DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/memoriesstudieso01forb MEMORIES AND STUDIES O F WAR AND PEACE Photo. U. S. Mendel88ohn % Pembridge Crescent , W. MEMORIES AND STUDIES '/ OF WAR and PEACE ARCHIBALD FORBES WITH PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR SECOND EDITION CASSELL and COMPANY, Limited LONDON ; PARIS <5^ MELBOURNE 1895 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED To tlir lirbrirti aittr 13rInbrlt /Wrtnortt OF GENERAL. MONTGOMERY CUNNINGHAM MEIGS, QUARTERMASTER-GENERAL OF THE ARMY OF THE UNITED STATES FROM 18G1 TO 1882, HIS SON-IN-LAW INSCRIBES THIS BOOK. CONTENTS. PACK I.—Ten Years of War Correspondence ... I IT.—Moltke before Metz ...... 47 III. —The Dark Days of Sedan . . 70 IV. —Ambush against Ambush .... 98 V.—Paris in Prostration . .115 VI. —The Crushing of the Commune . . . .127 VII. —Our Parish Murderer . . .172 VIII.—Pretty Maritza of Tirnova . .186 IX.—The Death of the Prince Imperial . .201 X.—War Correspondence as a Fine Art . . 216 XI.—The Future of the Wounded in War 241 XII.— A Hill Story ....... 257 XIII. —My Servants on Campaign ..... 268 XIV. —Distinguished Conduct in the Field . . 286 XV.— On the Old War-Path .... 297 XVI.—Soldiers’ Wives . . . . . .311 XVII.—An Honest-born Boy ...... 325 XVIII.—Soldiers I Have Known ..... 333 MEMORIES and STUDIES OF WAR and PEACE. I. TEN YEARS OF WAR CORRESPONDENCE. Skobeleff under Fire—The Ideal War Correspondent—Old and New Methods of War Correspondence—The Franco-German War—Saarbriicken—Grave - lotte—An Episode of the Entry into Paris—The Starving Magistrate— Malet in the Commune-time—The Servian Campaign—A Long Ride— The Russo-Turkish War and its War Correspondence—My Comrades— The Crossing of the Danube—Tzar Alexander II.—Life on Campaign—■ Second Battle of Plevna, July 30th—Fighting in the Schipka Pass—My Interview with the Emperor—His Return to St. Petersburg—Telegraphy in excehis —King Theebau and his Presents—Rough Surgery in Afghan¬ istan—Mentioned in Despatches—Ulundi and the Zulu Valour—A Long Gallop with the Tidings. I T was down by the Danube side, in the earlier days of the Russo-Turkish War. Skobeleff and myself were squatting in a hole in the ground, to escape the rain of bullets and shells which the Turks were pouring across the river on the detachment which the young general commanded. “ Here you and I are,” said Skobeleff with a laugh, “ like Uriah the Hittite, right in the forefront of the battle; and how strange it is that quiet stay-at-home folk all over the world, who take their morning papers just as they do their breakfasts, know ever so much more about this war as a whole than we fellows do, who are actually listening to the whistle of the bullets and the crash of the shells !” Skobeleff did not pursue the subject further, because just then a shell exploded right in front of us, and of the mud which it threw up a splash hit him in the face and changed the current of his ideas; but all the same his remark was a B MEMORIES OF WAR AND RE ACE. very true one. War correspondence and (he electric telegraph have for years given the peaceful citizen the advantage, in the matter of quick and wide war news, over the soldier who is looking the enemy in the face on the actual battlefield. But this intelligence, although the peaceful citizen takes little account of the manner of getting it, and has come to look for it as a thing of course—as a mere matter of everyday routine —yet reaches bis breakfast-table as the outcome only of long thoughtful planning, of arduous physical and mental exertion, of hairbreadth risks encountered. It is my purpose in this chapter to tell something of the war correspondent’s working life, something of the character of his exertions to satisfy the world’s crave for the “ latest intelligence from the seat of war,” and something of the dangers that encompass the path of his duty. If the recital of some bygone personal experiences in this field may strike the reader as involving the imputation of egotism, I would respectfully beg of him to admit the excuse that it is not easy for a man to avoid egotism altogether when he is speaking mainly of himself. In my day-dreams, indulged in mostly when smarting under the consciousness of my own deficiencies, I have tried to think out the attributes that ought to be concentrated in the ideal war correspondent. He ought to possess the gift of tongues—to be conversant with all European languages, a neat assortment of the Asiatic languages, and a few of the African tongues, such as Abyssinian, Ashantee, Zulu, and Soudanese. He should have the sweet, angelic temper of a woman, and be as affable as if he were a politician canvassing for a vote ; yet, at the same time, be big and ugly enough to impress the conviction that it would be highly unwise to take any liberties with him. The paragon war correspondent should be able to ride anything that chance may offer, from a giraffe to a rat: be able to ride a hundred miles at a stretch, to go without food for a week if needful, and without sleep for as long ; never to get tired—never to feel the sensation of a “slight sinking, you know; ” and be able at the end of a ride—of a journey however long, arduous, and sleepless—to write round-hand for a foreign telegraph clerk ignorant of the correspondent’s THE IDEAL WAR CORRESPONDENT. 