SEDAN: BEFORE AND AFTER.

Having made up our minds to quit the beleaguerment of Metz and strike off in a southerly direction with intent to hit on the march of the Crown Prince’s army, we started off rather vaguely on the 22nd of August, and reached St. Mihiel, a small town on the Meuse, the same night.

Now it seems hardly to be realised how difficult it was in the times of which I am writing to get reliable information, or to guard against being led away by some baseless rumour. I remember we lost the whole of the 23rd by slanting away to the north-west as far as a village called Fresnes, by reason of a circumstantial, but untrue story, to the effect that a battle was imminent under the walls of Verdun. When we quitted St. Mihiel for Bar-le-Duc on the morning of the 24th we could get no certain information whether it was as yet safe to go to Bar-le-Duc. We travelled with a column as far as Villotte, and then the troops struck away to the north in the direction of Vaubenoit. In answer to questions at Villotte, it was not to be learned that any German troops had taken the road to Bar-le-Duc, which lies through that village. There had been fighting, the villagers lyingly said, somewhere to the south-west, and the road to Bar-le-Duc ran south-west. Going on upon chance, we presently came into a deeply-wooded defile, extending for several miles. Not a German was visible; indeed, nothing human was to be seen. The place was calculated to make one nervous, especially when one’s driver had a fixed belief that there was a Frenchman behind every stump. He was a Luxemburger, and therefore theoretically a neutral, but I think he sympathised with the _grande nation_.

Possibly no reader has ever practised the art of reconnoitring from an open carriage, and I may describe the process. You cautiously advance till you reach an angle; then you steal round it and halt, and sweep the whole front and flanks with your binocular. Nothing suspicious is visible, so you trot along the straight till you approach another turn, when you repeat the cautious tactics. You get along at the rate of about two miles and a half an hour. If you see anything suspicious, such as the smoke of a camp fire, you cautiously retire your machine and make a pedestrian reconnoissance. Of course, with all this caution, we reached Vaires in perfect safety, and found it full of Bavarian cavalry, who told me that their army was in great force in Bar-le-Duc and ever so much farther forward. About two hours after we got into Bar-le-Duc we saw the old King arrive in his open travelling carriage. He had spent the previous night at Commercy. His quarters were in the largest house in the town, the Banque de France, on one of the charming Boulevards by which this very pretty town is surrounded. The Bavarians were very proud at being permitted to find him his guard, and I confess I pitied the two sentries on the door, who had to present arms on an average of about four times a minute. A Bavarian regimental band played in front of the Royal quarters in the early evening, and King Wilhelm came out and placidly smoked his cigar on the balcony, listening to the music. The townsfolk could not understand the quiet, homely way in which the Royal state of the Prussian monarch is conducted. When the French Emperor passed through on his way to Metz he, too, slept at the Banque de France, but he was surrounded by a cordon of guards, sentries, and police spies. The people made no secret of the fact that they liked the Prussian way of doing business best. The hotel-keepers remarked that they got their bills paid as if the generals were tourists, whereas the French gave promises to pay when the war should be over. During the day about thirty thousand men of the Crown Prince’s army passed through the town—chiefly Bavarians. The light blue of the Bavarian uniform does not wear well in point of looks—it gets soiled in no time and then even the officers look seedy. The helmet, too, is a creation of intensest ugliness. It has no split crow in gold on the front, but the letter “L” for the King’s initial, and it is surmounted by a ridgy tuft of upstanding bear’s-skin that looks like a dolly. But the Bavarian soldiers, spite of an ugly uniform, were fine fellows, and right serviceable-looking soldiers. The Crown Prince had given them some notable lessons in marching, and they had thrown away everything not essential, the very officers carrying their own kits in knapsacks on their backs. There were no led horses with portmanteaus, few pack waggons, and none of the impedimenta to which Prince Frederick Charles’s army was somewhat addicted. The men did not seem very uniform in size, and toward the tail of the regiment some of them ran smaller than would be admitted in the German service. But they were smart, clean-built fellows, with an elastic spring in their step, and bright, keen eyes, and altogether had a fighting look about them; and Weissemburg and Wörth were evidence that their actions corroborated their looks. Their cavalry was smart enough, but not very brilliantly mounted. The horses seemed more of the work-animal pattern than those of the Prussian Dragoons or Uhlans, but looked good weight-carriers, and had lost wonderfully little in flesh considering what had been taken out of them.

What a grand old motto is _festina lente_! In the early morning of the 25th, in full conviction that in two or three days the King and the Crown Prince, according to the programme then current, would be in Châlons, we started off thither, glad in the belief that we were so well to the front. It was, I believe, in the forenoon of the 25th that the change of tactics was arranged consequent on the discovery of MacMahon’s movement to the north; thus, when the troops about Bar-le-Duc were commencing that wonderful series of marches which brought them on the right flank of the French in the valley of the Meuse, we were jogging contentedly towards Vitry. In the worm-eaten old fortress we found a couple of battalions, the place having been abandoned by the Mobile garrison on the approach of the German troops, the curious miscellaneous assortment of guns having been partly pitched into the moat, partly left on the ramparts. The day after the evacuation several hundreds of the garrison had been surrounded in a wood by a comparative handful of Uhlans and made prisoners, after firing a few harmless volleys. The garrison of Vitry and the troops in the neighbourhood received orders on the 26th to march to the northward; but no explanation of the reason accompanied those orders, and nobody in Vitry had any knowledge as to the radical alteration in the situation. The march to the north was regarded as simply a slight diversion, and none doubted that MacMahon was falling back from the camp of Châlons. The road to Châlons then seemed still the chief thoroughfare for the advance of the German army, and off for Châlons we set by the southern bank of the Marne. During the whole journey we saw but one German—an officer driven in a gig by a peasant, and engaged in noting the bridges and fords on the Marne. The timid country people, anxious to sell their produce, continually begged of us to tell them whether they could get into Vitry. We might have been in a land of profound peace, so far away seemed everything warlike. When we reached the iron gates where the municipals of Châlons collect the octroi dues, it was matter of surprise that there stood no men in spiked helmets on sentry there. On we drove into the town, through streets thronged with people gossipping and gesticulating; and still never a German uniform was visible. Relinquishing our intention of halting at a hotel, we pushed right on, trying to look as unconcerned as possible, till we got on the further boulevard, where a well-intentioned townsman stopped us to say that if we went much further there were Germans still about who were sure to requisition our vehicle. Thanking him for form sake we pressed on till, some two miles outside of Châlons on the road to Suippes, we overtook an officer and five men of the Black Hussars, the last of the troops who had evacuated Châlons for the march to the north. This party we accompanied to Suippes, where we were on the extreme left flank of the German army. What boots it to narrate the little good purpose to which, chasing the shadows thrown out by defective information, we spent the days from the 27th to the 31st—how we were carried prisoners by an over-zealous train officer to Turane, where Prince Albrecht, commanding the cavalry covering the flank, blew him up for his officiousness—how we tracked back toward St. Menehould and then north to Vouziers, where we saw francs-tireurs shot, and the villages burnt in which they had fired on the German patrols—how on the 30th, passing through deserted camp after deserted camp of MacMahon's army, we were within a short distance of the surprise of Beamont without knowing it, and how at length in the afternoon we came into Chemery by the southern road as the Crown Prince, with the 5th Army Corps, came down by the eastern from Stonne? Where the two roads join at the end of the dismal village he halted, and regiment after regiment, first of the 11th and then of the 5th Corps, marched past him, dusty, fagged, but full of fight. Then there was a rattle of wheels, and the carriages containing the King and his staff drove up, and halted in the dusty road while Wilhelm dismounted, and stood by his son till the last proviant waggon of the 5th Corps had filed past, and till his uniform was so white with the dust that you might have taken him for a venerable baker who had mounted a sword and a helmet. Then he laid his hand on his son’s arm, and the pair walked slowly up a narrow lane to the right between two gardens. For awhile father and son stood talking earnestly, the senior with his hand on the other’s shoulder, the younger holding an unfolded map in his hand and talking earnestly. Then Von Moltke and Blumenthal were beckoned up out of the throng of staff officers, and presently Von Roon and Podbielski. The open air council of war lasted for nearly half an hour, and then the King left Chemery at a brisk trot, crossed the valley to Malmy, and went off down the further side of the canal to his head-quarters for the night at Vendresse. In the lane between the gardens, as I afterwards learnt, it was decided that the crushing blow should be dealt next day instead of being postponed, as originally intended, till the 2nd of September.

