, neither Austria nor Italy would move a man.