3 language, at tlie rate of a column an hour for six or eight consecutive hours; after which he should, as a matter of course, gallop back to the scene of action without an hour’s delay. He should be a competent judge of warfare; con¬ versant with all military operations, from the mounting of a corporal’s guard to the disposition of an army in the field. He ought to have supreme disregard for hostile fire when real duty calls upon him to expose himself to it; and his pulse should be as calm when shells are bursting around him as if he were watching his bosom-friend undergoing the ordeal of the marriage service. He must have a real instinct for the place and day of an impending combat: he must be able to scent the coming battle from afar, and allow nothing to hinder him from getting forward in time to be a spectator of it. He should be so constituted as to have an intuitive perception how the day hath gone; to be able to discern victory or defeat while as yet, to the spectator not so gifted, the field of strife seems confusion worse confounded ; and so to rely on his own judgment as to venture, while the turmoil is dying away, to turn his back upon it, and ride off the earliest bearer of the momentous tidings. To potter about waiting till the last shot be fired ; to linger for returns of killed and wounded, and for the measured reports of the commanders; to be the chiffonier of the rags of the battle¬ field—that is work which he must leave to his helpers, if lie has any such. Alas ! there never was such a man as I have ideally depicted, and there never will be such a man. 1 think Julius Cresar would have been an exceptionally brilliant war- correspondent, if the profession had been invented in his time, and if he could have weaned himself from the meaner avocations of commanding armies, conquering countries, and ruling nations. But the first Napoleon, if only he could have been a little truthful occasionally, would have eclipsed Julius Cresar and knocked William Howard Bussell into a cocked hat. Before the Franco-German War there had been war correspondents, and one at least of those had made for himself a reputation to vie with which no representative of 4 MEMORIES OF WAR AMD PEACE. ;t newer school has any claim. But their work, being almost wholly in the pre-telegraphic period, was carried on under less arduous conditions than those which have confronted the more recent war correspondent. Nor was it incumbent on the former to carry their lives in their hands. Before far- reaching rifled firearms were brought into use, it was quite easy to see a battle without getting within the range of fire. But this is no longer possible, and in the future will be still more impossible. With guns of position that carry six miles, with mobile artillery having a range of more than three miles, and with rifles that kill without benefit of clergy at two miles, the war correspondent may as well stay at home with his mother unless he has hardened his heart to take his full share of the risks of the battlefield. Indeed, if he has deter¬ mined to look narrowly into the turbulent heart of each successive paroxysm of the bloody struggle—and it is only now by doing this that he can make for himself a genuine and abiding reputation—he must lay his account with adven¬ turing more risk than falls to the lot of the average soldier. The percentage of casualties among war correspondents has recently been greater than that among the actual fighting men. In the Servian Campaign of 1876, for instance, there were twelve correspondents who kept the field and remained under fire. Of these, three were killed and four wounded. Certainly not more than thirty correspondents and artists, all told, were in the Soudan from the earliest fighting to the final collapse of the Nile expedition ; but on or under its cruel sands lie the corpses of at least five of my comrades. O’Donovan, the adventurous pioneer of Merv, perished with Hicks. The last hope has long faded that Vizetelly, endowed though he Avas with more lives than the proverbial cat, has still a life in hand. Cameron and St. Leger Herbert rvere struck down on the same bloody day, and rest together in their shalloAV grave in the hot Bayuda sand. Poor Gordon, Avho, like myself, had been a soldier