Indeed, General Frossard is entitled to any credit which may accrue from the stoutness with which he held his main position until nightfall. He himself assigns the march of Von Golz from Rosseln upon Forbach as the reason for his retreat. Having been obliged to leave the heights north-west of Forbach practically undefended, in order to support Vergé in Stiring-Wendel, he lost, or thought he had lost, control over the high road and railway to Metz, and felt bound to retire eccentrically upon Sarreguemines, a movement which it is not easy to comprehend. It is true that the guns of Von Golz, firing from the hills above Forbach, drove back a train bringing reinforcements from St. Avold, but a couple of miles to the rear was Metman’s entire division; and it was from and not towards this succour that the main body of the French took their way. The most astonishing fact connected with this battle is that during the whole day three of Bazaine’s divisions were each within about nine miles of the battlefield. It was not the Marshal’s fault that not one assisted the commander of the 2nd Corps. Each had been directed to do so, but none succeeded. General Montaudon did, indeed, move out from Sarreguemines, but halted after covering a few miles. General de Castagny, as soon as he heard the guns, and without waiting for orders, marched his division from Puttelange; but, unluckily for him, the sound led him into the hills, where the dense woods and vales obstructed the passage of the sound. Hearing nothing he returned to Puttelange, but no sooner had he got there than the roar of artillery, more intense than ever, smote his ear. The ready veteran at once set out afresh, this time following the route which would have brought him into the heart of the Spicheren position. He was too late; night came on apace, the distant tumult died down, he endeavoured to communicate with Frossard, but his messenger only found Metman, who, coming on from Marienthal, had halted at Bening, and did not move upon Forbach until nearly dark. Thus were three strong divisions wasted, and a force which would have given the French victory, spent the day in wandering to and fro or in weak hesitation. General de Castagny was the only officer who really did his utmost to support the 2nd Corps; for Metman awaited orders, and they came too late. During the night, or early in the morning, they all, except De Castagny, who was called up to St. Avold, assembled near Puttelange, wearied and disgusted with their fruitless exertions; and there they were joined by the 2nd Corps.
The Germans bivouacked on the field. They had had in action twenty-seven battalions and ten batteries, and the day’s irregular and confused fighting had cost them in killed and wounded a loss of no fewer than 223 officers and 4,648 men; while the French lost 249 officers and 3,829 men, including more than two thousand prisoners. The great disproportion is due to the fact that the Germans were the assailants and that throughout the day and on all points they fought the battle with relatively small groups, parts of the 7th, 8th, and 3rd Corps, which arrived in succession on the scene. That the victory was not more complete must be ascribed to the improvised character of the conflict. Both Woerth and Spicheren were accidental combats due to the initiative of subordinate officers, a practice which has its dangers; but the success attained in each case is a striking proof that the discipline and training of all ranks in the German Army had created a living organism which could be trusted to work by itself.
CHAPTER VI.
VACILLATION IN METZ.
Two such staggering and unexpected blows filled the civil population with terror, the aspiring soldiers at head-quarters with anger, and the Imperial Commander-in-Chief with dismay. Disorder, consternation, and amazement reigned in Metz. And no wonder. From Alsace came the appalling news that the 1st Corps had been hopelessly shattered and that the Marshal was already fleeing for safety, by day and night, through the passes of the Vosges. Strasburg reported the arrival of fugitives and the absence of a garrison. “We have scarcely any troops,” wrote the Prefect; “at most from fifteen hundred to two thousand men.” The chief official at Epinal asked for power to organize the defence of the Vosges at the moment when the passes were thronged with MacMahon’s hurrying troops. It was known that General Frossard had been defeated and that he was in full retreat, but during twenty-four hours no direct intelligence came to hand from him. That De Failly, left unsupported at Bitsche, would retire at once was assumed, but the orders directing his movements did not reach him until, after a severe night march, he had halted a moment at Lutzelstein, or, as the French call the fort, La Petite Pierre. From Verdun and Thionville arrived vehement demands for arms and provisions; and from the front towards the Saar no report that was not alarming. Turning to the south-east, the Imperial head-quarters did not know exactly where Douay’s 7th Corps was; and in an agony of apprehension ordered the General, if he could, to throw a division into Strasburg, and “with the two others” cover Belfort. When the telegram was sent one of these had been heavily engaged at Woerth, and the other was at Lyons not yet formed! The anxiety of the Emperor and his assistants was embittered by the knowledge that not one strong place on the Rhine had a sufficient garrison; and that the rout of MacMahon had not only flung wide open the portals of Lorraine, but had made the reduction of ill-provided Strasburg a question of weeks or days. So heedlessly had the Ollivier Ministry, the Emperor and Empress rushed into war, at a time when even the fortifications of Metz were glaringly incomplete, when the storehouses of the frontier fortresses were ill-supplied, when arms and uniforms were not or could not be furnished to the Mobiles; when, in short, nothing could be put between the Germans and Paris except the troops hastily collected in Alsace and Lorraine—now a host in part shattered, in part disordered, and the whole without resolute and clear-sighted direction.