It was entirely by chance that, unattached as we were to anything or anybody, while posting letters in Vendresse about seven o’clock on the morning of the 1st September, we heard that there was fighting going on to the north, in the valley of the Meuse. The King had been out of bed and away ever since the early morning—gone, one of the Royal gendarmes sagely informed us, to visit the battle of the previous day but one. Of course we started at once, found the road utterly deserted, and, taking the wrong branch at the fork, came down into the valley of the Meuse nearly as far west as Mezières, and for the time at least out of view of the great battle that was raging as we trotted rapidly forward. But the whole valley was resonant with the din of battle. Away to our right we could hear the crash of the artillery fire at Sedan. Over against Donchery, midway between Sedan and Mezières, the blazing villages sent baleful flakes of flame up into the bright sky. At Mezières itself the Würtembergers, from the top of the heights between us and the town, were replying with shells and musketry to the cannon from the bastions and the spiteful whirr of the mitrailleuses from the glacis. As we came down into the valley we passed through large French camps with the fires still burning. This had evidently been the scene of a surprise. The men had left their camp-kettles on the logs and their knapsacks in the lines; they seemed to have hurriedly snatched their arms and made off, some indeed having gone away without the preliminary ceremony of grasping their rifles. Here and there, but at rare intervals, were strewn corpses of men and horses, and the hospital flag was flying from several houses. Ere we left the height we saw regiment after regiment of Würtembergers press out of the village of Flize up on to the bluff which overhangs the town, and stand there blazing away at something that seemingly lay between them and the town, while the great guns of the fortress tried in vain to dislodge them. Reaching Flize I found several regiments of Würtembergers drawn up and in a high state of excitement by reason of the easy manner in which they had driven the enemy close up under the walls of Mezières. It had been a running skirmish for several miles in length and breadth. The French on the previous night had broken down a wooden suspension bridge crossing the Meuse close under the east of Flize. The suspension cables were composed of strands of fine wire; one of them only was cut, and the floor of the bridge had turned a complete somersault over the still standing wire, lying upside down in the bed of the river. The Würtembergers had, about midnight, thrown a pontoon across in twenty-five minutes, and followed up the pursuit on the northern river flat, while they continued to press the French towards the town on the southern knolls and heights. About the time we arrived the latter had been driven in a huddled mass on to the exposed glacis of the fortress, and were struggling for entrance at the gates. The Würtembergers from the heights, disregarding the feeble and ill-directed fire from the guns that ought to have covered the French retirement into the fortress, poured down volley after volley of musketry into the chaotic mass lying below them. Then just as we reached the height a battery opened fire with shells, and caught the range of the entrance gate through the fortress wall at the first shot. Two streams were meeting and battling at this entrance; the block was complete, when a shell hurtled into its midst, and, exploding as it fell, blew the densely-packed human mass, mangled and bleeding, in all directions. This terrible fire of shells never ceased till the Frenchmen were inside the great gate; and many there were that tried to enter whom the bursting shells forbade not only to enter but to live. The officer in command of the Würtembergers told us that he had no intention of assailing the fortress itself till further orders, and that he had complied with his instructions when he had chased the French inside of it. The guns were roaring up the valley at Sedan, and if we made haste we might yet be in time to see some fighting there. So we went off rapidly towards Sedan along the great chaussée, and reached a knoll behind the village of Frenois, which commands a view of the whole valley, just in time to witness the last of a series of brilliant cavalry charges made by the French Chasseurs d’Afrique, which went far to annihilate that body of dashing horsemen.

Sedan, a fortress of considerable strength, with a moderate-sized town, lies round the convex side of a northern bend of the Meuse. On the south-east, toward Wadelincourt and Balan, there were considerable artificially-caused inundations which materially added to the strength of the place on that side. Further to the south-west, and on both sides of the river, spreads out a considerable alluvial tract, probably at one time a lake. Near the centre of the northern section of this is, or rather was, the large village of Bazeilles. On the west side of the town the configuration of the ground is more complicated. The river quits the town in a north-westerly direction, leaving the suburb of Torcy on the south, and presently trends away north-west by north for a stretch over two miles. Doubling back with considerable abruptness it comes back nearly due south a distance of about three miles, skirting near the foot of this second stretch the grounds of the Chateau Bellevue, and impinging rather abruptly on the high ground by the village of Frenois, which diverts its course in a westerly direction towards Donchery. By this loop a peninsula is enclosed, which a canal across the isthmus converts wholly into an island—the island which for several days formed the wretched prison of the captured French army. At the angle where, on the side nearest Sedan, the canal leaves the Meuse, stands the village of Glaire; nearer Sedan, on the south side of the river, is the village of Torcy. On the southern side of Sedan a range of more or less abrupt high ground quits the bank of the Meuse above Wadelincourt (that is, on the south-eastern side of the town), and sweeping round envelopes a plain of some size till it comes closer to the river again at Frenois, after which it runs away parallel with the Meuse till broken by the river Bar running down northward from the low hills of the Argonne to join the Meuse not far from the village of Dom-le-Mesnil. This range comprises several eminences of considerable height: the loftiest is that just above the town of Donchery, on the summit of which is the chateau of the same name,—the point from which the Crown Prince directed operations on the day of the battle. At ill-defined right angles from this range there runs out a lower rounded spur, which gradually lessens in elevation as the river comes to meet it at Frenois, and disappears altogether a few hundred yards further north. On its northern shoulder is built the Chateau Bellevue, which, from its moderate elevation, looks across the river and over the plain to Donchery in one direction, and down upon Sedan on the other, seeming from its position, as looked at from either place, to stand considerably higher than it really does. On the north side of the Meuse there is a range of high ground resembling in many points that on the south. Commencing behind Sedan, the heights on the north are less rugged and have their tops, as it were, shaved off, so as to constitute a tableland sloping ever towards the river. Round the top of the loop the heights come pretty close to the river, but they leave to the west of it the considerable plain of Donchery, and their slopes are easier, studded with villages and fields, alternated with woods. On the Sedan side of the loop the belt of meadow-plain left is narrower, but it attains a considerable width just opposite the village of Glaire. Depressions rather than ravines serrate the high ground rectangularly, one of these being close to the town of Sedan. Behind all rise the forest-clad hills of the Ardennes, and the frontier is but a few miles off among those.

The Germans had driven the French out of the country on the south side of the Meuse, and the French lay along the northern bank. It may be said either that they had no proper front, or that they had three fronts. It was surely in some sense a front rather than a flank position, the extended face shown to the Bavarians and Crown Prince of Saxony’s army all the way from Bazeilles by Daigny back to Givonne. It was a very deep flank, if it could be called a flank, on which the 5th and 11th Corps fell on the west after their circuitous march to the head of the loop. But the nominal front may be said to have stretched along the river, with the fortress for its centre, whose fortifications were manned, and in and about which was accumulated the French train and other impedimenta.

Of the masses which fought so toughly with the Saxons and Bavarians on the north-east and south-east of the town, or of the character of the battle that raged all round that side, I can say nothing as an eye-witness. But when I came in sight of the ground a large force of French infantry, cavalry, and artillery held the broad, flattened top of the bluff height next but one to the fortress on the westward side of the town and the northern bank of the river. The great focus of interest to me was this flattened bluff standing forward into the valley, and bounded on the Sedan side as I have described, on the Mezières side by a wider depression, which, rising gradually, ultimately loses itself almost imperceptibly on the higher ground. This depression forms a sort of bay, round which sweeps the high ground, which then extends all the way westward as far as opposite Donchery, more or less elevated, and crested everywhere by a dense wood. In the very centre of this bay there rises an isolated knoll or mamelon, nearly to an equal height with the high ground flanking the bay, and affording a remarkable position for assailing with advantage the table land on which stood the French; since, crowned with wood, it formed admirable cover for any troops advancing from the west along the low ground, who had full opportunity to make all their dispositions without exposing so much as a helmet. And then, there was the choice either of standing on the top of the mamelon and firing across, of going to the left up the valley on to the height, or of debouching on to the low river-flat to the right, and from there assailing the table land where its slope was least abrupt, and where a road up its face was calculated to afford material assistance to an attacking party. That the Germans fully appreciated the strategical value of this mamelon became speedily apparent.

In the small hours of the morning, the 11th and the 5th Army Corps, which, after passing through Chemery, had pushed on to make their bivouac between Dom and Donchery, had crossed the Meuse by two pontoon bridges below their bivouac. The latter corps had struck up at once right out of the valley to the edge of the forests cresting the upper ground, and had then come left shoulders forward through the upland farms and villages, having to fight their way smartly as they progressed, and leaving a track of fire and smoke behind them. As we came into the valley above Flize, the line of this advance was already marked by those lurid insignia. The 11th Corps, on crossing the stream, right inclined considerably sooner than the 5th, and kept on the lower ground, while they bored on forward to round the top of the loop. Thus those two corps were marching on the right flank of the French, or on what I prefer to regard as having been its right face. Up till nine o’clock the battle, in this direction at all events, had been confined chiefly to artillery, but, soon after, the 5th Corps had got to close quarters away on the further upland, and the left of the 11th Corps was even sooner in the thick of it, nearer the river and adjacent to the place where the depression in which stands the mamelon loses itself on the upland. The French artillery first essayed in vain to stay the resolute progress of the German troops. Then their cavalry charged again and again—lancers, cuirassiers, and chasseurs-à-cheval—hurling themselves on the ever-advancing columns, with a courage which all who witnessed it unite in calling heroic. But the bayonets bore them back, as bayonets, in the hands of resolute disciplined infantrymen, will ever bear back horsemen, and then the two infantries came together, and the engagement at this point became close and general.

