From dusk to dawn the electric search ray now mounted on the summit of the Arc de Triomphe, as the broad wheeling beams from Vanves, Issy, Mont Valérien, and the whole ring of forts that guarded the great, magnificent, menaced capital, whitened earth and sky in token of the unsleeping vigilance of the Parisians, and their ceaseless expectation of a German night attack, even as the long indicatory fingers of brilliant blue-white light, stretching from the ridge of St. Cloud and from the heights of Clamart, from Marly, Vanesse, Epinal, Noiseau, Choisy, and Bourget—no less than the formidable battery of big guns on the Place d'Armes, with their muzzles placed so as to sweep the avenues radiating from the Château—betokened the invaders' anticipations of yet another sortie.
Ah, why had there been no sortie earlier than that abortive effort toward Chevilly on the thirtieth of September? There were, at the beginning of the Investment, no more than 180,000 German troops of the Crown Prince's Army encircling Paris. Up to the tenth of October what a triumphant turning of the tables might have been effected by a vigorous sally, effectively carried out!
Huge German forces were engaged in the sieges of Metz and Strasburg, Belfort and Soissons, Schelsstadt and Verdun. General von der Tann was engaged with the Army of the Loire near Artenay. The stubborn resistance of Orleans kept an Army Corps of the Red Prince extremely busy. The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, with the right wing of the Prussians' covering army south of Paris, was actively engaged with the French at Dreux and Le Mans.
And there were 55,000 troops of the Line within the walls of Paris; there were 105,000 Mobiles—not fighters to be sneezed at. There were 30,000 National Guards—perhaps too soft in muscle and well-developed in the region of the corporation to be very effective—pitted against such seasoned warriors as Schmidt, Klaus, Kraus, and Klein. But add to these, 25,000 Marines, Douaniers, Gardes-Champêtres and Forestiers, and there you had a force of 485,000 trained Frenchmen, asking nothing better than to sally out by St. Denis, Villejuif, and Charenton, cut the line of investment north, clear the blocked road south, effect a junction with the Army of the Loire, destroy the Warlock's subtlest combinations, promptly raise the Siege of Paris, and deliver France from the invader.
What was Trochu, Military Governor of Paris, thinking about? What were MM. Ducrot and Vinoy doing, to delay until the garrison and fortress of Strasburg were surrendered, until the Capitulation of Metz on the twenty-seventh of October, and the fall of Verdun on the seventh of November, had released the main Army of the Red Prince for the strengthening of that steel and iron girdle that lay outside the defiant ring of forts? The tentative sally of the twenty-ninth of November was foredoomed to failure from the outset. No wonder Trochu and his plans furnished hungry Parisians with abundant food for mockery, when the Specter of Famine brooded over the City on the Seine. Narrow-eyed and tight-lipped, cold, sinister, and mysterious, the man was a mere bag of wind, when all was said and done.
Meanwhile, the great bronze muzzle-loaders of the Forts of Mont Valérien, Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, and Charenton, St. Denis and its twin sisters, roared at intervals throughout each day, raining common shell, chain shot, solid ball, and shrapnel into the lines of the investing host. But the trenching and battery-making went on steadily; the high-walled farmyards and gardens of country houses in the environs were being converted into emplacements for artillery of the largest caliber. Already several of Krupp's stupendous siege-howitzers, with muzzles cocked at angles of forty-five, demonstrated the possibilities of the bombardment for which the German Press daily shrieked.
"Not for the reduction of the military defenses, but to produce by the exercise of sheer terror, bodily suffering, and destruction of private property, such an effect upon the unarmed multitudes—subjected to a hail of incendiary shells within their encircling ring of walls and fortresses—as to compel the chiefs of the Government and garrison to come to terms at command of the popular voice."
Thus the leader-writers of the Berliner Zeitung and other journals—peaceful-looking, stout men, with full beards and short-sighted eyes behind spectacles—wrote, as though they longed to dip their quills in newly shed French blood.
"It is sad, very sad," said the Warlock, vexed for once, "that the siege trains conveying more than 100,000 hundred-weights of ammunition cannot be brought over a single line of rails with sufficient quickness to gratify these excellent gentlemen.... Yet for the present we can do no more than invest the place and wait for the means of attacking it. The process of starving out is, as the mighty fortress of Metz has shown, a very slow one. But as the loud voices of one hundred and one guns have already proclaimed to our Berliners—the empty stomach triumphs over the most obstinate resistance. We now require an army to guard 300,000 prisoners of War! Since the Babylonian Captivity the world has not heard the like! And yet the chamber prattlers and the journalists accuse us of tardiness. Already from several anonymous quarters have reproachful or ridiculing letters reached me. One even contains a villainous comic verse, which I am told is sung in the music halls in Berlin."
And the great tactician read, with the expression of one who savors the bouquet of sulphureted hydrogen or asafetida: