Volume 1 / Part 1 — CHAPTER III. COURCELLES, SPICHEREN, AND GRAVELOTTE.

If one lingered long in Saarbrück, it became apparent, so rapid was the advance, that he might find himself out of the hunt altogether. Indeed, when I quitted Saarbrück on the afternoon of Tuesday, the 9th of August, I was already in the rear of most of the army of Steinmetz, and behind, likewise, no small proportion of the vast host of Prince Frederick Charles. Instead of tramping to Forbach by the road, I took a final walk over the scene of the battle-field of the Saturday.

By Monday at mid-day all the wounded had been removed and most of the dead buried. The whole of the ground was thickly dotted over with graves. The burial-parties had been pious in those their ministrations to the dead. Few of the mounds but were surmounted with a rude cross, made of a couple of sticks lashed together with a buckle strap. Others were more elaborate, the cross board being flat and having inscribed upon it the number interred, their rank and regiment. Already the townspeople had decorated some of the graves with shrubs and flowers, but most of the decorations consisted of bayonets and swords stuck in the soil—tokens that soldiers lay below. Friend and foe slept at peace with each other in one grave. The inscription over one of the largest on the first Spicheren height I thought worth copying:—

“Hier ruhen in Gott 29 Preussen und 69 Franzosen.”

I walked some distance before I came to an unburied body, but in the little clefts and gulleys leading up to the second Spicheren height they still lay quite thick. There was no difficulty in discovering their vicinity. The corpse of a man slain in battle does not lie for three days exposed to the air and sun without lapsing into decomposition, and some of the bodies were horrible sights. Some could hardly have been known for human—so black and turgid were the features. The deaths had chiefly been from rifle bullets. Most of the Germans bore their death-wounds in their faces and heads, received as they stormed the terrible ascent; the Frenchmen—those who had not perished by the bayonet—were for the most part shot through the body, or had their legs shattered. One scene I never can forget. By the foot of a tree lay two dead German soldiers. It seemed as if they had been removed thither either during or after the fight, while as yet only wounded. Beside them were two pannikins half full of water, and a piece of bread. One, quite a lad, lay in a crouching attitude, his head bent downwards toward the tree. He had been shot through the head, and the blood had streamed on to his handkerchief and the open pocket-book in front of him. One hand grasped that of his dead comrade, in the other was an envelope. The letter it contained may have blown away, or the lad, in his last agony, may have thrust it in his breast; but the envelope itself was eloquent enough. It was addressed in a female handwriting, and bore the postmark of a little village away near the shores of the Baltic. The writer—mother or sweetheart, I know not—evidently had been the last thought of the lad. Will she come to weep over his grave among the clay-stone crags of the Spicheren? Will he, indeed, have a grave at all? The place was a lonely one, and the straggling cowherd may, months after, have chanced upon a couple of skeletons with arms and belts on the bones.

What a distance over the height had stretched the battle, I never realised until this night. Three miles away from the first bluff of the Spicheren-berg, I found dead French soldiers lying between the drills of a potato-field. And then in the growing darkness I lost my way, and had to plunge through a dense wood growing on a steep slope. There was no road, but I scrambled downward with tolerable freedom, till I stumbled over something and fell at full length. As I stretched forth my hand to raise myself it touched the face of a corpse, cold and clammy with the death-sweat. In the dark solitude of the wood such a contact, unpleasant at any time, was horrible, and made my blood run cold. It seemed as if everywhere I turned my feet met prostrate corpses. I struck a light, and by its dim rays found myself in the centre of a knot of some half-dozen dead French soldiers. Whether they had been slain simultaneously by the bursting of a shell, or had scrambled into the wood wounded, and died here in each other’s company, I know not; I only know that I shuddered at the situation in which I found myself, and then it struck me that one of them moved. Could he be still alive? No, it was but imagination on my part. They were all dead, and sadly wanted burial. Very daintily did I pick my steps down the rest of the wooded slope, but, getting on a rough footpath, I chanced on no more corpses. But I slept very little that night, and when I did I continually dreamed of the group of dead Frenchmen. The indescribable taint of the unburied dead lingered in my nostrils for hours after.

Forbach consists mainly of one chief street, which is rather narrow. A horse falling, in a carriage, would block it up. Somehow German horses do not fall. I watched the constant stream pouring through this narrow street for half a day, and never observed a block, not even a check, for more than five minutes at a time. I do not know what sort of a place Forbach may be in ordinary times—probably a prosperous commercial town; with me it will ever be associated with semi-starvation and a narrow escape from sleeping in the gutter. In the house of a man who had been named to me in Saarbrück I had secured, as it seemed, quarters of a sort. From these a “Graf” somebody turned me out in order to let in twelve soldiers. I could not in decency object, seeing that the men had not been inside a house for eight days, and if I had it would not have mattered. My aliment for the succeeding twenty-four hours was a glass of liqueur and half a cigar. I spent the night among straw in an outhouse, and was thankful that I had not to take a pitch in the gutter. The soldiers had eaten up everything, drunken up everything, smoked up everything. The people were half starving; but as they starved they rejoiced, for they had charged the soldiers war prices. The commissariat arrangements had hardly yet got into order, but it was plain that even when that should have been the case, the consumption of everything available on the part of the troops would continue. Soldiers on the march are always hungry and thirsty. I wish they had left a little tobacco for an outsider though; it is easier to starve when one’s pipe is full.

I was the witness of a little incident in Forbach which tends to illustrate the Prussian thoroughness that is so great a key to success. Strolling down to the railway station to inquire as to the probabilities of a Militärzug, I found a divisional general sitting placidly outside the station entrance, a table by his side and a bottle of wine on it, which he and the Mayor of Forbach were leisurely drinking as they smoked their cigars. Now the divisional general of an English army in the field would have been surrounded by a cordon of orderlies, and have formed the centre of a glittering staff. It would not have been permitted to a mortal of common clay to look upon his glory. This old gentleman—his name I have forgotten—sat drinking his wine without a solitary orderly in waiting, much less a staff officer. The privates and corporals of working parties were passing out and in, clearing the station of French débris, and the jolly old fellow now and again exchanged a word with them as they came within hail. Presently there was brought unto him a deputation of the bakers of Forbach, whose attendance he had ordered. Quoth the general to the bakers—“My men are temporarily short of bread; you must each by to-morrow morning turn out so many loaves. You will be paid thirty francs for one hundred loaves, and I shall take no excuse.”

You should have heard the Forbach bakers jabber! The great “lord-general” was robbing them outright. They would rather give the bread for nothing. They had wives and children, and rents to pay. Would his Excellency ruin them? And so on. As they stood in the rain gesticulating, they presented a curious contrast to the grizzly German, in his waterproof, calmly smoking and sipping his wine as if he heard not the din of the terribly fluent bakers. At last they chattered themselves fairly out of breath, and then the old man turned to them with a smile, as if he just remembered their presence. “Go away, my good fellows,” said he, “and hold your tongues. I can get good loaves in Deutsch-land, three for a franc, and I give no Frenchman any more.” And the bakers went away in a perfect torrent of “sacres,” but for all that to get their ovens in order to do the behests of the laconic old chief. There was no trusting to bungling commissaries here—fellows whom the Duke of Wellington was wont to couple with correspondents in his anxiety to hang. The general knew that an army must be fed, if it is to march and to fight, and he personally saw to the purveyance.

The good folks of Forbach had for the most part remained at home to receive the Prussian troops, but they did not seem any the more for this to love Prussia. They were French to the backbone, but not French of the Napoleonic pattern. They made no secret of their readiness to cry “Vive la République” when the time should come; and I may note that the great majority of the French prisoners to whom I spoke, while staunch for France, had no fondness for the Emperor of the French, but openly avowed their preference for a Republic. The Forbach people gave out as the reason why the French army had without resistance been retired on Metz, that the troops had manifested a discontent which made the Emperor fear to trust them in action.

An allusion to French prisoners of war calls to mind one of the basest calumnies against German humanity that ever malignity invented. It was stated in French journals that both German soldiers and German civilians were cruel and abusive to French prisoners. Never was there a grosser lie. Indeed Germany might be well content to rest her reputation on the testimony of the prisoners themselves. I have seen the people at the railway stations tender the wine-can to the prisoners before the escort. If the escort were served first, I have seen the soldiers composing it pass the pannikin to their charge before drinking themselves. I have seen French wounded carried off the field in regular routine with Germans, and getting their turn of the doctor with religious exactitude. The people of Saarbrück, when they threw open their homes, did not care whether they admitted the wearer of a spiked helmet or of a pair of red breeches. And once I saw a German escort march a French sergeant by a circuitous route round a village, that he might not form an object of attention on the part of the village boys. This was an act of delicate consideration which of itself would refute the calumnious and unfounded statements to which I have referred, and which did not a little wound the feelings of German chivalry.