While these things were being transacted on the upland, a manœuvre was in progress for taking avail of the advantage which the isolated mamelon rising out of the centre of the embayed depression, was calculated to afford. There gradually massed behind it a large force of infantry and several batteries of artillery, belonging, no doubt, to the right division of the 11th Corps. More than one regiment and battery occupied the summit, and fired across point blank, replying with advantage to the direct cannon and mitrailleuse fire of the French from opposite, by reason of their advantageous position among the trees, while they also found opportunity to throw in a raking fire upon the left shoulders of the French infantry engaged with the Germans up at the head of the bay. A couple of regiments, under cover of this fire, dashed up the bottom of the depression on to the table land, and took the fighting Frenchmen on the flank, hurling them back, and leaving their guns and mitrailleuses in a position from which they had to retreat to prevent their own capture. The Germans then pressed the French steadily backward across the table-land toward the ravine on the side of Sedan, not without desperate fighting and heavy loss. As they were being thus pushed back, the French flank came within the range of two or three batteries of Bothmer’s Bavarian division, which had from the first been stationed on the opposite side of the Meuse, on a rising ground running out into the flat a little to the eastward of the village of Frenois. But this was at long range, and did not do all the execution which the leaders must have desiderated. Therefore, from behind the mamelon in the bay, there issued to the right a German infantry brigade of the 11th Corps and a battery of artillery. The little force skirted the plain at the base of the high ground till it came in a direct line with the fire of the Bavarian guns playing on the height over their heads. There, in the meadow opposite, in and about Floing they had a sharp brush with a regiment of French cuirassiers of the Guard, who had been stationed in a hamlet on the verge of the meadow. The cuirassiers, with their floating horsehair plumes and their long, straight swords, charged home knee to knee like gallant soldiers as they were; but we saw about half a dozen batches of white smoke, and then a broken, straggling stream of horsemen hurriedly breasting the steep by the terraced road that runs up it, leaving their track chequered by fallen men and horses. The terraced road was then followed by the battery, the brigade of infantry struggling up, regardless of a path. The little force was wholly protected from the enemy’s fire so long as it kept under the brow, and was further advantaged by the Bavarian fire, which was whistling high over its head. That fire stopped as the helmet spikes showed on to the table land, with the battery flanking it, the whole looking straight into the right flank of the Frenchmen retreating towards Sedan. The artillery began its measured booming; the infantrymen plied the needle-gun. It seemed as if the French retreat must become a rout. But there was still left heart among the Frenchmen for an attempt to hurl at least this last thorn in their side off the table land into the plain by the Meuse. At a gallop through the ragged intervals in the confused masses of the infantry came dashing the Chasseurs d’Afrique. The squadrons halted, fronted, and then wheeled into line, at a pace and with a regularity which would have done them credit in the Champ de Mars, and did them double credit, executed as was the evolution under a warm fire. That fire, as one could tell by the dying away of the smoke jets, ceased all of a sudden, as if the trumpets which rang out the “Charge!” for the Chasseurs had sounded also the “Cease firing!” for the German artillery and infantry. Not a needle-gun gave fire as the splendid horsemen crashed down the gentle slope with the velocity of an avalanche. I have seen not a few cavalry charges, but I never saw a finer one, whether from a spectator’s or an adjutant’s point of view, than this one of the Chasseurs d’Afrique. It was destined to a sudden arrestment, and that without the ceremony of the trumpets sounding the “Halt.” The horsemen and the footmen might have seen the colour of each others’ moustaches (to use Havelock’s favourite phrase), when along the line of the latter there flashed out a sudden, simultaneous streak of fire. Like thunder claps sounding over the din of a hurricane, rose the measured crash of the battery guns, and the cloud of white smoke drifted away towards the Chasseurs, enveloping them for the moment from one’s sight. When it blew away, there was visible a line of bright uniforms and grey horses struggling prostrate among the potato drills, or lying still in death. Only a handful of all the gallant show of five minutes before were galloping backward up the slope, leaving tokens at intervals of their progress as they retreated. So thorough a destruction, by what may be called a single volley probably the oldest soldier now alive never witnessed. The cavalry blotted out, still the French infantry found courage in despair for one last effort. It was to almost certain death, and to absolutely certain defeat, that that straggling line came on, irregularly firing as it pushed forward. Rushes of impotent passion burst out from parts of the line; other parts only staggered slowly forward, as if against a high wind. What came of the effort it was hard to tell in the distracting medley, till the time came for one to go on to the battle-field, after the combatants had quitted it. Under the veil of white smoke the tattered line of infantrymen seemed gradually to melt away, without having ever come to close quarters with the enemy, who stood so solidly pouring his fire into its teeth; but that some, both of the horsemen and the footmen, must have got somehow to the brink of the slope, seemed evident from the fact that dead men of both arms lay after the battle either on the road which slanted up the steep, or huddled at its bottom, as if either their impetus had overshot the mark, or they had been pitched over by the German infantrymen, who kept so tight a hold of the position on to which they had struggled.

Meanwhile the Bavarians from Bazeilles on the eastward of Sedan, the Saxons by Daigny and Givonne on the north-eastward, and the Prussian Guards edging round till they had reached due north of the town, were steadily, and with very hard fighting, driving in the French on their respective fronts. Pressing still to their own right, the right flank of the Guards began to touch the ever further and further overlapping left of the 5th Corps, till at length the junction was complete, and there was no thoroughfare through lines composed of soldiers such as those. And so the French host was environed and cut off from the frontier and from escape in that direction by a semicircle round Sedan, the chord of which was the Meuse. Then the Meuse on its south side was lined by Bavarian and Prussian troops, and the investment was complete. The citadel could not hold half the French infantry, to say nothing of the cavalry, artillery, and train; the town, it was seen from the battle-field, was densely packed even on to the exposed side of the glacis; and it seemed, as the firing gradually died away, almost to nothing, before three o’clock, that the battle was surely over. A report, indeed, ran round that the place, and all that was in it, had capitulated; but that this was premature was shown by the recommencement of artillery fire from the south-east between four and five. At what or at whom this fire was directed, none in our vicinity could tell, till volumes of black smoke, rising from inside the ramparts, gave indication that the city itself was the mark. The French had almost abandoned the semblance of resistance, and I saw no attempt at replying to this bombardment, which was over and past by five o’clock, and then the stillness was something painful, in contrast with the fearful din of the day. Before darkness fell the Germans had drawn back off the battle-field, and had surrounded the whole town with a cordon of artillery. The guns stood unlimbered and ready pointed at the town—24 batteries, 144 guns—a gentle hint of what were the German intentions in the morning if resistance should be persevered in.

My companion and myself had some expectation, judging from the aspect of affairs, that toward the close of the afternoon the French were concentrating for one last effort to break out in a due northerly direction; and anxious to be in the vicinity if this should occur, we had crossed the Meuse by a rope ferry at the village of Glaire, and pushed across the corpse-flecked plain into the dead-littered village of Floing at the further side. As we were clumbering up the steep on to the upland plateau, there rose suddenly, from the dense masses of troops collected on the southern swell, a hoarse roar of cheering, caught up, as if by infection, by the men of the 11th Army Corps in the bay around the mamelon, and on the plateau. From mouth to mouth flew the tidings that the French Emperor had sent his sword to the German King, that the whole French host were already virtually prisoners of war, and that Sedan, with all that was in it and around it, was formally to capitulate in the morning. From where we were we saw nothing of the aide-de-camp with the flag of truce, or of the grand sensational scene of his interview with the German monarch. The ferry-boat was on the wrong side of the stream, and before we got over once more to the south side, the King had set off on his return journey to Vendresse, the Crown Prince had vacated his hill and had taken the road back to Chemery, the flushed and wearied fighting men had commenced preparations for their bivouac, and the autumn twilight was fast descending. We came back past the Chateau Bellevue and through Frenois to Donchery. The mean town looked like a city of the dead, for every inhabitant seemed to have deserted it, save only the woman who kept the hotel. I contrived to obtain quarters in it, and presently there arrived a body of staff officers. These confirmed the tidings we had heard, but could give no specific details. A meagre supper was served, eked out by a few boxes of sardines, with which we happened to be provided, and it was being eaten when suddenly a message came that Bismarck would join the party. An officer who had constituted himself caterer went into the kitchen to see what could be procured for the great Count. Alas! the unhappy hostess, with many _mon Dieus_, protested that unless they chose to eat herself, there was nothing to be had save only eggs and bacon. On this modest fare accordingly, washed down with champagne, Bismarck made a hearty supper; but before he began to eat, he made a formal statement, reading from a despatch, to the effect that the Emperor of the French had communicated to the King the surrender of his sword. Bismarck reserved comments on this announcement, but led off a hearty cheer, and then, like a jovial fellow, gave the toasts of “The King,” and “The Fatherland.”

Before going to sleep I took a walk round the half-obliterated ramparts which surround the once fortified town of Donchery. The scene was very fine. The whole horizon was lurid with the reflection of fire. All along the valley of the Meuse, on either side, were the bivouacs of the German host. Two hundred thousand men lay here around their King. On the horizon glowed the flames of the burning villages, the flicker occasionally reflecting itself on a link of the placid Meuse. Over all the quiet moon waded through a sky cumbered with wind clouds. What were the Germans doing on this their night of triumph? Celebrating their victory by wassail and riot? No. There arose from every camp one unanimous chorus of song, but not the song of ribaldry. Verily they are a great race these Germans—a masterful, fighting, praying people; surely in many respects not unlike the men whom Cromwell led. The chaunt that filled the night air was Luther’s hymn, the glorious—

“Nun danket alle Gott,”

the Old Hundredth of Germany. To hear this great martial orchestra singing this noble hymn under such circumstances was alone worth a journey to Sedan, with all its vicissitudes and difficulties. We had a domiciliary visit in our bed-room during the night from a couple of Generals in civil but exacting search for blankets to cover them as they lay on the floor of the _salle à manger_.