before he became a Avar correspondent, died a lone death of thirst in the heart of the desert Avhile pushing on to Avhero his duty lay. Time would fail me to tell of those Avho have perished of fevers and other maladies, avIio have MATRIMONY AMONG THE BOMBSHELLS. been wounded, shipwrecked, and encountered strange hair¬ breadth escapes; of others, again, who have come home so broken by hardship and vicissitude that what remains of life to them is naught save weariness and pain. And it is such men whom a commander who has been himself adventurous has classed with the camp-followers, and has stigmatised as with decorations. The peasant woman and the princess knelt together at the same shrine. In stately procession the Emperor reached the altar, bent his head, and his lips touched the sacred image. When he turned to leave the building, the wildest confusion of enthusiasm laid hold of the throng. His people closed in about the Tzar till he had no power to move. The great struggle was but to touch him, and the chaos of policemen, officers, shrieking women, and enthusiastic peasants swayed and heaved to and fro; the Emperor in the midst, pale, his lips trembling with emotion —-just as I had seen him when his troops were cheering him in the battle-field—struggling for the bare ability to move, for he was lifted clean off his feet and whirled about helplessly. At length, extricated by a wedge of officers, he reached his carriage, only to experience as wonderful a reception when he reached the raised portico of the Winter Palace. As for his daughter-in-law, the Tzarevna of the period, now the Empress Dowager, her experiences were unique. As her carriage approached the terrace, the populace utilised it as a convenience whence to see and cheer the Em¬ peror. Men scrambled on to the horses, the box, the roof, the wheels; progress became utterly impracticable. A bevy of cadets and students who lined the foot of the terrace, were equal to the occasion. They opened her carriage-door by dint of great exertion, they lifted out the bright little lady who clearly was enjoying the fun greatly, and they passed her from hand to hand above their heads till the Emperor caught her, lifted her over the balustrades, and set her down by his side on the terrace. I saw the metal heels of her remarkably neat boots sparkling in the winter sun¬ shine over the heads of the throng. In many respects the monarch whom the Nihilists slew was a grand man. He was absolutely free from that corruption which is the blackest curse of Russia, and which still taints the nearest relatives of the Great White Tzar. Alexander had the purest aspirations to do his duty to¬ wards the vast empire over which he ruled, and never did he spare himself in toilsome work. He took few CHARACTER OF ALEXANDER II. 37 pleasures; the melancholy of his position made sombre his features and darkened for him much of the brightness of life. For he had the bitterest consciousness of the abuses that were gradually alienating the subjects who had been wont from their hearts to couple the names of “ Cfod and the Tzar.” He knew how the nation writhed and groaned ; and he, absolute despot though he was, writhed and groaned no less, in the realisation of his impotency to ameliorate the evils. For, although honest and sincerely well-intentioned, Alexander had a taint of weakness in his character. True, he began his reign with a show of self- assertion, but then unworthy favourites gained his ear, his family compassed him about; the whole huge stubborn vis inertice of immemorial rottenness and tenacious officialism lay doggedly athwart the hard path of reform. Alexander’s aspirations were powerless to pierce the dense solid obstacle; and his powerlessness to do this, with the disquieting self- consciousness that it behoved him to do it, embittered his whole later life. In the end, the man who was once a reformer, died a tyrant. One of poor MacGahan’s most sanguine beliefs was that a time would come, if the Millennium did not intervene, when the war correspondent should overhang the battle¬ field in a captive balloon, gazing down on the scene through a big telescope, and telegraphing a narrative of the combat as it progressed, through a wire with one end in the balloon and the other in the nearest telegraph office. I don’t profess to be very sanguine myself that this elabor¬ ation of system will ever be carried into effect; and I think, on the whole, I should prefer, were it attempted, that some one else should conduct the aerial service. But L remember once beating time, or at least apparent time, in a curiously remarkable fashion, in the transmission across the world of war news by means of the telegraph wire. In the early morning of November 22nd, 1878, a column of British troops gained possession of the fortress of Ali Musjid, up in the throat of the Khyber Pass. I rode ME MOB IE S OF WAR AMD PEACE. 