From Forbach the next stage was St. Avold, to reach which on the afternoon of Thursday the 11th of August involved a walk of some ten miles in the rain, commenced without breakfast and concluded in the most utterly blank prospect of anything to eat, or of any place wherein to sleep. Forbach seemed as full as any town could possibly be, but Forbach was not a patch on St. Avold. All the staff were there, and there, too, was half the army. I had casually heard of a dish of liver down a bye-street, and fondly hoped it would be mine. It was taken by stouthrief and hamesucken from under my nose by a masterful German sergeant of Uhlans, who swore by all the deities of the Saxon Switzerland, from which locality he derived his existence, that he would send a “kugel” through the man that interfered between him and the liver. Empty as I was, I was not eager to have the vacuum filled up by “kugels,” and I let him have it with a reluctant sigh. The food and locomotion question, by the way, demands a word or two. In those early days of the war I nourished a pet theory that the best way to do the work on which I was engaged was to be “at large” in the army in preference to being attached to any head-quarters, to carry one’s belongings on his back, and do one’s locomotion on one’s own feet. Beyond question there is a great charm to a strong healthy man in pursuing this system. If you get a bed in a house, good and well; if not, steer for the nearest camp fire, and you are generally sure of a dip into the kettle and a hunk, savoury if tough, of the mature cow which you saw sedately walking behind a baggage-cart in the morning. If you tire, you can jump on the first waggon that passes; if you see an eminence whence you think there is a view, you can climb it—and you will not count the toil wasted among such scenery as one may see among the vine slopes;—if it rains you get wet; but then when it fairs, and the sun comes out, you get dry again. If there is fighting in the wind, you need not be farther behind than the troops that come up at the double; in short, you are your own master, free to come and to go, without the everlasting incubus of impedimenta and belongings on your mind. But the plan has disadvantages which experience teaches more than outweigh the pleasures. The information which reaches an unattached man is scanty and often inaccurate; a day comes when a gallop is worth anything, and then you miss a horse, and swear to forego gipsying.

Just at dusk on the 11th I strolled up the market-place of St. Avoid, opposite to the Post. At an open window, looking down on the busy throng of his soldiers, sat King Wilhelm. The old man was alone; his chin was in his hand, and one could read in the abstraction of his glance that his thoughts were far away. Next morning I saw him under a different guise. For two hours and more he stood in the market-place, close to the road that bisects in its midst. By his side was Von Moltke—gaunt, thin, shaggy, wiry. Close behind stood Bismarck, seemingly as ready to fight as to make a fool of Benedetti in diplomacy. A few general officers stood around, but there was no semblance of a staff, nor anything like a guard or escort. The Father of his people is a homely man. Interspersed among the generals were the gamins of St. Avold, staring up with eyes of wonder at “le Roi Prussien.” A private soldier, in his shirt-sleeves, carrying a loaf in his hand, all but floured his Majesty’s elbow, and others stood around, forming a close circle behind the generals. But if King William was homely in his immediate surroundings, those who stood by him were spectators with him of a sight that well might make his cheek flush with pride and emotion. For during the two hours that the King stood on this market place there ceased not to stream past him the army of which he is the chief. Now it was a regiment of white-coated, steel-breasted cuirassiers that came on stately, the ground shaking under the tramp of the great horses as the air vibrated to the sound of the mighty cheer from the deep-chested men. Then a regiment of infantry, three battalions strong, each with its band playing at its head, the men marching eight abreast, and already seasoned by the march and the bivouac, looking fit to do anything and go anywhere. The cheering of the passing troops was always hearty, but it rose to a shout of proud joy as the regiments came by with ranks already thinned by the desperate storm of Spicheren, and when the King with a wave of his hand saluted them with the cheery, “Morgen, Knappe Jungens!” Hussars, Uhlans, horse artillery, diversified the dense masses of infantry, and so thoroughly serviceable did all appear in every respect, that it would be invidious to comment in particular on the appearance of any. With all the field-officers the King shook hands and exchanged a few words, but he seemed best pleased to look into the enthusiastic faces of the men—his “Kinder”—as they passed. King as he is, he is none the less the soldier. It amused me greatly to hear him reprove a man for being out of step, and another for having his zund-nadelgewehr on the wrong shoulder. No one would have imagined that the upright form and square shoulders carried the load of seventy-three winters.

It is impossible to imagine an army travelling with greater swiftness, and leaving fewer traces behind it, than the Prussian army invading France. The reserve was in Forbach; the army in St. Avold and beyond. For miles between the two places the road I traversed was as clear as in the quiet days of peace. The wave of war had passed, and hardly left a trace behind. The crops were unharmed in the fields on either side of the road, save in the spots where there had been bivouacs on the previous night; not a soldier or a mark of warfare was visible. Between Saarbrück and St. Avold I saw only two dead horses by the wayside, notwithstanding that some of the waggons had journeyed from near Berlin. If any men had fallen out footsore they must have been brought on somehow, for there were no stragglers. The stores were all close up, and the commissariat now in full working. It was a great catch for the Prussians to have captured at the Forbach station some two million thalers worth of French stores, of which a depot had been formed there.

Our tramp of the 12th was to Marange, a squalid village to the northern front of Falquemont, near which the King had his head-quarters for several days. We were pushing on after Steinmetz, knowing something of the dash and daring of that seasoned old warrior. Everybody was asking what could have become of the French army, thirty thousand men of which passed through Marange in headlong retreat the day but one after the battle of Spicheren. It was noted that there was hardly a foot of ground between St. Avold and Marange that might not have been held to advantage against an invader. St. Avold itself stands in the throat of a gullet. On the Metz side of it the valley opens out into a fine plain with a large château on a mamelon in its centre, a noble key to a splendid position, and behind, shutting in the valley from the French side, swells a great sloping ridge from the summit of which artillery might have operated with overwhelming advantage. Between Marange and Bionville another great hog-backed swell, the beau ideal of a battle position for the resistance of invasion; but it was crowned by Prussian bivouacs, and the French,—well, when you asked anybody in authority where they were, he would give a laugh and a little nod, and ask you for a light for his cigar.

From a hut in Marange to a château in Bazoncourt, a village a little behind Courcelles, and on the northern side of the little river Nied, was our experience of the 13th. Here Bazaine had had his head-quarters for a day or two, when he was sent forward with the 3rd French corps to attempt the rallying of the fugitives from Spicheren. By this time, the 13th, we had gained one of the central divisions of Steinmetz’s army, and that commander himself was expected to occupy rooms for the night in the château of Bazoncourt, where meanwhile the officers of a dragoon regiment had located themselves. This château, the property of a certain Baron de Courtier, was a fine specimen of a French country house. The reception rooms were fitted up with great splendour in the Louis Quatorze style. They had been left just as they were occupied by the family, and the half-finished sketches and dainty needle-work of the young ladies were lying about just as they had been dropped when the route came for the retreat to Metz. Upstairs were long corridors, off which opened any quantity of bed rooms, all left in trim order, and between the snowy sheets of which dragoon officers, weary from frequent bivouacs, had stretched their weary frames the previous night. Bric-à-brac clocks, bijouterie, and all manner of tasteful nick-nacks adorned the pretty chambers; in one hung a watch, which its owner had left behind in his or her hurry. The corridors were hung with old family pictures, portraits of men in armour, gaunt and sinewy with the training that won them renown in the tournament—with chevaliers with elaborately curled hair hanging over their shoulders, ruffles and frills of Valenciennes lace, court swords, and jewelled snuff-boxes. And the gallery of female portraits was equally rich, from the straight-robed lady of the old regime to the luscious dame, all powder and patches, of Louis the Great, and the sprightly damsel of the Regency. The library door stood open, and a volume of Thomas Carlyle’s “Life of Cromwell” lay open side by side with a French translation of one of James’s novels. I wrote a letter at a desk at a window in the corridor, in the interior of which I found a family album, a bundle of maps and guide-books—the relics of a family tour through Switzerland,—and a quantity of exercises in English, presumably by the young ladies, corrected by the pencil of the governess. At the rear of the château was a beautiful garden, adorned with flowering annuals, trailing sprays of fuchsias, and greener grass than I had hitherto ever seen in France; and in pretty retreats were rustic seats and fantastic tables.

When the Baron and his family ran away—a very foolish thing for them to do by the way, for they would have received no annoyance—they had the civility to leave behind them a neat assortment of the ugliest old cook-women it has ever been my lot to see, who did their best to provide for the wants of all comers. The Baron owned all the fertile and warm vineyards that slope upward from the village, and he housed the vintages underneath his château and the esplanade behind it. I found that the quartermaster of the dragoons had administered to the keys of the cellars, from the stores of which he doled forth bottles on properly vouched application. To my solicitation he replied by a bottle of white wine and a bottle of red wine, along with which my companion and myself retired to a shady arbour, and cordially drank the health of the Baron and all his house. He could not have been a bad man, his wine was so good.

At Bazoncourt were within twelve miles of Metz. The 12th Regiment of Dragoons had scouted the same morning to within sight of Forts St. Julien and Queleu, and had left videttes to observe the doings in the vicinity. The universal belief was that the French were in position to defend the passage of the Moselle between Metz and Pont-à-Mousson. The centre of their position was set down as being somewhere about Noveant, nearly midway between Pont-à-Mousson and Metz. Steinmetz on the right, Prince Frederick Charles was in the centre, and his head-quarters on the 13th were at Nomeny, considerably to the south of us. The Crown Prince, pushing on from Wörth, was on the extreme left, and rather in the rear, heading right on Nancy. It was expected that there would be a gradual concentration of the widely opened-out front, consequent upon exact knowledge of the French dispositions, and of the locality in which they might have made up their mind to offer battle. The soldiers of Steinmetz were thoroughly confident of victory. They had respected—and perhaps half feared—the French till they tested their calibre on the heights of Spicheren. Since then they made somewhat light of them; and as they penetrated farther and farther into the French territory, asked each other with raised eyebrows, whether a French host could have penetrated thus far into Rhineland without fertilizing the vineyards with its blood.