Next morning we rose with day-break, intending to get as close to Sedan as possible, that we might watch the critical state of affairs, and take the earliest opportunity of getting inside the city. Whencesoever he had come—it was rumoured that he had spent the night in Donchery—there sat on his horse at the corner of the market-place a sad-faced French general with red eyes, as if he had not slept. This I afterwards learned was General Count Reillé. Ever as he tried to wedge his horse into the narrow throat of the street leading to the bridge, and so on to the road leading to Sedan, he was baulked by the steady ceaseless stream of proviant-waggons and munition tumbrils, and he smiled a weary forced smile as he drew his horse back out of the press. At length an adjutant made a way for him, and he was gone. He could not have been across the bridge when at the same corner of the market-place showed the tall form and square shoulders of Bismarck on his powerful bay horse. There was no redness about his eyes; it must have been past one in the morning when he drank his last glass of champagne in the Hôtel de Commerce, it would be rash to say how long he had been at work after that; and yet here he was before the Mairie clock had chimed the hour of six, fresh, hearty, clean-shaved, steady of hand, and clear of throat, as the voice proved in which he bade the column-men give him space to pass. He wore a blue military cloak and the undress cap of the cuirassier regiment of which he is the colonel. On such a morning where Bismarck was there for sure would there be momentous doings, and we followed in his tracks as soon as possible. We lost him, however, on the farther side of the bridge, but learnt he had ridden on toward Frenois, and so followed that road. About two kilometres beyond Donchery we met a rather shabby open carriage drawn by two horses, driven by a coachman with a gold band. It contained four French general officers, and a fifth, the one we had seen in the market-place of Donchery, rode behind by the side of the ubiquitous Bismarck. The hour was ten minutes past seven. There was no escort, or anything, save the circumstance that the occupants of the carriage were French generals, to mark out the equipage as anything exceptional. We were barely past, when by a common impulse my companion and myself exclaimed, “That’s Napoleon!” We dismounted, and returned walking behind a line of wains which were going the same way as the carriage. Sure enough, on the right-hand side of the back seat there sat the Emperor—that grey face of his, impassive and sphinxlike as ever, but with its lines drawn and deepened as if by some spasm. He wore a general’s uniform, with a cavalry cloak, which was thrown open, and showed the decorations on his breast. In no other respect did he differ from his companions in dress.

The modest cavalcade went on about a hundred yards, and then halted in front of a small wayside house on the left-hand side of the road as one goes from Frenois to Donchery. The cottage into which the Emperor went on alighting was the right-hand cottage as one looks out on to the chaussée, one of a block of three mean two-storied brick houses inhabited by families of weavers. The houses stand some twenty or twenty-five feet back from the road. In their front is a narrow level of gravelled path—at the edge of this, in front of the right-hand house were placed the chairs for the Emperor and Bismarck—and then there is a grassy slope down to the ditch bounding the road. It was in obedience to a sudden request of the Emperor that the modest _cortége_ halted at the wayside house. I saw him turn round in his seat, and heard the request he made to the Prussian Chancellor. Immediately on alighting, the Emperor walked hurriedly to the rear of the house, and presently returned and went inside for, at the most, five minutes. The three officers occupying the carriage had gone inside at once, and were followed by Bismarck and his mounted companion. Then the Emperor and the Chancellor came outside again and sat down on two chairs which were fetched for them by the weaver who lived downstairs. Some chairs were brought out also for the French generals, but not enough, so one or two of them lay down on the grass bank in front of the left-hand cottage, and were presently joined by several officers of the German staff. One of the French generals, the Duke de Moskowa I think, seemed to have been wounded, and dragged one of his legs heavily behind him. On a table in rear of the block of houses, there had been set out a couple of bottles of country wine with glasses, and one of the French generals, I shall not say which, kept popping round the corner to pay his devoirs to the sour tipple.

When the interview between the Emperor and Bismarck commenced—at twenty minutes past seven by my watch—Bismarck stood with cap in hand, but, as it seemed, in compliance with an injunction from Napoleon, accompanied with a bow and a slight smile, the Chancellor covered himself and sat down beside the other. Then an earnest conversation ensued. The Emperor occasionally smiled and made a remark, but it was evident that Bismarck was doing the greater part of the talking, and that, too, energetically. From our position we could just hear the murmur of Bismarck’s voice when he raised it at those points where he thought it necessary to give emphasis by the gesture of bringing the fore-finger of the left hand sharp down on the palm of the right. The occupant of the first floor of the right-hand cottage was all the while overlooking the pair out of his front window. Along the road streamed the ceaseless current of a proviant column, the rude teamsters glowering greedily at the strange scene by the road-side—a scene the like of which is not in the history of our century—and exclaiming occasionally in their uncouth curiosity, “_Wo ist der Napoleon, den?_”

A little after eight von Moltke drove up from the direction of Donchery, and after joining in the conversation for a quarter of an hour, went away again. Bismarck followed him, mounted, at a sharp trot, and the French party was left to itself. The Generals remained seated in a clump. The Emperor took to stalking moodily up and down a path in the potato-plot by the side of the cottage, limping slightly as he walked, and smoking hard. After a spell of this exercise, he came and sat down among his Generals, still retaining an almost total silence, while they spoke and gesticulated with considerable animation, and, as it seemed occasionally, a little confusedness. A little after nine there came up at the trot from Donchery a half troop of the 1st Sleswig Cuirassier Regiment of Life Guards. The Cuirassiers, with trained celerity, formed a semicircle around the back of the house. The burly lieutenant dismounted two of his men, and without a glance at the sitting party or the semblance of a salute, marched them close up to the cottage-wall just behind the Emperor’s chair, halted them, gave loudly the order “Draw swords,” and then gave them their orders in an undertone. I noticed the Emperor glance backward at this arrangement, as if he did not half like it. There was a flush on his face, the first evidence of emotion he had manifested. At a quarter to ten Bismarck came back among the staff, which by this time had accumulated on the road in considerable numbers, and Moltke’s lean face was visible in the crowd on the road. He did not seem to care about having more to say to the Frenchmen, and never went up the slope. Bismarck now wore his cuirassier helmet and looked quite martial, but rather heated, and no wonder, for he had taken a stretching gallop back in the direction of Vendresse to meet his master the King. The King and his two great subjects, the civilian Bismarck and the soldier Moltke, met on the road at the foot of a steep slope about four kilometres backward from Donchery toward Vendresse and Chemery. An estaminet stands just opposite the spot of meeting, the portly proprietor of which watched from a distance the hurried council of war which took place in the field by the roadside, and took the pains to mark with an axe the tree against which the King leant when the momentous consultation was in progress.

Wiping his hot face, Bismarck strode up to the sitting Emperor, and as we know now, communicated the message from his master the King, and the arrangement as to the interim disposition of the illustrious prisoner. After a short interview he beckoned to the carriage, which had drawn off a little, and the Emperor entered it, followed by the Generals, and, still escorted by the Cuirassiers, the party drove off in the direction of Sedan. I followed as fast as I could, and caught up its track as it entered the grounds of the château appropriately named Bellevue, which overlooks the plain on which stands Sedan. In the grounds a regiment of Bavarians had been bivouacking, but as the imperial party arrived they were marched out. The château consists of a centre block, with two wings joined to the centre by conservatories on the first floor. The chief front is towards the road. I was at the back of the house, but then the blinds were drawn down at the front, so I had rather the best of it. In the conservatory on the left were the French Generals; in that on the right was the Prussian staff. In the dining-room on the ground-floor of the central block von Moltke, Bismarck, and de Wimpfen were debating the terms of the capitulation. The Emperor, I gathered, was lying down on a sofa in the drawing-room on the first floor of the central turret, or in the boudoir which opens off it. No doubt he was weary and sick at heart, while it required no very keen eyes to discern that he was in bodily pain. And that had been a long trying wait there by the wayside from seven till ten, with little truly to lighten its monotony to the stunned, crushed man. A colloquy with Bismarck, stern of heart, sharp, if courteous of speech, unyielding in resolve, for an hour or more; for another hour or more a listless kicking of heels while the man who had vanquished should pronounce what was to be done with him. He, the Emperor of the French, the proudest monarch in Europe, kicking his heels on the roadside by a weaver’s cottage while a Prussian count galloped to a Prussian king for instructions! If he were not too stunned to think at all, he must have thought at times as he lay there that surely the morning’s doings were one ghastly dream.

The deliberations as to the negotiations seemed likely, by the rumours which reached us, to last for some time, and quitting the precincts of the Château Bellevue, my companion and myself utilised the interval in visiting the battle-field. The tract charged over by the Chasseurs d’Afrique was a scene of terrible carnage. The Arab stallions ridden by this force had died very hard; in many cases they had with their struggles made graves before they had died for their riders and themselves. The burial parties did not have much trouble hereabouts in bringing corpses to the grave-pits. The difficulty was to clear a space on which to commence a grave-pit. Higher up on the tableland there was fearful evidence of the power of a shell-fire at short range. I counted five headless corpses within two hundred yards—their heads had been blown away as clean as if they had been guillotined. Men disembowelled, with their chests driven into fragments, with legs or arms blown away, were common spectacles. I found one man’s leg about twenty-five paces distant from his body. Right on the battle-field we came on a friendly quartermaster, who was superintending the collection of biscuit barrels and wine casks that the French had left behind them in their hurried retreat. He placed at our service the contents of a barrel of biscuits, the outside of which was stained by a fluid which was red, but was not wine; but bucket staves are not sponges, and the biscuits were very good, and we were very hungry.