Prince Louis Napoleon, sitting passively on his horse in the barrack-yard of Strasburg, in 1836, was defined by a caustic historian as a “literary man” whose characteristic was a “faltering boldness.” The phrases apply to the Emperor in Metz. It may be said that he could use the language employed by soldiers, that he had some military judgment, but that, when called on, he could not deal at all with the things which are the essence of the profession he loved to adopt. After a lapse of more than thirty years, he found himself, not alone in a barrack-yard facing an “indignant Colonel,” but at the head of a great, yet scattered and roughly handled Army, with formidable enemies pressing upon his front, and equally formidable enemies pouring through the rugged hill paths upon his vulnerable flank, and threatening the sole railway which led direct through Chalons to Paris. He was now a man, old for his years, and a painful disease made a seat on horseback almost intolerable. He could not, like his uncle in his prime, ride sixty miles a day, sleep an hour or two, and mount again if needful. He was an invalid and a dreamer, who had, against his fluctuating will, undertaken a task much too vast for his powers. The contemptuous words applied to him by Mr. Kinglake seem harsh, still, in very truth, they exactly describe Louis Napoleon as he was at Strasburg in 1836, and as he sat meditatively at Metz in 1870. Yet, be it understood, he never at any period of his career was wanting in coolness and physical courage, though what Napier has finely called “springing valour” had no place in his temperament. He was scared by the suddenness of the shock and the rapidity of events, and he was bewildered because he was incapable of grasping, co-ordinating, or understanding the thick-coming realities presented by war on a grand scale; and stood always too much in awe of the unknown. He could not “make up his mind,” and in the higher ranks of the French Army there was not one man who could force him to make it up and stand fast by his resolution. But, inferior as they were when measured by a high standard, it is probable that any one of the Corps Commanders, clothed with Imperial power, would have conducted the campaign far better than the Emperor. Another disadvantage which beset him was a moral consequence inseparable from his adventurous career. He could not add a cubit to his military stature; but he need not have “waded through slaughter to a throne.” In Paris before he started for the frontier, in Metz on the morning of August 7th, he must have felt, as the Empress also felt, that his was a dynasty which could not stand before the shock of defeat in battle. He had, therefore, to consider every hour, not so much what was the best course of action from the soldier’s standpoint, as how any course, advance, retreat or inaction, would affect the political situation in Paris. Count von Bismarck’s haughty message through M. Benedetti in 1866, if Benedetti faithfully delivered it, must have come back to the Emperor’s memory in 1870. Remind the Emperor, said Bismarck, that a war might bring on a revolutionary crisis; and add, that “in such a case, the German dynasties are likely to prove more solid than that of the Emperor Napoleon.” It was a consciousness of the weak foundations of his power, breeding an ever-present dread alike in the capital and the camp, which, making him ponder when he should act, falter when he should be bold, imparted to his resolutions the instability of the wind.
It is on record that the first impulse of the Emperor and his intimate advisers was to retreat forthwith over the Moselle and the Meuse. General de Ladmirault was ordered to fall back on Metz; the Guard had to take the same direction; Bazaine, who had responsibility without power, was requested to protect the retirement of Frossard, who, driven off the direct, was marching along the more easterly road to Metz, through Gros Tenquin and Faulquemont, which the Germans call Falconberg; De Failly was required, if he could, to move on Nancy. MacMahon, it was hoped, would gather up his fragments, and transport them to Chalons, where Canrobert was to stand fast, and draw back to that place one of his divisions which had reached Nancy. Paris was placarded with the Emperor’s famous despatch; and the Parisians read aloud the ominous sentences which heralded the fall of an Empire. “Marshal MacMahon,” said the Emperor, “has lost a battle on the Sauer. General Frossard has been obliged to retire. The retreat is conducted in good order.” And then followed the tell-tale phrase, used by Napoleon I. himself on a similar occasion—“Tout peut se rétablir,” all, perhaps, may come right again. But so inconstant was the Imperial will, that the hasty resolve to fly into Champagne faded out almost as soon as it was formed; for the next day the dominant opinion was that it would be better to remain on the right bank of the Moselle. MacMahon and De Failly accordingly got counter orders, indicating Nancy as a point of concentration, and based on a feeble notion that they could both be drawn to Metz; while once again Canrobert was told to bring the infantry of the 6th Corps up to the same place by rail. Orders and counter orders then showered down on De Failly—thus, he was and he was not to move on Toul—but the enemy’s movements dictated the future course of a General rendered as powerless as his superiors were vacillating; and finally both the Marshal and his luckless subordinate, as well as Douay’s 7th Corps, made their way deviously to the camp of Chalons.