We missed seeing the battle of Courcelles, baulked by that over-eagerness which so often defeats itself. In the absence of good staff information, and judging solely, therefore, from regimental gossip, which it may be taken as an axiom is never reliable, we came to the conclusion that the impending battle must be fought more to the south. Early on the morning of the 14th—oh, that we had been less impatient!—my companion and myself, having determined to make towards the centre of the army of advance, quitted Bazoncourt in a south-westerly direction, and walked across the front, keeping at first as close as possible in the track of a party of dragoons, which the day before had marched from Bazoncourt toward Nomeny. Guided only by a rough chart, and destitute of a compass, we found ourselves in what may be called the debateable land between the German advance and the Moselle, to the south of Metz. So long as we were in the track of the dragoons we passed through the frequent villages without molestation, and, indeed, experienced a certain grumpy civility; but when we got into the terra incognita beyond, black looks everywhere met us from the French villagers. Towards midday, getting hungry, we asked a patriarch in a village through which we passed if he could put us in the way of getting any food. Rather sulkily he asked us in, and gave us some sour bread and hard-boiled eggs. As we were consuming this fare he left us, and only returned in order to obtain payment. When we recrossed his threshold we found waiting for us what I suppose was the able-bodied adult population of the village, consisting of about half-a-dozen young men and two hobbedehoys. One of them, acting as spokesman, inquired our business, muttering charges of our being Prussians and spies. I tried hard to explain to them that we were in the extremest sense of the word non-combatants, showing them a tiny penknife as the most lethal weapon I carried; but they continued to crowd around us threateningly, and I thought for sure every minute they would close. We edged towards a wall, so as to have them only on one side, and then my companion giving the word suddenly altered his tone, and peremptorily ordered them to clear the road. One hulking fellow would not give back, whereupon my friend let fly a straight right-hander from the shoulder that knocked the Frenchman backward into his patrimonial dunghill. The thoroughness and rapidity of the act seemed to dumbfounder his comrades, and we were out of the village before they recovered themselves.

Reaching the village of St. Jure we once more fell in with the spiked helmets, and remained there for the night. In the still night watches we heard the distant din of the artillery fire with which the battle of Courcelles was concluded, and in the morning came scrappy tidings of the bloody victory.

Although I was not a spectator of the battle of Courcelles (or Borny, as the French and indeed some of the Germans call it), I may give a brief sketch of the character of the operations. The German leaders had reason for believing, what we afterwards know was the case, that Bazaine, who had got the command of the French “Army of the Rhine,” was proceeding to attempt the withdrawal of his army from Metz, with intent to retire upon Châlons and form a defensive junction with MacMahon. Weighing him in their own scales, it seemed clear that if he were to put this design into practice with energy and promptitude, he must gain such a start as would frustrate the intended strategetical movement on the part of Prince Frederick of swinging round by the south on the ground beyond the Moselle, and blocking Bazaine’s paths of retreat. This was to be baulked at any cost, and the sluggishness of the French general gave Steinmetz an opportunity of which he was not slow to avail himself. There seems no reason to doubt that Bazaine might have marched clean away, if he had but realised the urgency of the necessity, without troubling himself about a strong rear-guard, when he had such a fortress as Metz to cover his retreat. In truth, Bazaine does not seem to have left the corps of Decaën, Ladmirault, and Frossard in the camps where Steinmetz found them, out of any solicitude for the safety of his rear, but simply because he had let his front get clogged in the passage of the Moselle, and was not impressed with the necessity of clearing his feet and getting away quickly from what afterwards proved his prison-house. The fact that on the 14th he fought when he need not, and indeed ought not, is strong proof that he did not realise his position. Had he done so, it would appear that his policy was, instead of trying to hold the line by Nouilly, Montoy, Colombey, and Mercy le Haut, to get his three corps back under the shelter of the forts of Metz, bustle them over the river and set them to keep the passage of the stream on the south of Metz. Steinmetz could have taken nothing by boring that bullet-head of his against Fort St. Julien or Fort Queleu. His direct march would have been arrested by the stone and iron in his path, and he must have diverged either north or south. The northern route would have been too circuitous, and have disconnected him too far from Prince Frederick Charles; if he had chosen the southward, he would have had to fight for the crossing with Bazaine’s rear-guard, while the mass of the army of the latter, escaping the too tardy grapple of Prince Frederick Charles, would have been far on the road toward Macmahon. But everything seemed to work together for the advantage of the German arms. The three rearward French corps Steinmetz found in their camps; he asked them to give them battle that so he might gain time for Prince Frederick Charles, and with chivalrously blind simplicity they complied. They occupied the line of villages I have named, covering Metz to the eastward, when Steinmetz’s reconnaissance beat up their quarters. The position, with which I had occasion afterwards to become familiar, presents many advantageous features, but is faulty in a military sense by reason of the abundance of cover for an approaching enemy, and of the number of excellent roads at his service for bringing up his forces in parallel columns. The French front and flanks were studiedly covered with numerous rifle-pits and trenches. Steinmetz’s attack did not begin till shortly before four o’clock in the afternoon. It was initiated by the 1st division (Bentheim) belonging to the 1st Army Corps, which had joined Steinmetz since Spicheren; and by the 26th brigade (von der Goltz) of Glümer’s division (the 13th) belonging to the 7th Army Corps. There were strong supports belonging to the 1st and 7th corps behind, about Pange, Domangeville, and Frontigny. The 26th brigade began the attack on Colombey, while Bentheim’s men farther to the north pressed up the Saarbrück-Metz chaussée, deploying when at the hamlet of St. Agnan on the vineyards toward Flanville against Montoy and the ravine of La Planchette. The French were so strong on the slopes and in the woods about their position that the German infantry could make no headway, and lost heavily, experiencing, too, now for the first time a foretaste of the idiosyncracies of French fortress guns. Infantry supports came up, but the Colombey-Montoy position was defended with great obstinacy and could not be forced. After the infantry had been engaged without effect for some hours, the horse artillery were galloped up and came into action on the plateau near Noisseville, close to the brewery, with which the siege of Metz made us so familiar, and looking down upon Montoy from the north-east. There were no fewer than fourteen batteries in position between Noisseville and Flanville, and before the fire from eighty-four cannon the French began to break and give ground. Then the infantry of Bentheim and von der Goltz took advantage of the opportunity, but encountered a warm resistance, and had to fight for every fragment of ground they gained, losing, of course, very heavily. At seven o’clock further supports came up; Pritzelwitz with his fresh 2nd division eager to back up his countrymen of Bentheim’s division, and Kamecke with his 14th division, weakened already by the fight of Spicheren, but ready as it had been then to be in the thick of it. Thus the 1st and 7th corps were complete, and drove the French in toward Borny, Vantoux, and Mey. The French right at Mercy le Haut was crushed through an instrumentality that owed its presence to the fact that artillery fire makes a noise. Had air-guns been in use instead or fulminating powder, von Wrangel, marching his 18th division leisurely toward the Moselle, in the southern rear of the battle-field, would not have heard the cannon thunder. His division, forming part of the 9th Army Corps (Manstein), had only crossed the frontier a day or two before, and it belonged to the army of Prince Frederick Charles. But the cannon thunder intuitively turned Wrangel to the right, and about seven o’clock he turned up at Mercy le Haut, and set about throwing back the French right wing. Just before dark the French of Ladmirault’s corps made a strong rally, attacking Wrangel vigorously by Grigy, while they staggered Bentheim on the north and even made him temporarily give ground in the direction of Noisseville and Servigny. But the attempt only caused further bloodshed. The Germans braced themselves up, fresh supports came, and after a fight which lasted long after dark, the proximity of the forts alone compelled the Germans to desist from driving the French farther. As it was, perhaps they came too close to the inanimate defences. There are German graves of the 14th August nearer to Queleu and les Bottes than prudence would seem to warrant; but men flushed with victory are not always wise. The German loss was between 2000 and 3000, and over 4000 wounded French prisoners were taken.