After hurriedly traversing a corner of the battle-field my companion and myself determined to take our chance of being able to visit Sedan. We found German outposts, consisting of three men each, near the transverse passages leading through the glacis, and close to them bodies of Frenchmen without arms, who chatted freely with the German sentries. We got on to the glacis of the fortress with the greatest ease in the world, and found the soldiers lying on it to consist chiefly of Turcos and Zouaves, dirty fellows most of them, but certainly in better case to all appearance than the troops we found inside. Everybody was very friendly; wine was genially pressed on us, all the more warmly when we mentioned that we were Englishmen. One especially greasy and strong-smelling Turco, of a full Day-and-Martin colour, insisted vehemently on kissing us, and we had to submit to the oleaginous hug with what grace we might. Getting into the town was a different matter. The gates were closed, and opened only to admit the wounded as they were brought in on waggons. By the advice of this friendly Turco, who set us the example, we jumped on one of the waggons and passed in without interference. As rapidly as we could for the chaotic press, we traversed several streets of the town. We saw where M’Mahon lay wounded, and also how full the town was of troops. They were swarming, densely packed, everywhere. Of the wounded, some were in the churches, the houses, and the public buildings, others lying unheeded and jostled in the courtyards; the dead were everywhere—in the gutters, trampled on by the living, on the swampy margin of the moat, littering the narrow way through the glacis and the fortifications, lying, some of them, on the steps of a church. The sight was one never to be forgotten—a sight of misery, chaos, disorganization, and general devilry, which assuredly was unique in this generation—an eddying sea of humanity, trampling recklessly over the dead and the wounded, the men now yelling for the blood of their officers, now struggling in fierce contention for a morsel of bread.

Hastening back to the Château Bellevue, we were yet too late for the announcement of the signature of the capitulation. We had seen nothing of that sensational incident—if it really did occur—when von Moltke, as is related, led outside the reluctant de Wimpfen, and weakened his obduracy by pointing to the ring of field guns unlimbered, and with the gunners in position, girdling the fated city, and ready at the word to commence a bombardment which would have been the synonyme for a butchery. But we were just in time with a sharp run to see the King up to the gates of the château, followed by his son and the leading members of his staff, and to see the silent greeting—if words were spoken they must have been muttered in a low tone by men afraid to trust their voices—between the monarchs on the gravelled drive at the bottom of the steps. The “good brothers” turned, and mounting the steps, disappeared inside one of the rooms in the central block, the royal staff partly occupying one of the conservatories, partly remaining outside. The interview, that surely must have sorely tried the composure of both the parties to it, lasted barely some twenty minutes, and then Wilhelm was out and off in his carriage for a drive through his victorious Kinder bivouacking by the Meuse. He who was left in that inner room must have heard the air throb again with the cheering which came from German throats at the sight of the white-haired conqueror-king. Later in the afternoon I saw the Emperor again. He came out in front of the château to superintend the unpacking of his travelling carriage. He looked very wan and weary, although he still kept up the old impassible look. The imperial equipage in its magnificence was an extraordinary contrast to the simplicity of the modest turnout of the Prussian King. In gold and scarlet the outriders of the former glittered profusely. He of Prussia had his postboys in shoddy cloth, with glazed coverings to their hats to keep the dust off the nap.

The Emperor’s barber, with whom I had a chat as the suite waited for orders outside the château, gave me some interesting particulars regarding the last disastrous day in Sedan. The French army, he said, had its efficiency destroyed by socialism and a craving for a republic. It was in a chronic state of semi-mutiny, and many regiments would not follow their officers on any consideration. This yeasty condition of agitation made discipline an impossibility, and accounted for the disregard of discipline on their part, which had enabled the Germans so often to surprise their camps and drive them whithersoever they listed. M’Mahon was wounded in a vain attempt to excite one of these disaffected regiments to charge. The Emperor met him in the street as he was being carried half unconscious into his quarters. If my informant was truthful, Napoleon bore himself worthily during the disastrous day. Imitating his uncle at Montereau, he directed guns with his own hand, and was continually under fire. But the French were totally out-manœuvred and outnumbered. They had expected to have to cope with an army of 120,000 men; instead of this, nearly double the number started up unexpectedly, as if from the ground. The troops in Sedan candidly admitted to me that the Germans were better soldiers than themselves, although not braver men; and this is about the truth of the matter. They have a sense of responsibility which the French want; they are splendid marchers, they fight like devils, they are strong, self-contained, self-respecting, earnest, manly fellows; they have generals who know how to direct them, and officers who know how to lead them, and this is why they came to go on accordingly from victory to victory.

Next morning (the 3rd September), we tried to get through Sedan with intent to go a little way into Belgium. There was thoroughfare only one way and for one class of persons. The gate was surrounded by a guard of Bavarians, and a continuous stream of French prisoners, horse, foot, and artillery, was fast passing out. We watched it for hours—it seemed as if it never would stint, and at last we abandoned the intention of getting through Sedan, and turned down the stream to the rope ferry which we had used the two previous days. When we got to the bridge over the canal, we came again upon the stream of French prisoners, flowing in the direction we were going. The tract between the canal and the Meuse is an island of some extent. The rope of the ferry was cut, and the boat on the other side. Skirting the Meuse downward for some distance, we found several ferries, but all the boats were, like the first, on the other side of the stream. The fact was, the Germans had utilised the island into a prison. They had turned the disarmed French army bodily into it to the number of some 70,000, looking to the Meuse and the canal to do the main duty of custodianship. It is true that here and there on the farther side there stood a company under arms, and that towards nightfall a chain of sentries was run along the farther banks; but I do not believe that on the island itself there was a single German. The Frenchmen had been turned on to the island just as they came out of the town. The Germans themselves were temporarily short of rations, and could spare nothing for their prisoners. But the prisoners fared better than their captors, although goodness knows how they did it. After all nobody can achieve a savoury mess under difficulties like a Frenchman, or build himself a house where another man would have to be content with the heavens for his roof. Innumerable fires had been lit, about one seemingly serving three men. The fellows dragged out firewood from recondite corners in the most marvellous manner; recklessly tore down houses, and burnt doors, window frames, and rafters; broke up carts, ploughs, fences, and everything else available. On every fire was a saucepan, and in the saucepan were potatoes, and something else. Where the potatoes came from was plain enough; we could see the fellows delving them, but about the “something else,” all that one could tell was that it smelt nice. There was a flavour of onions in the scent—I began to think Frenchmen have an onion bed somewhere about their persons—and a _soupçon_ of garlic and a gamey whiff that made one’s mouth water. Most of the men who were not cooking were building unto themselves habitations for the night. About half of them had their _tentes d’abris_, which they were rigging up dexterously, and bedding with boughs torn from the trees. The trees were put under heavier contributions to build wherewithal leafy bowers of considerable architectural pretensions, and positively I do not think that, with the exception of the extremely late-comers, a single man of the captive French army slept this first night supperless and without some cover. They were the civilest, cheeriest, best-humoured set of fellows imaginable. We two, quite alone, and unable to bestow anything—for our flasks and tobacco-pouches were but drops in the bucket, and very soon exhausted—experienced no word but of the frankest courtesy and the heartiest friendliness, alike from officers and men. The officers had been allowed to retain their swords, having given their parole, but had to accompany their men, whose disarmament had been very thorough. On the island is a handsome château, with beautiful and extensive grounds, and of the cover there afforded the Frenchmen took avail extensively. I do not suppose that in the island they had much more room than in Sedan, but they preferred it for quarters, since they could get firewood and potatoes. A few stray barrels of biscuit had been brought into the island on carts, and their contents were distributed as far as they would go, but there was not a biscuit for every twenty men of the great multitude. After some conversation with a group of captains in the grounds of the chateau, we strolled down towards the river, and accepted the invitation of a bivouac of Zouaves to join them at their supper. The mess was better than good, it was superb. It consisted of potatoes, the indescribable savoury “something,” and flesh of some kind or other. The swarthy Zouaves, in their red fezes and baggy canvas breeches, treated us like princes, but evaded a direct reply to the question what was the meat in their mess. After we had bidden the merry rascals a hearty good night, we came upon the carcass of a horse that had been killed by a shell, and there was a clean slice or two out of its flanks. I did not think it necessary to go back to the Zouaves and put it to them point blank whether they had been regaling us on horse; but, like the man in the play, I had my own thoughts on the matter. It was late before we quitted the fires on the island; and when we were once outside and realised the difficulty of finding quarters, we were sorry we had not stayed and shared the bivouac of the Zouaves. Donchery we knew to have been invaded by a whole Army Corps; Frenois was seething full of Bavarians. As we were discussing the probabilities of a bivouac we drove past the front of the Château Bellevue. All was in darkness. A happy thought struck my companion. “Let us sleep here,” he cried. The gardener seemed glad enough to have a couple of quiet civilians for his inmates. He stabled our horse and conducted ourselves into the chateau, one of the most beautiful residences, both internally and externally, I have ever seen. The dining hall, where the capitulation was signed, was a model of taste without meretricious display. It was wholly in stained oak, save the roof, which is inlaid with American maple. The windows were Gothic, and in niches round the room there were alternately mirrors and Etruscan vases. One or two large pictures were let into the panelling, and in recesses were divans. The chairs were high backed, in finely carved oak. Above this room, up a winding staircase, and on the first-floor, was the bedroom occupied by the Emperor on the previous night, just in the state he left it. Before leaving at nine in the morning, he had breakfasted with his suite in the dining hall. On its beauties, as on those of the rest of the charming villa, we were free to feast; there was nothing else to satisfy the appetite. The gardener was very hungry himself and so was his wife. Nor, according to the gardener, was there a drop of wine in the house, and appearances certainly seemed to corroborate his asseveration. It fell to me to sleep in the bed occupied by the Emperor on the previous night. Sheets and a quilt were on the bed, but one of the window hangings, with its semicircular canopy, had been torn down, and applied as an additional covering for the couch of the Emperor. He had apparently been reading in bed, for a translation of Lord Lytton’s “Last of the Barons” lay open turned on its face, on a little table by the bed-head. There seemed something of a sombre significance in the selection.

