"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee when the Prince with his four Divisions appeared on the heights above Schweigen. The Red Breeches thought it was a promenade militaire in the Second Empire style, until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"
"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously, "our artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."
"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise old head cased in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry should do much for the French. For the chassepot is quicker in loading than our needle-gun, and spits less, which is better for the aim.... Then our needle-gun has A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than kills outright. While the chassepot bullet,—driven by its huge charge of powder—has a splendidly flat trajectory, And flattening out,—makes a magnificent wound! In at the chest—out at the shoulder-blades! ... The man has a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"
And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in slaughter. While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin and military attaché:
"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples will be German.... Look at him! Already he begins to resemble a bird of prey. Have you read these French newspapers? The King has laughed heartily over them, but they must horribly irritate the Emperor. Listen to this, from the Constitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to insult us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a word from their Chief, might descend like three crashing avalanches upon the hosts of Germany. Why is the word not uttered? Why is the massacre—with the rout that must inevitably follow, delayed for a single hour?'" ...
The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters at the Prefecture at Metz. His eyes seemed opaque as clouded glass, his face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression, as he replied to the hinted condolences of a sycophant upon his staff.
"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not solicited. They are free to criticize me, let them do so. I am not bound to divulge to them my plans."
Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements of his magnificent Army. He did not put in an appearance with his staff at headquarters until a fortnight subsequent to the Declaration of War. A week later—and no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals. True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at Saarbrück. He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army Corps. He had witnessed the evacuation of the town by its tiny garrison—had withdrawn his advanced posts and gone home to Metz to dine and telegraph to Paris of the "capture of the heights" and the "short resistance of the Prussians";—to tell of the cannon-balls and bullets which fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial, "who showed admirable coolness." "Some of the soldiers wept," he adds, "beholding him so calm...."
And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a grain of salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have cheered the sick heart of his father, and yet thrust another dagger in it, too.
Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one wonders.... Long after he had ceased to be Emperor, a pamphlet was published at Brussels, which is generally accepted as the work of the pen that signed the Capitulation of Sedan.