3S lack ten miles to the nearest field telegraph office at Jumrood, and sent the tidings to England, in a short message bearing date 10 a.m. There is five hours’ differ¬ ence of time between India and England, in favour of the latter; and newspapers containing this telegram, dated 10 a.m., were selling in London at 8 a.m.—two hours of apparent time before it was despatched. Nor was this all. Owing to the five hours’ difference of time between London and New York, it was in time for the regular editions of the New York papers of the same morning, The message was immediately wired across the American continent; and owing to the difference in time between the Atlantic coast and the Pacific slope, the early-rising citizen of San Fran¬ cisco purchasing his morning paper at 6 a.m., was able to read the announcement of an event actually occurring two hours later in apparent time 15,000 miles away on the other side of the globe from the fair city inside the Golden Gate. Puck professed his ability to put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes: but this telegram sped some two-thirds round the earth in two hours less than no time at all. During a lull in the fighting in Afghanistan in the winter of 1878-79, I made a hurried run across the Bay of Bengal to Burma, and ascended the river Irrawady to Mandlay, the capital of native Burma, for the purpose of learning something of the now dethroned King Tlieebau, who had then recently succeeded to the titles of Lord of the White Elephants, Monarch of the Golden Umbrella, and all the rest of it. Theebau, when I worshipped the Golden Feet, had not yet begun to massacre his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, who were all kept in durance waiting for their doom in a building within the palace enclosure. He courteously postponed that atrocity until I had quitted his tawdry capital, but perpetrated it before I had reached Calcutta on my return to India. It was said, I question if truthfully, that he had subsequently taken to drink and became bloated, under the provocation of what KING THEE BAIT “El V PETIT COlTn'fT 39 may be called a double-barrelled mother-in-law, for the unfortunate Theebau was married to both the lady’s daughters; but when I had the honour of making his acquaintance, he looked a manly, frank-faced young fellow, with a good forehead, clear steady eyes, and a firm but pleasant mouth. He received me, not in state, but quite informally in a kiosk in the garden of his palace, dressed in a white silk jacket, and a petticoat robe of rich yellow and green satin. A herald, lying prone on bis stomach, introduced me in the following portentous apostrophe— “Archibald Forbes, a great newspaper teacher of the Daily News of London, tenders to his Most Glorious Excellent Majesty, Lord of the Ishaddan, King of Elephants, Master of many White Elephants, Lord of the Mines of Gold and Silver, Rubies, Amber, and the noble Serpentine, Sovereign of the Empires of Thunaparanta and Tampadipa, and other great Empires and Countries, and of all the umbrella-wearing chiefs, the Supporter of Religion, the Sun-Descended Monarch, Arbiter of Life, and great righteous King, King of Kings and Possessor of boundless dominions and supreme wisdom—the following presents.” My presents were not of much account, but at least they were genuine, which was more than could be said for the Burmese monarch’s return gifts. Among these was a ring of great size and seeming splendour. I looked upon myself as provided for for life: but my suspicious servant took the precaution of submitting it to a jeweller and having it priced. He returned with melancholy and dis¬ gust stamped on bis swarthy but expressive countenance. The ring was worth but thirty shillings. In fact it was a “duffer.” I set down the Lord of the Great White Elephant as a fraud. Indeed, the Great White Elephant was a fraud himself. I went to see the royal brute in the gilded pagoda which was his palace. I saw a lean, mangy, dun-coloured animal, with evil little red eyes, and dingy white patches on his head and trunk. And now the Great White Elephant, sold once to Barnum, is dead of white paint on the skin; Theebau is dethroned and a state 40 MEMORIES OF WAR ANI) PEACE. prisoner; and his territory, to the great advantage of the people who were once his subjects, is incorporated into our ever-growing Indian Empire. I have already told how the war correspondent learns to be a cook after a fashion, and, in truth, he finds it con¬ venient to be a sort of jack-of-all-trades. Among other acquisitions, he has ample opportunity for picking up an elementary knowledge of rough surgery. Occasions in battles are frequent when no surgeon is near, and when