At this time the chateau was inviolate; not so much as an ornament had been touched. The beautiful clocks ticked on every mantel-piece, and the pretty knick-knacks of the young ladies were sticking on the pincushions in their abandoned bedrooms. But about five in the morning there was an incursion of a Bavarian regiment, which during the night had been on guard over the prisoners on the island. Beyond doubt they did not use the place tenderly. The Bavarians are, out of sight, the most butter-fingered of the German soldiers, and anything conveniently portable they annexed with neatness and despatch. What the men wanted was wine, and what seemingly wanton damage they did to the wainscot, panelling, &c., was in quest of it, a quest in the end crowned with success.

By the 6th of September the King of Prussia was in Rheims, the self-constituted guest of the Most Reverend the Archbishop in that ecclesiastical dignitary’s palace, hard by the historical old cathedral. There had been but a short stay for the German hosts on the field where they gained laurels so green and yet so bloody. The blood tint had hardly died out of the Meuse, the unburied dead yet festered in the sunheat, and the ruins of Bazeilles yet smoked and stank, when the vanguard of the Crown Prince’s army shouldered their packs and trudged away up the valleys of the Argonnes towards the fertile vine-lands of Champagne, marching nearly due southward but with their faces ever set Paris-ward, and “Nach Paris!” ever on their lips. Royal head-quarters made a long pause in the old cathedral city, while men all over Europe were asking one another whether the catastrophe of Sedan had not virtually ended the war, and looking for the white dove of peace to alight on the blood-stained battle-field. But the Revolution had taken place in Paris, and the leaders of the new Republic were flushed with the chimera that Republican institutions and untrained hordes of patriots, which at the talismanic name of “Republic” were sure to rush to arms eager to fight and proud to die for _la Patrie_ emancipated, could cope with the generalship and the trained and victorious armies that had crunched the disciplined soldiers of the Empire as a boy cracks a nut. It was from the crisis of Sedan that may be dated the falling away of British sympathy from the German side. Wise and considerate men at home, who in the beginning had seen and readily owned to the justice of the cause in which Germany had fought and conquered, let their reason and their logical perception become enfeebled by a sympathy for misfortune which did honour to their hearts. With others the keynote to the changed feeling was kindliness for a Republic, a gushing abstract love for an institution which they reckoned a synonym for the truest of all national liberty. A judicious alternative to this mild phase of mental aberration might have been discovered in an enforced residence in Paris during the months of March and April last. When Wilhelm went to war in the name of the German Fatherland, he put forth that he warred not with the people but with its ruler. That ruler gone, he was bound to look to some person or to some body, as the successor of the captive Emperor in some kind of right or other to dispose of the destinies of France. He could not make peace with the French nation in the gross; that nation must set up, whether for peace or for war, something tangible to be treated with by the victor, if it was to be peace; to direct war, if the nation’s fiat was for war. The Provisional Government assumed this province, and was tacitly accepted by France. Then the nation through this, its mouthpiece, instead of suing for peace, instead of asking what terms it might expect if it should sit down content with the punishment it had received, cried “War, war to the hilt, war without a thought, a dream, a hint of negotiation!” Wilhelm had no help for it, but to accept what was virtually a new challenge, and fight on. And that challenge gave to him a new antagonist. He now fought, no longer with the man who was his prisoner, but with the French nation, with whom up till then he had proclaimed that he had no quarrel, and he fought with it, because it had taken up the quarrel that might have gone with the _Déchéance_, and made it its own. The German did not quit his first position; France and the French drove him out of it whether he would or not. There was no alternative but to march on defiant Paris. Sympathy is a beautiful feeling; but its failing is that very often it clouds discrimination. Under the influence of effusive sympathy for France, who has not heard men plead—“Ah, but in the hour of her triumph Germany might have shown her magnanimity and offered terms to poor France, instead of coldly standing at attention waiting for her beaten foe to humiliate herself by suing for terms.” For Germany to have acted thus would not have been magnanimity; it would have been quixotry, and quixotry certain to have been misinterpreted by France. Because the German arms only occupied as a formality a corner of Paris for a couple of days, did not Paris send up the defiantly-complacent yelp that it was fear which had made the occupation so transient and partial? Can international history point to a precedent in which the unquestioned victor, unweakened either by a single reverse or by a long war, fighting in a cause acknowledged as just by all the world, took the initiative in offering terms, either directly or indirectly, to an adversary so stubborn and haughty that it seemed like enough the profferer would have had them flung back in his teeth? Who ever heard of the gladiator in the arena, or the pugilist in the ring cry, “Hold, surely there is enough,” while the opponent proclaimed himself still full of fighting, and refused to be led away by what in this case was an Europeful of judicious bottle holders?

While the King abode in Rheims, waiting for what never came, and while Europe was talking and scheming, and France was hardening her heart and stiffening her neck, the German armies were deploying into a grand line for the advance on Paris. Three great roads converge toward Paris from the east of France. On the southernmost of these leading from Châlons, through Tour de Montaimé, by Montmirail, Coulommiers, Chaulmes, and Brie Comte Robert, the head-quarters of the Crown Prince of Prussia it was arranged should march. The northern route is _viâ_ Laon, Soissons and Dammartin, but the fortresses of the two first-named towns still held out, so that the 12th Army Corps and the Prussian Guards had tracks farther to the south perforce allotted to them. The central road from Châlons through Epernay is cut near Dormans, by the road that comes from Rheims, by Ville en Tardenoise, and thence continues its course through the beautiful valley of the Marne, threading successively, as in a string, the pretty towns of Château Thierry, La Ferté sous Jouarre and Meaux. Meaux was a pretty town once before the deluge came upon it. This central road was set down as common property for the right flank of the fourth army and the left flank of the third. Along it lay the track of the 6th Army Corps, which, spared at Sedan, was to head the advance on Paris. Later it was to be traversed by the 2nd Bavarians, and later still by the 11th Army Corps, which had been left in the rear when its fellows marched out of the valley of the Meuse.

Dispositions covering a front so extensive, and having an object so vast and so momentous, were not made in a day. The men had to be rested after feats of fighting and marching not surpassed in the history of the world; supplies had to be accumulated near; communications had to be everywhere perfected and made good. Meanwhile the King took his ease in the archbishop’s palace. Bismarck, in his yellow and white cap, stalked about the town alone, disregarding with a grim indifference the crowds of beggar boys who fancied they could recognise benevolence in the fact that they were not summarily sworn at by reason of their importunity, and only found out their mistake when they had haunted the stern man persistently to no purpose for half the length of a street. Moltke paced the aisles of the cathedral for hours at a time, with set face and abstracted eye, his hands ever clasped behind his back. Captains and subalterns, dashing Freiwilligen and gay Vicefeldwebel, made merry over the flowing champagne in the hotels and cafés, and wished that there was a Rheims at every halting spot. The soldiers ate and drank, sauntered and stared; dealing justly in uncouth and fragmentary French with the shopkeepers of the town, and essaying in a sheepish way to make a little love to the girls, whose coquetry overcame even the conventional hatred. But although _festina lente_ was the motto, there was no time to be wasted. On the 7th of September General von Tümpling, commanding the 6th army corps, had already his head-quarters in Dormans. The German Uhlans who, when they had ridden into Rheims on the Sunday previous, had all but seen the backs of Vinoy’s men retreating, were far up the valley feeling the front at least two days before I reached Dormans on the 8th of September. I wonder how many British tourists are familiar with the rich, placid beauty of the valley of the Marne, otherwise than as seen from the window of a railway carriage. It will amply repay a much more detailed inspection. On the afternoon I climbed a little hill above Dormans, which overlooks the valley for several miles in both directions, and the view well repaid the exertion. On either side of the river lie flat and fertile “haughs,” as the alluvial tracts are called in Scotland; and out of them rise almost imperceptibly the swelling knolls clad with vineyards in which the frequent villages nestle snugly. I counted ten villages from my hill-top. The whole valley was as quiet as if there was nothing but peace in the world. Presently, from one of the villages over against me, there arose the swell of military music; the band of a regiment was quartered in it, and was treating the villagers to a concert. I do not think I ever saw such a wealth of fruit of all kinds as there was around Dormans. For the first time I realised how the Israelites might have been compelled to resort to a stake borne by two men to carry wherewithal the trusses of grapes from the vines of Eshcol. Apples and pears hung by the roadside like hips and haws in our hedgerows at home, alternated by trees laden with delicious golden plums. It made one glad that the troops were marching in peace through the valley of Dormans. It would have been desecration to sully this Eden by making it a battle-field. A quiet race were the people of the valley, sighing for quietude and for liberty, without plebiscites, and without severe taxation, to till their soil and live prosperously in their quiet way. They craved a strong and moderate Government, be it what it might—monarchy or republic. The landlady of an auberge where I halted for a short time put the matter to me very pithily. “I don’t care a sou about politics,” said she, “and we have been taught to abhor the Prussians, and specially to detest Bismarck; but, oh, how heartily do I wish that in France we had such a one as Bismarck!”