Soon after leaving St. Jure in the morning, we encountered a large body of German troops in full advance toward the Moselle. Accompanying it was the head-quarter staff of General von Alvensleben, from some members of which we learned that the Moselle bank was undefended by the French, and that the Third Army Corps, of which von Alvensleben had the command, was marching straight on Pagny to pontoon the stream near that point, and, crossing, strive to catch up with the left flank of Bazaine, who had that day quitted Metz on his march towards Verdun. Receiving permission to accompany the advance, we therefore went on to a village called Seligny, where the staff located itself in a handsome château with charming grounds surrounding it, and the troops bivouacked in the neighbourhood. At first it seemed as if the halt was but for a few hours during the heat of the day, and that the march would be resumed in the afternoon; but other troops continued to arrive, and then we were given to understand that there was to be a halt in Seligny for the night. We knew that troops had already crossed the Moselle at Pont-à-Mousson, which is about midway between Metz and Nancy, and the idea of being kept pottering behind was very disagreeable. So we parted company from General von Alvensleben and his staff, and made rapid tracks for Pont-à-Mousson. In an intermediate valley we passed through a large bivouac, chiefly of artillery and medical staff. Then we climbed a long vineclad ascent, and on reaching its summit there lay stretched at our feet the beautiful valley of the Moselle, with the broad stream in its bosom, and the white chateaux on the farther slope, glancing brightly from the rich green ground of the vineyards. On the left the grim old ruin of the Castle of Mousson frowned from the top of its precipitous rock—a gaunt skeleton of ancient war, looking down upon modern war. Under its shelter lay the town of Pont-à-Mousson, developing itself from the distance where we stood chiefly in church spires and barrack roofs, and along the valley directly below us ran the broad chaussée from Metz to Nancy. We found Pont-à-Mousson crammed with German soldiers. It occupies both sides of the river, connected by the quaint old bridge, which in ancient times was one of the keys by which France was wont to unlock the door that opened up the passage through Lorraine into Germany. Over the river and we were in France proper—no longer in German Lorraine, which every true Frenchman considers but a bastard Frankland. The triangular Place we found packed full of troops of all arms. There runs round it a piazza, such as we may see in Covent Garden, and this piazza was bedded with straw, and formed one vast couch for I cannot tell how many soldiers. Prince Frederick Carl had been in Pont-à-Mousson the night before, but had already gone forward. The Pont-à-Mousson people were very sombre, yet they kept their shops open and did their best to reap a good harvest, accepting German money as if it had been their currency from time immemorial. The first intimation they had that things were not prospering with France had been in the shape of a vast train of hospital-carts laden with wounded, which passed through the town on the 11th. The poor wounded were in a fearful state, many of them were weeping, and all utterly despondent and prostrated. Next day a detachment of about forty Prussian Uhlans had galloped into the valley and begun to tear up the railway between Metz and Nancy, and to cut the telegraph. An official wired their presence to Metz, and brought a squadron of the Chasseurs d’Afrique on their grey Arab stallions down from Metz at the gallop. They did the distance—about fifteen miles—at hunting pace, surrounded the Uhlans while engrossed at their work, and potted the lot with neatness and dexterity, being on their way back to Metz with their prisoners in less than half an hour. This was a very clever little exploit. Next day the Prussians had come in force and occupied the bridge, encountering no opposition. Since then the stream of arrivals had been constant. The little specimen which we experienced of the malevolence of the French civilians had, it appeared, been by no means isolated. We heard of a patrol, consisting of three men and a sergeant, who had been set upon by the inhabitants of a village on the French side of the Moselle, armed with pitchforks, and headed by the curé. They were all killed. The murderers were taken by another patrol, brought into Pont-à-Mousson, tried by a drum-head court-martial, and were lying under sentence of death. Another case was reported where two dragoons were poisoned in the quarters which they occupied in an outlying village.

Late the same afternoon, the 15th, my companion and myself quitted Pont-à-Mousson, and took the line of advance so well marked by a continuous stream of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and military train. We had been unable to obtain definite information as to the proposed scheme of action. But Frederick Charles himself, that hot-blooded man of war, had hours ago galloped out of the market-place of Pont-à-Mousson; and his was always a good line to follow; for sure as where the carcass is there the vultures are gathered together, so wherever there is the smell of powder burnt in wrath the Red Prince is not far off. When we reached the top of the heights fringing the western side of the valley of the Moselle, we found that the line of advance taken was not by the straight road that leads by Commercy to Bar-le-Duc, at which point the Marne comes nearest to the Moselle, but that it slanted away in a north-westerly direction in the direction, as it seemed, of Verdun, traversing a country consisting of alternate abrupt but inconsiderable elevations and narrow but not very deep valleys. As to the reason for this seeming detour from the straight clutch at the throat of Paris, it became obvious by-and-by. We passed several small villages, around which were great bivouacs; and about nine o’clock in the evening we reached the moderate-sized but very poverty-stricken town of Thiaucourt. It was teeming with troops. Entering a wine-shop close to a bridge at the end of the town nearest Pont-à-Mousson, we made some inquiries of the officers we found there as to the distance which the advance was ahead, and as to what was known of the French movements. They were fresh arrivals, and could tell us nothing except that they believed we must be close to the limit of the advance, for that the head-quarters of the leading division of the 10th Corps were in the town. As we were both fair walkers and the night was beautiful, and as Thiaucourt did not seem to offer many inducements in the way of accommodation, we determined to cover another five miles to the front, if we could get so far, before seeking the neighbourhood of a friendly camp-fire. So we started merrily up the crowded, narrow, and steep street of Thiaucourt. Not far from the top we came upon a few hand ambulances on which wounded men lay stretched. This indicated fighting no great distance off, for the blood on their bandages was still moist and fresh. Although we heard no firing, we made sure a night attack was in progress somewhere, and, by pressing on, that we should be able to see something of it. Just as we got to the top we passed a group of officers in earnest conversation, several of whom wore the provost-marshal or field-gendarmerie uniform. One of these abruptly and loudly challenged us, and demanded to know who we were. In reply to our explanations he only waxed wroth.

“Correspondents!” roared the angry man, “donner wetter, correspondents indeed! We want no correspondents here. Not a step farther do you go, and if I can do anything you will be sent back at once.”

The man was too angry to be remonstrated with. Something before our rencontre with him had evidently disturbed his equanimity, and we were getting the benefit of his being out of temper. He confiscated our papers remorselessly, and as good as told us to go to the devil—at all events till the morning. Considerably chap-fallen, we were slowly retracing our steps, with the intention of finding quarters somewhere, when we were again abruptly challenged by a still angrier man than the first. I fancy he had been sent after us by challenger No. 1. Anyhow, he did not wait for any explanation. We were coming from the direction of the French, and so—the sentence was concluded by a word of command to a party which was following, and we heard the nasty click of the bayonets as they were fixed and sent home in the socket. Our escort brought us to a large house which was the mairie of the town, and taking us upstairs left us in the dark in a huge room, with a sentry standing over us. It seemed as if our apprehension had excited some interest, for officers often came to the door and peered in upon us through the gloom, but not one brought us tidings of release. Presently there came a trampling of feet on the staircase, officers rushed into the room with lights in advance of some stretchers, on which were wounded men, and we were informed that we were to be removed. We had hoped in our simplicity that we were pretty nearly in as bad case as might be, but we were to find out how rash was this conclusion. We were hurried across a passage, a door was opened, and we were thrust into a dark room, the floor of which was littered by prostrate Frenchmen. They were all civilians, who had been arrested on suspicion of being spies. The French idiosyncrasy does not develop itself in the direction of free ventilation, and our companions were singularly odoriferous, even for Frenchmen of the lower orders; it may be imagined, therefore, how abominably the place stank. We remonstrated energetically against being herded with spies, but the only indulgence we could obtain was in the shape of two chairs, whereas our companions had to sit on the floor,—at least I judged so, for it was too dark to see them. The room we were in was the Salle de Justice, and the table of the right worshipful mayor, and another one, which, I presume, was used by the Mr. Oke of Thiaucourt, stood on a dais inside a low railing. We took possession of this little platform, got a window open, sat down opposite to each other in our chairs, and simultaneously burst into a roar of laughter at the whimsicality of our position. But laughing, although pleasant exercise for the facial muscles, is not filling, viewed as a supper dish, and we had not eaten since midday. There was no prospect of release, and as little of anything to eat, so the next best thing was to sleep. My companion took the two chairs. I threw my knapsack on the boards as a pillow, pulled the baize covers off the tables, spread one of them below me, dragged the other over me, and we went to sleep. About midnight we were awakened and brought forth from our den. For my part I wished they had left us alone till morning, for the bitterness of death was past, and I was very comfortable between the mayor’s table-covers. We were liberated, told to find quarters for the night if we could—the gendarme grinned a saturnine grin as he told us this—and instructed to call for our papers in the morning, when we should learn what had been determined anent us. At this untoward crisis an ancient Frenchman presented himself, and in reply to our question said he could accommodate us with a bed. I am bound to say that he fulfilled his promise. He did more. He gave us a bottle of vinegar which he called wine. His habitation was a single large room, with three or four mattresses strewed about the floor miscellaneously. On one of them I threw myself, my companion took another, and the old Frenchman set up a melodious snore on a third. In about an hour I awoke. Two cats were on my chest. I was positively overrun with vermin. On occasion I can manage to retain composure under the assaults of the small, lively, and saltatory species of animalculæ, but when it comes to an army of miscreants bearing the conventional name in England of a great ducal family, I am compelled to draw the line; so I got up and strolled out into the bright fresh dawn. Troops had been streaming through Thiaucourt all night, and they still came as if there were no end to them.

Early in the morning our friend the chief of the gendarmes returned us our “legitimations,” explaining that they were good only for Stülpnagel’s division, not for the whole army of Prince Frederick Charles, and enjoining us strictly to return with all speed to Pont-à-Mousson, adding the cheerful observation that if he came across us again he would have us sent over the frontier under escort. We did indeed return to Pont-à-Mousson but having procured more comprehensive “legitimations” started off with all speed for Gorze.