the correspondent, having no fighting to do, is free to concern himself with aiding the wounded, and may have the happy chance to save human life. In the absence of professional appliances he may have to resort to curious impromptu expedients. During one of the expeditions in the winter Afghan campaign we were marching down the bed of a mountain-torrent, on each side of which rose precipitous crags. Suddenly the head of the column emerged from the gorge into a little open space. There came a ragged volley down upon us from a handful of Afghans perched high up among the rocks above. A private soldier marching by my side, fell across my path, shot through the thigh. Assisted by a young soldier I cut the cloth from the fallen man’s leg, and found that he was bleeding very fast. No tourniquet was accessible, nor was any surgeon in the vicinity; so, closing with my thumbs both orifices of the wound, I directed my assistant to find two round stones and get out the surgical bandage which every soldier carries in the field. Just as I raised a thumb for him to introduce a stone, there came a second volley from the Afghans above. The young soldier hastily ran to cover, and I had no alternative, if I were not to allow the wounded man to bleed to death, but to remain pressing my thumbs on the orifices, kneeling out in the open under a dropping fire from the native gentlemen on the rocks above. After some minutes, a detachment, climbing the crags, gradually drove the enemy away; where¬ upon I was able to complete my rough operation and to THE TJNBURIED DEAD OF IS AND I WAN A. 41 get my patient comfortably on a stretcher. I was naturally proud that when the surgeons came to see to him an hour later, they found that my device had effectually arrested the bleeding, and that they did not think it necessary to interfere with my bandaging; nor, surely, was I less proud when the general in command did me the honour to mention me in his despatch, on account of the little service which I had the good fortune to render. I had not reached South Africa when there occurred that ghastly misfortune, the massacre of Isandlwana. But I accompanied the first party that visited that Aceldama, and the spectacle which it presented I can never forget. A thousand corpses had been lying there in rain and sun for four long months. The dead lay as they had fallen, for, strange to relate, the vultures of Zululand, that will reduce a dead ox to a skeleton in a few hours, had apparently never touched the corpses of our ill-fated countrymen. In the precipitous ravine at the base of the slope stretching down from the crest on which stood the abandoned waggons, dead men lay thick—mere bones, with toughened discoloured skin like leather covering them and clinging tight to them, the flesh all wasted away. I forbear to describe the faces, with their blackened features, and beards blanched by rain and sun. The clothes had lasted better than the poor bodies they covered, and helped to keep the skeletons together. All the way up the slope I traced, by the ghastly token of dead men, the fitful line of flight. It was like a long string with knots in it, the string formed of single corpses, the knots of clusters of dead, where, as it seemed, little groups must have gathered to make a hopeless, gallant stand, and so die. Still following the trail of dead bodies through long rank grass and among stones, I approached the crest. Here the slaughtered dead lay very thick, so that the string became a broad belt. On the bare ground, on the crest itself, among the waggons, the dead were less thick; but on the slope beyond, on which from the crest we looked down, the scene MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. 42 was the saddest, and more full of weird desolation than any¬ thing I had ever gazed upon. There was none of the stark, blood-curdling horror of a recent battle-field ; no pools of yet wet blood; no torn flesh still quivering. Nothing of all that makes the scene of a yesterday’s battle so repulsive shocked the senses. A strange dead calm reigned in this solitude of nature. Grain had grown luxuriantly round and under the waggons, sprouting from the seed that had dropped from the loads, fallen on soil fertilised by the life-blood of gallant men. So long in places had grown the grass that it merci¬ fully shrouded the dead, who for four long months had been scandalously left unburied. As one strayed aimlessly about, one stumbled in the grass over skeletons that rattled to the touch. Here lay a corpse with a bayonet jammed into the mouth up to the socket, transfixing the head and mouth a foot into the ground. There lay a form that seemed cosily curled in calm sleep, turned almost on its face ; but seven assegai stabs had pierced the back. It was the miserablest work wandering