Now that the strain of the forced marching was somewhat abated, it was instructive to note how the Germans were resuming their rigour in little matters of detail and discipline. I saw the officer of the day turn out the quarter-guard the evening I arrived in Dormans, and he bullied the men as if the regiment had been in barracks, because their buttons were not polished and their coat-cuffs not turned down. The soldiers were everywhere brushing and beating their clothes, or mending holes in them. In a shoemaker’s shop there was a comical-looking row of soldiers, all sitting solemnly against the wall, each with a boot in his hand, waiting for his turn with the funny little French shoemaker, of whose continual jabber they understood not one word, but courteously replied with the invariable “Ja! Ja!” The Dormans tailor was hard at work repairing officers’ uniforms; I wonder whether he was patriotic enough not to utilise the “cabbage.”

Von Tümpling seemed in no hurry to advance from Dormans. Had he been dallying in Rheims, one might have apprehended that he had found his Capua, but pleasant place as was Dormans, every one said there were more eligible quarters and equally beautiful spots farther down the valley of the Marne. The truth is he was waiting till the 3rd army on his left should get approximately abreast of him. He was certainly near enough to his own front. On the 9th we started off with intent to make Château Thierry before we halted. About eighteen kilometres from Dormans we came to a bridge. The bridge itself was sound enough, but on the other side of it an embankment on which the road was made had been cut across by a trench. This was evidently the work of an enemy, but of an enemy destitute of the guidance of engineers, and ignorantly eager to oppose the German progress. As might have been expected, the pitiful trench had been no great obstacle. It had been partially and hastily bridged, and thus we knew that friends were still ahead. About a kilometre farther we entered the village of Crezancy. Nobody had anything to say to us as we passed through the village; but when we got on the top of the hill beyond it, we found a sergeant’s guard along with an officer. The latter told us that the post was the extreme infantry advance, and that we must not pass it. A few horsemen were scouting farther, but he had no assurance as to the state of the country, and he could not allow us to go on any farther. He was a fixture, he understood, for the day, and the forward movement had for the time been arrested. So there was no resource but to return to Dormans, where we learned that the head-quarters of the 6th Corps were not to move till the 11th, and perhaps not then.

Impatient of the inaction, it occurred to us on the morning of the 9th to start off in a southerly direction, inclining a little to the rear, so that thus we should strike the head of the more southerly advance. The place where we intersected the first east and west road was a village called Igny-le-Jard. There were no Germans there, and the villagers said they had seen none but a few scattered Uhlans. Our road then lay through a fine forest, intersected with rides for hunting purposes, and full of deer. At Mareaille, on its farther side, we came upon an advanced infantry-post—there was nothing beyond except cavalry, said the officer who commanded the handful of men. A few miles farther to the south, and we reached the charming village of Corbellieu, lying snugly by the little river Surmelin. In the environs was a beautiful chateau, surrounded with grounds, everywhere adorned with parterres of flowers, and intersected by artificial streams and lakes, crossed by bridges of fanciful construction. For miles the road lay through avenues of fine trees, on either side of which were rich farms or beautiful villas. We had passed Corbellieu for some miles, still edging rearward, when the towers of a castle became visible, and soon we entered the pretty village of Montmort, at the end of which, raised high over it on an eminence, partly natural and partly artificial, stands the castle of the same name. At one time, I doubt not, a castle of great strength must have occupied the summit of the commanding eminence. The site is one which the castle-builders of the middle ages must have thoroughly appreciated. From the wall encircling the esplanade I dropped an apple sheer into the street, two hundred feet below; a double moat surrounds the abrupt height, the top of which is reached externally by winding paths; internally, by a winding staircase up a turret built into the rock. The castle itself is comparatively modern. It was the property and the residence of the Marquis de Montmort, who, along with his daughter, had very sensibly remained at home to receive the Germans instead of running away into Paris. He had for his guests the head-quarters of a brigade of the 5th Army Corps, the officers of which, in consideration of the courtesy of the Marquis in doing the honours of his own house, exerted all their efforts to prevent intrusion on his privacy and towards the preservation of the amenities of the charming place.

Quitting Montmort we pushed on a few miles farther south to Etoges, which is on the great road. No German sentries were posted outside of it. We traversed it from one end to the other, and found it wholly French. Having left our carriage at the village auberge, we strolled towards a fine chateau in the environs, at the gate of which a courteous French gentleman accosted us. He was the son of the owner of the chateau, M. de Kirchener, son of an engineer officer who distinguished himself greatly in the Prussian service in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814. M. de Kirchener is himself married to a sister of the Duchess de Montebello. The old gentleman himself came out to meet us, in a little trepidation, and knotting around his waist as he came a scarf of the “Succour for the Wounded” pattern. The father and son courteously joined in urging our removal from the auberge to the more pleasant quarters which the chateau afforded; and there we spent the night with not a German soldier, so far as we knew, nearer to us than the outposts outside Montmort. There were, however, German troops nearer Paris than Etoges, two squadrons of cavalry having passed through it in the morning.

Next morning (the 10th) we started westward for Montmirail, with intent to traverse a district memorable in the first campaign of 1814 as that in which, in a rapid series of battles within a very small space, Napoleon destroyed the army of Blucher. Soon after quitting Etoges we came upon the fine plain of Champ Aubert, on which was fought the battle of the 10th February, 1814. A monument stands in the centre of the battle-field, erected by “the Emperor Napoleon III.” A couple of kilometres farther on we reached the village of Vauchamps, outside which took place the battle of the same name on the 14th February, in which Blucher’s discomfiture was consummated. Passing through the pretty little town of Montmirail, we crossed a deep gorge and came out on a noble plateau, almost on the verge of which stands a fine fluted column, surmounted by a gilded eagle and bearing on its pedestal the announcement, dated 15th August, 1866, that “this monument was erected by the orders of the Emperor Napoleon III. to indicate the spot on which stood the Emperor Napoleon I. when he directed the efforts of the French army in the battle of Montmirail on the 11th February, 1814.” On the other sides of this pretentious monument are the names of the other victories:—Feb. 12th, Les Caquerets, Nesle, Château Thierry; Feb. 11th, Montmirail, Marchais; Feb. 10th, Champ Aubert; Feb. 14th, Vauchamps.

At Montmirail we passed through the advance brigade of the 5th Army Corps, which we had seen in Montmort the day before. The previous day had been a rest day, and the troops were fresh and thoroughly in good condition and spirits. About six miles in front of Montmirail, at a village called Vieuxmaisons, we found the battalion quartering itself which constituted the vanguard. There was nothing beyond except a few cavalry outposts, and although it was ascertained that there were no French troops in the immediate front, there was reason to believe, the officer told us, that there were detached little parties rancorously scouring the country, who might be more awkward customers for people like ourselves to encounter than regular soldiery. His advice coincided with our own opinion that we had got to the end of our tether on this lower road. There would be a further advance next day, no doubt, but in the meantime Vieuxmaisons afforded nothing whatever calculated to sustain life, it having borne the brunt of a squadron of hussars on the previous night. The officers of the 58th, a fine Silesian regiment, made us heartily welcome to a share of their rations, but thought it advisable to regain the valley of the Marne. So with a hearty farewell to the good fellows of the Posener Regiment, we struck across the low sierras to Château Thierry, crossing as we did so the scene of the battle of Nesle and close to Château Thierry the battle-field of the same name, where Napoleon annihilated the remains of the corps of Sacken, which he had beaten previously at Montmirail; and on our arrival found that Von Tümpling’s head-quarters had come on into Château Thierry in the course of the afternoon. Château Thierry was taken and retaken several times, and three times sacked in the campaign of 1814, but had long lost the traces of its early misfortunes. On the occasion of the present visit of the Prussians there was no sack, and, indeed, very little scarcity. The people had for the most part stayed at home, and, disregarding the lies of the French newspapers as to the conduct of the German troops, had laid in goodly stores of eatables and drinkables, for which they found a ready market, at no doubt remunerative prices. A sagacious citizen told me he would not at all mind if the Prussians were to stop a month in the place, for they were far better customers than French soldiers, and most of the population seemed to be much of his mind. The officers chiefly frequented the Café du Midi, close to the Hôtel de l’Eléphant on the esplanade, and consumed their beer and coffee much as if they had been in the Fatherland. In this place I saw the first manifestation of a feeling of impotent insolence on the part of Frenchmen. As most readers are doubtless aware, it is the custom in Germany to bow to the company on entering a café, and to remain uncovered while the stay lasts. While the café was at its fullest two young Frenchmen of the town entered with some noise, and without any recognition of the company laid hold of cues and monopolised the only billiard-table. At first they were unobserved by the German officers, but their loud laughter and exclamations presently attracted attention. Each wore his cap cocked on his head, and they two were the only covered persons in the room. A German lieutenant quietly arose, and removing the cap of one of them made him a bow, quietly said, “Pardon, Monsieur,” hung the cap on a peg, and sat down. The young fellow looked as if he would fain be angry if he dared, but thought better of it, and went on with his game. His companion did not take the hint, but cocked his cap all the more defiantly, and I heard him whisper to his companion that he would not have stood the insult if offered to himself. A German officer sitting near me heard this too. He got up, walked solemnly to the Frenchman, took off his cap, chucked it out of the door, looked the Frenchman in the face for a minute, and then went back to his seat. The young fellow made a lame attempt to explain that he wore his cap because he had a cold, but nobody noticed him, and the pair went off, looking as impudent as they thought was safe.