In Gorze on Tuesday night nobody thought of bed. The hale were hurrying to the front; the doctors, the medical volunteers, and the sisters of mercy were tending the wounded everywhere. Every room was full, straw was shaken down in the streets by the sides of the houses, and wounded laid upon it. A huge convent, like one of those mills you see in Lancashire and Yorkshire, was packed full to its uttermost recess; from every window streamed a blaze of light. The whole town had a weird, lurid aspect. Candles were being burnt on the window-sills to light the troops on to the battle-field and the wounded off it; a babel of tongues raged in its narrow streets; it was impossible to avoid the feeling of nervousness such as one experiences when the air is charged with electricity just before a thunder-storm.

My companion and myself devoted ourselves to tend the wounded in one wing of a large hotel. They lay much as they had been brought in; their wounds had been bandaged in the field, and their time had not yet come for a second visit from the doctor. Three lay stretched on a billiard-table; the blood accumulated in the bed of the table till it began to ooze through the boards and drip on to the floor. Of nine in one small room, to whom we last gave water at midnight, three were dead by five in the morning. We left the poor fellows at six; two sisters of mercy had undertaken them by that time.

A great battle had been fought, perhaps the most stubborn fight of all this bloody campaign. Of 80,000 Germans engaged 18,000 were hors de combat, a proportion unequalled in modern European warfare. And it had been scarcely a victory for the German armies; it had been only not a defeat and a contribution toward the victory which it was hoped would follow. Vionville was no battle the plan of which was sedulously devised beforehand; there was no making of skilful dispositions with a keen eye to contingencies. It was simply a furious fight into which regiments, brigades, and divisions precipitated themselves as they came up, sure that they could not do wrong if they could but find an enemy and fasten upon him. Nor was an enemy hard to find or easy to cope with. You will not find a German who fought at Vionville but will frankly acknowledge that. He owns to you, with a shudder of recollection, how even was the balance for hours, and how his countrymen thought not of turning it in their favour, but would have been glad of the assurance that the beam would not kick the other way. In so far as Vionville was decided at all, it decided the relative staying power of French and German soldiers. There was no question about the fighting, there was not a hair’s breadth to choose between them there; but who could fight the longer, that was what Vionville tested. And Vionville, like Waterloo, gave men the belief that the side which did not lose could fight for ever if need were. If further proof were wanting that Bazaine had no comprehension how gravely his situation was compromised, it is to be found in the fact that he could not have scouted the ravine of Gorze or the region to the south of it. If he had done so on the 15th he would have found it swarming with the ever-vigilant cavalry of Rheinbaben’s division, which actually on the night of the 15th had indeed as good as turned his front, for it bivouacked at Xonville, some distance on the south-west of Mars la Tour. In utter blindness Bazaine blundered out of Metz in the course of the 15th, and composedly halted for the night when he had got about nine miles on his road. It becomes necessary to give a brief topographical sketch of the locality to aid in the understanding of the events of the next three days. The terrain to the west of Metz is rolling, broken in places with ravines, studded with forests, interspersed with open fields, numerous villages, and frequent farm-houses. It is intersected by three roads leading westward. Of these the most northerly quits Metz by Woippy, and strikes away by St. Privat la Montagne and St. Marie au Chênes to Brie and the valley of the Meuse. The central and southern roads are one as far as the village of Gravelotte, where the former one goes away in a north-westerly direction to Conflans and Estain. The most southerly of the three goes on due west toward Verdun, threading on it successively the villages of Rezonville, Vionville, and Mars la Tour. This is the most direct road to Verdun, but there is no want of cross-roads to facilitate access thereto by the others, and the way by the central road is little less direct than that by the southern. Before reaching Gravelotte the conjunct chaussée, after coming out of the valley of the Moselle by Longeau and Roserieulles, crosses the table-land surface of a rounded ridge, known as the plateau of St. Hubert, and turning sharp at the Point du Jour, plunges down into an abrupt and narrow ravine with closely-wooded banks, and in whose bed runs the little stream of the Mance. This ravine is prolonged less markedly further north, and may be said to partition off the plateau of St. Hubert from that of Gravelotte. The latter is a model battle-plain of the old pattern, when it was a large army that had a frontage of a mile and a half. From the brink of the ravine it rolls backward in undulating downs at least as far as Mars-la-Tour, bare of trees or obstructions right and left of the chaussée, which runs along its centre, for a breadth varying from two miles to a mile and a half. It is flanked on the north by scattered patches of forest, on the south by a continuous forest under various names, which clothes the rugged slopes of the ravine of Gorze, and crops up upon the plain, in places encroaching not a little distance on the plateau. Reckoning from Metz, the first forest bears the name of the Bois de Vaux. It clothes the Moselle-ward slopes of the plateau of St. Hubert, and terminates in the ravine of Gravelotte. On the opposite side of this ravine begins the Bois des Ognons, which intrudes on to the plateau to the south and south-west of Gravelotte, and stretches westerly to a little stream that comes down into the ravine of Gorze nearly south of Rezonville. Farther westward on the slope is the Bois de Vionville, and north of it, in the direction of Rezonville, the Bois de St. Arnould. On the plain to the south of the chaussée, between Rezonville and Vionville, is the hamlet of Flavigny; farther west, and also south of the chaussée, are the villages of Tronville and Puxieux. Northward of Vionville, in the triangle between the central and southern chaussées, are the villages of Bruville and St. Marcel. Farther north still, on the central chaussée, is the village of Doncourt.

Bazaine on the 15th had marched by both the central and the southern chaussées. For the night the corps of Le Bœuf, of Ladmirault, and of the Imperial Guards had their camps, the first on the central chaussée about Jarny, the second in Doncourt, and the third in St. Marcel. The corps of Canrobert and of Frossard, taking the southern road, had halted in Rezonville, Vionville, Flavigny, and Tronville, with advanced guards westward as far as Mars-la-Tour.

After all his efforts, as it seems, the French had the heels of Prince Frederick Charles. It appears certain that the German leaders had made their calculations on the basis of a battle to take place on the 17th, and there were indications that such was expected to be joined farther to the westward than the terrain on which the battles of Vionville and Gravelotte were fought. Why, else, had the 19th Division, the first over the Moselle been sent on the 15th so far away due west as Thiaucourt, seeing that, in the actual event, they had to sweep round on the enemy with a circuit surely unnecessarily large? Of the rest of the army nothing had crossed the Moselle on the night of the 15th save the 3rd Army Corps. Had I but been patient, and not mistaken Alvensleben’s halt at Seligny for a night bivouac, I should have been in the front of the fray. For at nightfall Stülpnagel had put his division (the 6th) in motion, had crossed the Moselle, and by three in the morning stacked arms again with his advance guard at Onville on the south of Gorze. Note, that he also was heading due west, as if to march farther in that direction before the time should come for him to swing round on the enemy. Buddenbrock’s 5th Division, with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin’s 6th Cavalry Division, the force destined to open the ball on the 16th, had not crossed the Moselle till the early morning of that day.

The German cavalry never sleep. Probing about the front and flanks of the advance, the horsemen, under cover of the night, had discovered where Bazaine’s left flank lay in fancied security about the terrain villages, and the information went to the rear, we may depend, with all the speed that zealous men and stout horses could compass. Alvensleben got the tidings first, and by 5 o’clock Buddenbrock was over the Moselle and hurrying toward Vionville by the Gorze road. Stülpnagel, too, had his bearings given him, and he also was heading now northward. But they were not to draw the first blood. “Boots and saddles” had sounded early that morning in Rheinbaben’s cavalry bivouac in Xonville, and his squadrons riding northward had found the French outposts in Mars-la-Tour, and had engaged in a skirmish with them. What he saw there sufficed to convince him that time was precious. He sent word to Alvensleben of the urgency, and taking up his position to block the road while he could, held himself at Alvensleben’s orders. There were other cavalry men already on the field by 8 o’clock. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin had trotted his division forward, and was already driving in the French foreposts from the wooded alleys of the Bois de Vionville when Buddenbrock climbed on to the plateau at nine and saw Flavigny and the enemy before him. But he was yet on the French left, even when he reached Tronville, and his place was on the chaussée to block the French from utilising it. His artillery came into action on the brow of a swell at Tronville, while the infantry got into formation with their faces now looking toward Metz. Then Alvensleben bade them go at the villages, and they went. What sort of fighting had been done before Flavigny and Vionville were carried, was only to be realised by those who saw the vicinity before the corpses were buried. One uses weak words when he writes that the potato gardens of Flanville were strewed with French and German dead. There were places where the corpses were piled one upon another till the earth could not be discerned for the number of her children that cumbered her bosom there in death. But carried at length were the villages, and now for the moment there was the strange spectacle of a single weakened division of Germans standing up alone on the plain against the whole French array. But not for long. The reserve artillery of the 3rd Corps rattled up from the Gorze ravine, and taking ground on the south-east of Flavigny, began pounding into Rezonville. Then trusty Stülpnagel made his proximity known, as his men, breasting the steep leading up from Gorze into the wood of Vionville, found enemies in there, and essayed to drive them out by the fire of the needle-guns. It was the wood of Spicheren over again. The French in Rezonville had awoke, and sent southward in the Bois a strong body of infantry, who occupied a position both commanding and important; commanding in that it was one of the chief keys to the plateau out of the ravine of Gorze, specially important in so far as that while it was held Buddenbrock was isolated and cut off from all supports, unless by a circuitous route. Stülpnagel had to leave right many a good man on the slope on the narrow forest road and in the scrub before he had tumbled the Frenchmen first out of the wood of Vionville, and then out of the wood of St. Arnould, and was free to place himself with his right flank with its back on the latter, his left touching and aligning with Buddenbrock’s right in Flavigny. Stülpnagel had picked up by the way and brought on with him two errant battalions of the 10th Corps, under the command of Colonel Lyncker, which at a later period of the fight made themselves not a little useful.

It was neither a very brilliant position nor a very brilliant prospect. Here stood a single Army Corps, slantingly athwart the plain, its right clinging to the wood of St. Arnould, its left away in a north-easterly direction, grappled upon Vionville as on a sheet anchor; for was not Vionville the foothold it had achieved on the great Verdun chaussée? Against this left, clung to so limpetlike, and against the whole attenuated line aslant of the plain, the French projected themselves with excessive fury over and over again. The hours passed, and still there came no assistance. Vionville had been carried before eleven, and now it was past one. It had been found necessary to interpose the cavalry as a buffer between the French and the exhausted infantry men. Rheinbaben, if there were terrible odds before him, saw also before him the sight so dear to a cavalry soldier, a noble stretch of charging ground. He was not slow to make the most of it. Again and again his horsemen dashed themselves against the French masses. Once they galloped so far that men said afterwards they had got to sabring the mitrailleuse gunners that plied their work on the chaussée before Rezonville. It was the sight of the war to have seen those cavalry charges on the day of Vionville—work of which this I now write of was but a mere episode, gallant and useful as it was. Necessity has no law, but the general must be in sore case indeed who is forced to dash cavalry again and again into the faces of serried files of infantry men handling a weapon like the chassepot. Who shall wonder that when the drafts were sent for to fill up the gaps in Rheinbaben’s squadrons, a thrill ran through the landleute of the districts whence it is recruited, when the footing up of the requisition came to be known. But minutes were precious, and the devoted horsemen threw their lives away to gain them.

The most sustained and furious French attack that had yet been made, had been withstood with growing difficulty shortly before two o’clock, when Alvensleben became cognisant of a new and fearfully ominous complication. There were symptoms that he was about to be outflanked on his left. Hitherto he had been fighting only the corps of Canrobert and Frossard. But now came intelligence that the Imperial Guards were stirring in their bivouac in St. Marcel, and that the corps of Le Bœuf and Ladmirault were already on the heights of Druville, having marched southward from their encampments on the central chaussée about Jarny and Doncourt. Had they come thundering down on his left Alvensleben must have felt that all was over. The greater danger had to be met at the risk of the less. Hard as the struggle had been to maintain the continuity of the original line, it was necessary now to attenuate it still more. Buddenbrock was ordered to take ground farther to the north, and whereas till now his left flank had been on Vionville, it was now to hold his left flank, while with his right he did what he might to stay the avalanche threatening from the northward. It was well for him that at this pinch supports, fresh if scanty, came to his hand. The mass of the leading division of the 10th Corps, the 19th (Schwarzkoppen), marching from Thiaucourt in the early morning, had its direction given it on St. Hilaire, far away to the west of Mars-la-Tour. But one brigade of it, the 37th (Leymann), diminished to four battalions by the abstraction of Lyncker’s two battalions which Stülpnagel had already whipped up as he came to the battle-field, had fortunately a less circuitous route chalked out for it. Its point was Chambley, to act in support of Rheinbaben, and it came very opportunely to Buddenbrock’s hand in the emergency in which he now found himself. Into the forest north of Vionville he had already plunged the 24th Regiment, and now he was able to strengthen this slender force with Leymann’s battalions. The forest fighting was desperate and long, but the Germans managed to hold their ground till more assistance came in the shape, first of the reserve artillery of the 10th Corps which went into action at once, followed about four o’clock by the bulk of Schwarzkoffen’s division. Soon after came hurrying up the 20th Division (Kraatz-Koschlau) which had followed the 19th from Pont-à-Mousson to Thiaucourt, but instead of making the circuit by St. Hilaire had struck straight from Thiaucourt to the battle-field by Chambley. These reinforcements enabled head to be made against the attacks from the north, and baulked for the time Le Bœuf’s flanking movement. Kraatz-Koschlau could even spare some three battalions to strengthen Stülpnagel, who was staunchly holding his own on the right flank.

But to follow the incidents of the northern attack I have somewhat anticipated the events about what was now the German centre, the vicinity of the great southern chaussée. Of its weakness in infantry the French took ready advantage. An old Roman road runs nearly parallel to the chaussée some distance northward of it, and utilising it the French had got into position near it about midway between St. Marcel and Vionville, a large force of artillery. These batteries were doubly hurtful. They enfiladed the struggling infantrymen in the wood to the west, trying to stay the progress of Le Bœuf, and they fired southwards upon the German batteries by Vionville, which were embarrassed in replying to them because of the urgency of the requirement for their firing eastward toward Rezonville to keep in check the French infantry which was threatening the German centre. Becoming audacious in discernment of the double advantage of their position, the French got up more guns to the southward of those near the Roman road, till at length there was a convex formation of batteries stretching down on to the grassy swell on the north-west of Rezonville. By what agency soever, it behoved Alvensleben to interfere with the ruinous practice these were making on his centre, and at least to check their progress, for in very truth, backed and flanked by infantry, they were echeloning an advance right into his centre, making as if to cut him in two. He had no infantry wherewith to arrest this movement, so ominous of evil: his artillery was overmatched. There was nothing for it but to save his continuity at the cost of his cavalry. While the horsemen were sacrificing themselves, supports might come up to strengthen the centre; at all events time would be gained, and time in such a strait was everything. His Nolan galloped to Bredow, the commander of the 12th Cavalry Brigade, and bade that officer to charge the batteries in his front. Our own Light Brigade accepted not more cheerfully a kindred task than did Bredow’s dashing horsemen. Surely it is beseeming to name the regiments to whom fell this forlorn hope of cavalry service. They were the 7th Cuirassiers, the 16th Uhlans, the 13th Dragoons. Up the gentle slope galloped gaily on Bredow’s devoted kinder, the French batteries belching death into their faces, the French infantry, from the intervals between the guns and the batteries, pouring into them a hail-storm of chassepot bullets. Full many were the graves that had to be dug on that grassy slope afterwards; but the brigade, what of it was left, was among the guns and sabring the artillerymen before the latter, standing up to their work to the last, had time to seek safety in flight. Aye, and they were not content with carrying the battery, but, riding through them, went straight at the infantry beyond. On a house in Le Bourget, when retaken by the Guards, there was noticed the inscription,—“Prussians, you shall never see your wives more.” The legend might have been borne on the banners of those French columns against which Bredow’s brigade was dauntlessly charging. “Nobly they rode and well,” but the bullet-storm in their teeth was too strong for them. They had to turn their backs upon it and ride back whence they had come, such of them as had stood up against it. It was the smaller half of the brigade that formed line again in the old position by Vionville.

This sacrifice, however, gave at least a temporary check to the pressure on Alvensleben’s centre; but still a fresh access of danger had developed itself on his left. Pressed by the French Guards from St. Marcel, the soldiers of Kraatz-Koschlau, Schwarzkoffen, and Lyncker, who were prolonging the German left flank to the northward of Buddenbrock, had to turn their faces eastward, and fight as best they might against the repeated attacks made from that point of the compass. Meanwhile Le Bœuf, on the slopes of Bruville and extending farther west, was positioned right athwart their extreme left flank, and although he had been checked for a time, was now taking advantage of the engrossment caused to the Germans by the attacks from the east, not only to renew his from the north, but to deploy in a westerly direction, so as practically to sweep the German rear. To have suffered this evolution would have been destruction. Kraatz-Koschlau and Schwarzkoffen were up to the hilt already: to no man is it given, physically, to face two ways at once, and their faces were already set fast to the east. Cavalry, yet again cavalry, had to be resorted to. Who shall say, after Vionville, that more cavalry than is needed for outpost and despatch duties is a needless adjunct to a modern army? But for its strength in this arm, the night of the 16th of August would have closed upon the German army hurled back defeated into the ravine of Gorze. True, the cavalry was mercilessly used, if indeed abused is not the more appropriate word; but the crucial urgency of the exigency gave cavalry an opportunity to vindicate the perpetuation of its higher attributes as an arm of war in the face of the altered conditions of modern warfare. The general would be a reckless maniac who should teach himself to lean on his cavalry as an everyday and matter-of-course appliance for such purposes as those to which cavalry was put at Vionville; but the knowledge, based on what happened at Vionville, cannot harm him, that if he has a good and strong cavalry force, he has a reserve-buckler on which he may rely in the hour of need to postpone or avert an otherwise inevitable reverse.