On the 12th the head-quarters of the 6th Corps moved forward to the village of Nogent l’Artaud; but as several regiments had gone forward, we did so too, in hopes of being able to spend the night in La Ferté sous Jouarre. From Nogent the valley of the Marne is exceptionally beautiful and fertile. The villages are plentiful and full of good houses, lavishly decked with flowers, and every slope is covered with vineyards. At times the valley is so narrow that there is room only for the river and the road, and the railway has to betake itself into a tunnel; then it widens into a charming flat on which lies a pretty village. I do not think that I ever saw a more beautiful village, both externally and internally, than Charly, about two miles west of Nogent. Almost all the houses were villas, and they stood embowered among trees amid a wealth of flowers. The soldiers, of which the place was full, seemed imbued with the influence of its beauty, and respected its amenity as far as was possible. From Charly we went forward to Croutes, and then on to Luzancy, where we found the 51st Regiment quartered, and then we knew that there was no La Ferté for us that night. The 51st constitute the extreme infantry advance, and whenever one saw it one might be sure there is nothing further but a handful of horsemen. Luzancy, a very little place, was full to repletion. We returned, therefore, to Croutes, and found as much crowding there; so, instead of retracing our steps to Nogent, we crossed the Marne and made for the railway station of Nanteuil-Saacy, which we saw opposite with a couple of houses beside it. One of the houses was deserted and stripped. In the other we found a man and his wife, but the lady was doing her duty by her country in this its hour of need by adding a unit to its population. In these circumstances we took up our quarters in the waiting-room of the station, sleeping on the seats, and lighting our fire to boil our coffee-water with a basketful of used tickets. Next morning we came on to La Ferté in advance of head-quarters.

The white fog so characteristic of the Marne valley was still hanging over the pretty town of La Ferté, when, about half-past four in the morning of Wednesday the 14th, we drove over the quaint old bridge on our road forward to Meaux. All round lay the 6th Army Corps, the honest fellows still slumbering soundly in the semi-darkness. As we drove forward through the fog, there were but few signs of our having been preceded by any large body of men. As day broke, the soft roadsides showed tokens of having been trodden by cavalry, and the hoof-prints had not been beaten out, as they invariably were, when infantry men had come tramping after the horsemen. Seven miles beyond La Ferté, still in the thick fog, we reached the village of Trilport, about three miles from Meaux, and here were a few men of the 51st, and a slender guard in front of the Mairie. The sentry shouted something unintelligible as we passed him—it was not “Halt!” and so we did not care to pull up. But when we had traversed quite half the fine bridge which forms a continuation of the little town, a “Halt!” in loud and peremptory tones, came from a dim figure half obscured by the fog. It came again still sharper and louder as we continued to advance, our horse having a good deal of way on him. Then the figure stretched out an arm, and, snatching the bridle, sent the animal back on his haunches, shouting as he did so, “Donnerwetter! can’t you see the bridge is down?” Down it certainly was, and very near down were we, too, in the fog. The arch nearest Meaux, one of considerable span, had been utterly shattered by gunpowder, and the débris lay in the water, creating quite a tempestuous little rapid. As we were thanking and questioning the sentry, a gust of wind suddenly swept the fog away, and there became visible, two hundred yards or so up stream, the wreck of the fine railway bridge, all three arches of which had been blown up. Gaunt and grim stood the shattered arches in the sombre light of the morning, contrasting strangely in the sullen ruin of their appearance with the busy scene in the intervening space. The pioneers of the 6th Corps were just finishing a bridge which they had hastily improvised. A pontoon train was hourly expected, but meanwhile the pioneers with their axes had constructed a very creditable pile bridge. Now they were causewaying the approaches to the timber platform with grassy sods sliced from the bank. It was good to see the system and purpose with which everyone worked. An officer stood by formally to superintend operations, but he seldom needed to take the cigar from his mouth to utter an order. The division of labour principle was carried out to its fullest extent, and the result was speed, order, and efficiency. As a special favour, this gentleman permitted our carriage to cross before the bridge was quite finished, and in advance of a battery of artillery, the horses of which were champing their bits with impatience at the halt in the chill morning air.

The broken bridges on the Marne, at Trilport, were not the only obstacles which the French engineers had attempted to interpose between the Germans and Meaux. There was the tunnel at Nanteuil, a really serious impediment. Had all the French operations on this line been as thorough as this, the German advance would have been materially delayed. But in other cases the engineers must either have been consummately stupid or have built largely on a supposititious stupidity on the part of the Germans. When they destroyed the bridges in the direct line, they invariably left standing some convenient substitute capable of being utilised by the easy expedient of going a few hundred yards either right or left. Thus a mile beyond the Trilport ruin a bridge on the canal had also been destroyed. But a wily Uhlan had ridden down the towing-path till he came to a handy if rather narrow wooden structure, about half a mile to the left, and then come back on to the chaussée, and chalked on a convenient post the laconic but intelligible word “Links.” “Links” (left) we went accordingly, crossed the canal, and reached the outskirts of Meaux, where there was another bridge down. This time the direction was “Rechts,” and obedience to it soon brought us into the town, where there were nothing as yet but a regiment of hussars and a few sergeants that had come on in advance to take up quarters in the town and the neighbouring villages for the troops. In the course of the afternoon the greater part of the 6th Army Corps arrived in the neighbourhood of Meaux; comparatively few men, however, being quartered in the town itself, in anticipation of the accommodation requisite for Royal head-quarters, which were expected from Château Thierry next day. General von Tümpling had his head-quarters at Quincy Segy, a little village with a beautiful château, about six kilometres to the south of Meaux, but divided from it by a more serious obstacle than the trivial distance, in the shape of a destroyed bridge on a branch of the canal. A Jäger regiment formed the infantry foreposts in a line of villages, the centre of which was Claye, about five miles to the front; and the 8th and 9th Regiments of hussars were on patrol and vedette duty out to the front of the Jägers. They had pushed reconnaissances as near to Paris as the village of Gagny, close under Fort Nogent, and their report was that there was no French force outside the ring of forts. But there had been a few trifling skirmishes between detachments of French cavalry covering the engineers in their work of destruction, and the German patrols. Two or three German dragoons had been shot and a few French prisoners taken. And the 5th Army Corps’ advance guard lay around Coulommiers, considerably to the left rear. To the north, and also rather in the rear, was the bulk of the Maas army, but its cavalry were reported to have pushed patrols on the north-west, close up to Gonesse and Montmorency.

On the morning of the 16th, while riding out to the cavalry foreposts in company with a hussar officer, we suddenly came, on the great road in front of Claye, on a little posse of French lancers, following a civilian who carried a white flag. On the top of a little knoll the lancers halted, and then retreated, leaving the “parlementaire” to come forward alone. When he came within hail, it turned out that he was the Second Secretary of the British Legation in Paris, and the bearer of a communication from Lord Lyons to Count Bismarck. He got a mount from one of the hussars, who vacated his saddle for the purpose, and was escorted into the camp by a sergeant and a couple of men. Great interest was naturally excited among the German troops when the news spread of the advent of a “parlementaire.” A report had been current a couple of days before that the defence of Paris was abandoned, and although that had been contradicted, a wide-spread belief existed that the Parisians were not prepared when confronted with the actual realities of a siege, to let the matter go to extremities. The arrival of the English secretary was accepted as in support of this view, and everybody was anxious for the King and Bismarck to come on toward the front. The Royal head-quarters arrived early in the afternoon of the same day, and I learned, however, in the course of the evening, from a reliable source, that Mr. Malet was the bearer of a communication emanating, in the first instance, from Lord Granville, having for its object that proposal relative to mediation which led to the historical interviews at Ferrières, which Jules Favre terminated by futile gasconade.

Mr. Malet was courteous enough to give a few details regarding the condition of Paris, and the incidents of his journey from the capital to the German foreposts. He described Paris as being in a seething and excited condition, with divided councils, and a huge mass of pseudo-soldiery, the individual bravery of each individual component part of which might be unquestionable, but the general discipline of which was so loose and flaccid as almost to disentitle, in his opinion, the body of semi-armed men to the appellation of soldiers. He had spent a night on his road, and the Gardes Mobiles where he halted had made the cheerful suggestion that he should sleep “under the beautiful stars.” Mr. Malet, reserving the question whether he would have any objection to sleep “under the beautiful stars,” if they were visible, pointed out the fact that they were not, and requested other sleeping accommodation than that afforded by the earth as a mattress and the sky as a canopy. This he ultimately obtained, his escort sleeping in the adjoining shed. He saw evidences of the most flagrant disregard of discipline on the part of the troops lying outside the defences of Paris. The men coolly refused to get up and take their turn of duty on guard when ordered to do so by their officers, although, to judge from appearances, there would have been no hesitation had the order been to get up and go into action. It says not a little for Trochu that he could have constructed a measurably serviceable army out of materials so unpromising.

Mr. Malet returned towards Paris next morning, leaving in the same way as he had come, under an escort of German hussars. Those who knew the nature of the risk he ran felt considerable apprehension for his safety. In the course of the morning the French had fired upon two flags of truce, and it was just a chance if Mr. Malet should be recognized. However, he got among the defenders of Paris without detriment, and, as we afterwards learnt, reached the British Embassy—there was yet a British Embassy in Paris—in safety.