Wedell’s cavalry brigade from the 10th Corps was sent against Le Bœuf to charge the heights of Bruville, and case the pressure on the left flank. It had a foretaste of what was in store for it when, as they passed Mars-la-Tour, the village shot up into lurid flames kindled by the French shells. French shells tore through its ranks as they rode up the open; French shells crashed into it when the inevitable halt and dislocation took place as the broken ground was reached. The brigade was the focus of a converging fire from the north and from the east. The chassepots and the mitrailleuses opened upon it as the horsemen struggled through the rocky underbrush that kept them at a walking pace, and made a mockery of formation. Can an infantry regiment, in full marching order, swim out to an iron-clad in the offing and carry her by boarding? The task is hardly less impossible than was that which the Wedells failed to accomplish. They came back “aus bruchstücken” (in fragments), to quote the graphic words of an actor, and retrieved their formation behind the reserve artillery of the 10th Corps, which had come into action a little to the east of Mars-la-Tour. Flushed by the repulse of the cavalry, Le Bœuf’s infantry assumed the offensive with greater audacity. Coming down due south with an extended front on Mars-la-Tour, the infantry stretched as far west as the farm of Greyères, while still farther west, near to Ville-sur-Iron, there rode five regiments of the cavalry of the Imperial Guard, the pick and pride of the French army, in whose long, straight rapiers was vested the guardianship of its right flank. This advance made untenable the position of Schwarzkoffen’s regiments on the German left wing north of the chaussée. Already they had been assailed in front and on the flank; now there were troops actually in their rear marching along their backs. Voights-Rechts sent orders to Schwarzkoffen to extricate himself from a position so impracticable, and the manœuvre had to be effected by the co-operation yet again of cavalry. With Schwarzkoffen’s 19th Division had come from Thiaucourt the Dragoon brigade of the Prussian Guards, consisting of the 1st and 2nd Dragoon Guards. They formed close columns of squadrons due north of the burning Mars-la-Tour, their faces northward toward Le Bœuf’s infantry. Aligning with them on their left, and facing the cavalry of the French Imperial Guard, was Warby’s brigade of the Division Rheinbaben; the 4th Cuirassiers, the 13th Uhlans, and the 19th Dragoons, strengthened by the 10th Hussars from Rheinbaben’s other brigade, and by such of Bredow’s 13th Hussars as the French shells and chassepot bullets had left fit for another charge. The Guards, whose charging ground was farther west than the broken country which had brought Wedell’s brigade to grief, had a good stretch of fair swelling downs before them. Warby could not have wished a happier land whereon to test the question of superiority between German line cavalry and the picked horsemen of the French Imperial Guard. The Guards rode straight at Le Bœuf: one may be right sure there was no swerve in the gallop that brought Warby’s men sword-point to sword-point with the French cavalry. Methodists are fond of propounding it as an axiom that a single charge is all that can be got out of cavalry in one day. Why, here were these troopers of the Prussian Guards dashing themselves again and again on the bayonets of Le Bœuf’s masses, now recoiling before the gusts of chassepot firing, now rallying and charging in again as if each man had as many lives as there were pistol cartridges in his pouch, and he was determined to expend the ammunition of vitality. So long as martialism lives in the Fatherland, so long will this deed of derring-do on the part of the Prussian Dragoon Guards be cherished as one of the proudest memories of a campaign very fertile in such memories. As for Warby’s brigade, it had work to its liking. Men can project from rapier blades no pale death in the shape of chassepot bullets. A cavalry fight is horse to horse, man to man, sword to sword; weight, valour, and skill give their owners something to show for their gifts. Long, confusing, and stubborn was the mêlée. One who looked on it from Mars-la-Tour told me that the simile which occurred to him as he watched was chaos in a state of fermentation. The fermenting chaos in time resolved itself into its constituent elements. One constituent element was galloping to the rear, the other was chasing it furiously; and the process of fermentation had precipitated an abundance of lees, which cumbered the ground whereon the chemical phenomenon had developed itself.

The diversion caused by these efforts of the cavalry enabled Schwarzkoffen to extricate himself from his critical position, and he retired till he had his back on the chaussée between Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, with strong artillery in his rear. Penetration further northward on the part of the German left wing was abandoned for the time, and the defensive strictly adhered to. To conclude the narrative as regards the left wing it may be stated, that soon after six o’clock Le Bœuf and Canrobert’s corps, who had been comparatively quiescent since the retrograde movement of the Germans, reassumed the offensive in strong force. After some tough fighting this attack was repulsed, and then Kraatz-Koschlaw and Buddenbrock, keen to utilise their opportunities, followed up the retreating Frenchmen and gained some new ground in the direction of St. Marcel and Bruville.

Stülpnagel’s less eventful experiences on the German right must now be briefly alluded to. Owing to the French having chiefly concentrated themselves on the effort to break the centre and turn the left of their opponents, he was not exposed to very fierce assaults, and those which came against him he sturdily repulsed. But toward five o’clock it appeared to have struck Bazaine that he was permitting too great quietude to the German right. He sent out to the south a large portion of his reserve, consisting of the Infantry of the Guard, who, occupying the Bois des Ognons, came through the Bois de St. Arnould, and made a demonstration against Stülpnagel’s right flank, which rested on that wood. But the cannon had not been thundering all day for nothing. Barneckow, with his 8th Division, had been at Frontigny, on the other side of the Moselle, at midday. By five o’clock his leading infantry brigade, and some batteries of his cavalry, were already in action. The latter came to strengthen Stülpnagel. By the orders of Prince Frederick Charles, who had reached the field at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the Brigade Rex, which was Barneckow’s foremost contingent, came up the steep and plunged northward through the woods of Vionville and St. Arnould, with intent to take in flank the French Guard infantry, who were troubling Stülpnagel, and having thrown them back, make a demonstration against Vionville. This manœuvre was supported by the 49th Brigade, from the Hessian Division, under the command of Prince Louis of Hesse, the husband of our Princess Alice. It belonged to the 9th Corps, and had been sent on by General Manstein from Pont-à-Mousson at midday, in accordance with instructions from Prince Frederick Charles. The Hessians struck up from Gorze through the Bois des Chevaux into the Bois des Ognons, co-operating on the right with the Brigade Rex. Neither brigade was able to do much in the dense woods, now still further obscured by the growing darkness. The Brigade Rex did succeed in clearing the wood of St. Arnould, but could effect no demonstration in the open against Rezonville; the Hessians did not succeed in driving the French out of the Bois des Ognons on the right. While they were fagging and fighting in the twilight, a furious French cannonade broke out on the north, directed against the German right wing, under cover of which it was apparent that the French were falling back over St. Marcel and Druville, as was conjectured, to place themselves on the central chaussée, in final abandonment of the design of cutting their way through the obstacle on the southern. So far as was consistent with prudence, Rheinbaben’s ever-handy cavalry strove to hamper their movement, and succeeded in cutting off some French prisoners in Rezonville. By nine o’clock the bloody battle-field was no longer vexed by shot or shell. The fighting men bivouacked in the tracks in which they had fought; the Krankenträger and ambulance people saw before them a task so stupendous that they might well stand aghast. It was with the wounded of Vionville that Gorze was ghastly on the night of the 16th of August.

I have said that there was no sleep for anyone in Gorze on the night of the 16th of August. All who were not otherwise engaged were busy among the wounded. But while the wounded groaned the leaders and the staff had to work, organise, direct; for the victory was not won yet by a great way. There was little access for outsiders to the busy bureau of Prince Frederick Charles; yet I got a glimpse of it through circumstances beyond my own control. While I was striving to soothe into an approximation of coherency the landlady of the hotel, who alternated between hysterics and vituperation of her species generally, a couple of field-policemen took it into their honest heads to regard me as a suspicious person, and forthwith conducted me to the bureau. While justifying myself, a process which was not so difficult as it had been the night before, I saw six orderly dragoons dispatched in as many minutes in as many different directions. There was no staff officer with leisure or inclination to enlighten a vagrant as to the dispositions in progress, but this much I gathered that there was urgent hurry for the bringing forward of every available man. What I learned then must be supplemented by later information.

It seemed a foregone conclusion among the Germans that they were in no case to resume hostilities on the 17th; nor did there seem much apprehension that the French could take the initiative. By the morning of the 17th there was every appearance that they had given up all hope of opening up the southern road, and had indeed drawn back materially from the position on the central road which they had held on the morning of the 16th. It was not, however, blocked to them save by detachments of German cavalry which patrolled it as far as Estain. The German forepost line established after the fight of the day before, extended from Ville-sur-Iron, north-west of Mars-la-Tour, in a slanting south-easterly direction across the plateau till it struck the head of the Bois de St. Arnould due south of Rezonville. The chain crossed the southern chaussée between Vionville and Rezonville, a circumstance showing how little ground the Germans had gained since the previous morning. All through the night and during the early part of the 17th, the several Army Corps were marching up and falling into the places arranged for them in the council of war, and in the bureau over-night. There was wonderfully little fuss and no confusion. Spicheren and Vionville had been battles of occasion, joined without premeditation or indeed expectation, and fought out as best they might, in what manner and with what material was most available in the exigency. The battle of the morrow was to be of another sort—one of the old formal set battles, in which generals were to play with divisions and Army Corps as with chessmen, were to elaborate combinations, to strike preconcerted blows, to put forth their genius, science, experience, and skill to gain the result they wished for. Not that the campaign had not earlier been fertile in evidences of the possession of these attributes by the men who directed the steps of the German armies. A master-mind shone in every detail of the plan, of which the battles of Spicheren and Vionville, occurring when they did, were incidental excrescences, springing out of the pressure of a modification in the circumstances.

Bazaine, crippled as he was by the action of the 16th, could not, even supposing him tardily awakened to the danger of his position, have made an attempt at extricating himself on the 17th. Drawn back into a commanding position, with his right wing on Roncourt and above the precipitous ravines of St. Privat-la-Montagne, his centre on Amanvilliers, La Folie, and Leipsic, and his right on a natural fortress, the plateau of St. Hubert, with Moscow on the right of it, and Point du Jour on the left, and inclining backward over the ridge to the left rear at Rozerieulles and Jussy, he held a position of surpassing strength in itself, and wherein he was not actually debarred from getting on to the central road by Verneville and Doncourt, while with his right he kept open the northern road, emerging as it did from his position at St. Privat. Had he elected he might have marched by it on the 18th, and had a fair start of the Germans, whose nearest point before they moved on that morning was several miles south of the northern chaussée; but had he been ever so nimble he would have run a fearful risk of being taken in flank, and in the best event would inevitably have had his foes thundering on his rear by nightfall. Let those who blame him confine their strictures to his unaccountable sluggishness before the 16th. Let those who in cold blood urge that, coûte qui coûte, he should have cut his way through the Germans on that day, remember that in trying to do so he had exhausted all his available reserves, except a portion of Ladmirault’s Corps. It was not in the nature of things that he could have moved before midnight of the 17th, and by that time the track he must have taken was scoured by German patrols quick to send back the tidings of his movement to the plateau of Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, by that time packed with German Army Corps which had not suffered as had he the day before. No, Bazaine was fairly out-generalled and out-manœuvred, and he accepted the inevitable, greatly as it was his own fault, with conduct and skill that to my thinking go some way toward redeeming his earlier mistakes. I have used the word inevitable, but there was one chance open to him, although a hazardous one, if he had been a man of prompt action. The Thionville road leading into the valley of the Meuse at Longuion was yet free from Prince Frederick Charles’s éclaireurs. By leaving one of his corps d’armée in position about Amanvilliers and St. Privat with orders to hold its ground as long as possible, and make a demonstration as if with intent to use the northern road by Brie, falling back under the guns of Plappeville when it could keep up the delusion no longer, he would probably have gained a day’s start before the Germans would have found out that his whole army was not still standing before them. But the risks of such an attempt are apparent when it is noticed that Prince Frederick Charles, had he been beguiled into spending the whole of the 18th fighting with a single French army corps, would on the 19th have still by the Brie road have been equidistant from Longuion with Bazaine on his more circuitous route, supposing that the latter had made all possible use of his start. If we consider that Bazaine, not so much by his own fault as by the rottenness of the French system, or rather want of system, of obtaining intelligence, had no conception of the strength opposed to him, but on the contrary believed that on the 16th he had fought all the German troops that were available for the 18th, an additional reason is found for the line of action on which he determined, nor is there any occasion to inquire into the truth of the allegation that he felt himself not justified in quitting Metz in its then condition of imperfect defence. Abuse him for what we may, we cannot deny him the selection of a fine position on which to stand the impact of an attack in force. Its natural strength was worth to him at least an additional Army Corps. And he had strengthened the fortress with judicious outworks in the shape of strongly-held and carefully-fortified posts at St. Marie-aux-Chênes, Vernéville, Gravelotte, and in the Bois des Vaux. His whole front was studded with rifle-pits.⁠[2]⁠

Von Moltke and Prince Frederick Charles had imperfect knowledge of the dispositions just detailed. They could not assure themselves whether Bazaine had elected to stand and fight upon his ridges, or whether he would not rather dash out upon the northern road, offering battle as he came. It was necessary, therefore, to make dispositions to meet both contingencies; and since the latter contingency was the likelier, and, if it occurred, demanded the prompter dealing with, it behoved the German leaders to commence the game with special reference to that eventuality. The southern road was first of all to be securely blocked. That task was assigned to the 7th and 8th Corps of the 1st Army, the former lying in the western portion of the Bois de Vaux and the eastern portion of the Bois des Ognons, standing in fine due south from Gravelotte; the latter, touching the left of the 7th Corps, occupied the western part of the Bois des Ognons, the Bois de St. Arnould, and the Bois de Vionville. It stood south of Rezonville. Besides caring for the southern road, and occupying a useful position in view of a necessity on the part of the enemy for falling back on Metz, these two corps served as a kind of stationary anchor for the 2nd Army to sway from, or perhaps it would be a better illustration were I to liken them to the fixed pivot on which it was to swing round should events justify the movement. The 2nd Army had its front in a north-easterly direction, parallel with the line of the northern road, which was its first objective point, having relation to the contingency that Bazaine would attempt to march off thereby. This front was composed of, reckoning from right to left, first, the 9th Army Corps, which touched von Göben’s left, and with the direction given it on Caulre farm; second, the Guards, direction Doncourt; third, the 12th Army Corps (Royal Saxons), direction Jarny. The second line was composed of the troops that had been so severely mauled on the 16th, viz., the 3rd and 10th Corps. The 4th Corps was on its way toward Toul; the 2nd Corps was not up, having only quitted Pont-à-Mousson early on the morning of the battle.

King Wilhelm had been on the field on the forenoon of the 17th, and before returning to Pont-à-Mousson, he had issued his formal orders for the morrow. Wellington himself could not have been more laconic or less devout. “The 2nd Army,” so wrote Moltke in his master’s name, “will, early in the morning, at 5 o’clock, commence operations and advance in échelon between Ville-sur-Iron and Rezonville. The 8th Army Corps will co-operate in this movement with the 2nd Army on its right. The 7th Army Corps will at first have the duty of covering the movement of the 2nd Army against any demonstrations on the part of the enemy from the side of Metz. The King’s further orders will depend on the action taken by the enemy. Communications for his Majesty will next find him on the height south of Flavigny.” Prince Frederick Charles, quitting Gorze, quartered himself for the night between the 17th and 18th in Buxières. He was stirring early. What a subject for a painter that morning gathering of the leaders of army corps by the poplar-trees between Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, with the Red Prince in their midst, brusque, curt, and emphatic! Around the group, conning over a new slaughter, lay the ghastly evidences of a past. Mild-eyed, handsome-faced Prince of Saxony; puffy, phlegmatic, gros August of Würtemburg; Alvensleben the aristocrat, with his thin clear-cut features and bright hawk eye; Voights-Rhetz, with the shrewd, keen look of a lowland Scot; Manstein, grim, grey, and determined; Göben, of the massive head and thoughtful brow; these stand, in a roughly defined circle, with their horses’ heads turned inward; and there addresses them in a few short crisp sentences, the tall square man on the powerful bay; he lets his hand drop on his thigh with an audible thud, for he is very heavy-handed in every sense, this stalwart man with the massive hair-clad jaw, the strong wide mouth, cruel in its set resoluteness when the features are at rest, the well-opened piercing eye under the splendid forehead, which, broad, square, and knotted above the eyebrows, soars inexplicably away into calm benevolence. A man this, in the tight red tunic, cast surely by nature in her special mould for a great military leader. You might think with yourself, as you looked at him, that you could not fancy him as a friend; look again, and I dare swear you will fancy him far less as an enemy. Nor is the Red Prince without friends, warm and jealous; if the women in the French villages use his name as the Scotch peasants of old did the name of the Black Douglas, to hush their babes wherewithal into awe-stricken silence, his army would die for him to the last man, and I have seen a pretty picture of bonny children climbing in loving trustfulness about the knees of the heavy-browed and heavy-handed man. He does not detain his generals long under the poplar-trees. One of them afterwards gave me his laconic parting words, “Your duty is to march forward, find the enemy, prevent his escape, and fight him wherever you find him.” And Alvensleben the pious added in his quiet tones, “In the name of God,” as the generals wheeled their horses outwards, and the little council scattered.

Modern battle-fields are not like cockpits. Were that a real battle which is ordinarily fought on Easter Monday on the Brighton Downs, the spectators, who squat and lunch placidly on the Red-hill, would find that commanding elevation very hot quarters. Generals, with the perversity of human nature, do not make the convenience of spectators the primary consideration in their dispositions, nor has any means yet been discovered to enable the spectators to circumvent the inattention to their convenience on the part of the military authorities, by being in more than one place at the same time. The science of expeditious and comprehensive war intelligence is still in its infancy. If the millennium does not intervene through the zealous efforts of the Peace Society, we may anticipate gigantic strides in this department of catering for the avidity of the public, culminating perhaps in opposition-balloons with a war correspondent in each hanging in the air over the centre of the battle-field, and having a “special wire,” per favour of Mr. Scudamore, leading direct into each Foreign Editor’s room. But such appliances are for posterity. In the late war, especially towards its commencement, the civilian spectator who was not fortunate enough to be attached to a head-quarter staff (and there were only three, I believe, to whom this well-deserved favour was accorded) had to be thankful for very small mercies indeed. I thought myself extremely lucky in not being interfered with when I took up what seemed an eligible position at the edge of the wood of St. Arnould, to the south of Rezonville. The forest land here throws itself up into a little elevation, affording some command of the rolling plateau to the north-eastward, with Gravelotte on its bosom, the ridge of St. Hubert and Point du Jour beyond, and away to the north on the horizon the bushy uplands of Vernéville, with the church spire showing above the trees; yet here, as it was not difficult to discern even at the time, and far more easy afterwards from sad indiciæ, it was possible to witness only one phase of the battle, and that neither the most critical nor the most decisive. I propose to narrate first the occurrences of which I was the eye-witness here on the southern edge of the field, and, having done so, to give then a short account of the more northern operations, from the official documents and other information I received afterwards from the Saxons and Guards, to whose share fell so much of the heavy fighting on the German left and left centre.