about the desolate camp, amid the sour odour of stale death, and gathering sad relics, letters from home, photographs, and blood-stained books. After many delays the day at length came when, as our little army camped on the White Umvaloosi, there lay on the bosom of the wide plain over against us the great circular kraal of Ulundi, King Ceteaayo’s capital. After two days’ futile delay, on the third morning the force crossed the river and moved across the plain, preserving in its march the formation of a great square, until a suitable spot was reached whereon to halt and accept the assault of the Zulu hordes which were showing in dense black masses all around. This point attained, the whole force then halted. Already there had been ringing out around the moving square the rattle of the musketry fire of Redvers Buller’s horsemen, as they faced and stung the ingathering impis that had suddenly darkened the green face of the plain. A few yards beyond the front stood the ruins of a mission station. The moulder¬ ing walls were ordered to be levelled, lest they should obstruct ULUNDI. 43 the fire ; and the sappers went to work with a will. But there lay within those walls a ghastly something that was not to be buried by the clay crumbling under the pick-axe —the horribly mutilated form of one of Buller’s men, who had fallen in the reconnaissance of the day before. The mangled corpse was lifted out; half a dozen men with spades dug a shallow grave. The chaplain, who had donned his surplice, stood by the head of the grave and read the burial service, to which the shell fire of the artillery gave the stern responses, while the bullets whistled about the mourners. The time had come. Buller’s men, having done their work, galloped back into the shelter of the square till their time should come again. And lo ! as they cleared the front, a living concentric wave of Zulus was disclosed. On the slope towards Ulundi the shells were crashing into the black masses that were rushing forward to the encounter. Into the hordes in front the Gatlings, with their measured volleys, were raining pitiless showers of death. Le Grice and Harness were firing steadily into the thickets of black forms showing on the left and rear. But those Zulus could die—ay, they could dare and die with a valour and devotion unsurpassed by the soldiery of any age or of any nationality. They went down in numbers; but numbers stood up and pressed swiftly and steadily on. The sharper din of our musketry fire filled the intervals between the hoarse roar of the cannon and the scream of the speeding shells. Still the Zulus would not stay the whirlwind of their converging attack. They fired and rushed on, halting to fire again, and then rushing on time after time. There were those who had feared lest the sudden confront with the fierce Zulu rush should try the nerves of our beardless lads; but the British soldier was true to his manly traditions when he found himself in the open and saw his enemy face to face in the daylight. For half an hour the square stood grim and purposeful, steadfastly pour¬ ing the sleet of death from every face. There was scarce any sound of human speech, save the quiet injunctions of the officers—“ Fire low, men; get your aim, no wildness ! ” On the little rise in the centre the surgeons were plying their 41 MEMORIES OF WAR AND VEACE. duties, regardless of the bullets that whistled about them. The Zulus could not get to close quarters simply because of the sheer weight of our fire. The canister tore through them like a harrow through weeds ; the rockets ravaged their zigzag path through the masses. One rush came within a few yards, but it was the last effort of the heroic Zulus. Their noble ardour could not endure in the face of the appli¬ ances of civilised warfare. They began to waver. The time for the cavalry had at last come. Lord Chelmsford caught the moment. Drury Lowe was sitting on his charger, watch¬ ing with ears and eyes intent for the word. It came at last tersely—“ Off with you ! ” The infantrymen made a gap for the Lancers, and gave them, too, a cheer as they galloped out into the open—knees well into saddles, right hands with a firm grip of the lances down at the “ engage.” Drury Lowe collected his chestnut into a canter, and glancing over his shoulder gave the commands: “At a gallop; Front form troops!” and then “Front form line!” You may swear there was no dallying over these evolutions : just one pull to steady the cohesion, and then, with an eager quiver in the voice, “Now for it, my lads, charge!” The Zulus strove to gain the rough ground, but the Lancers were upon them and among them before they could clear the long grass of the plain. It did one good to see the glorious old “ white arm ” reassert once again its pristine prestige. Lord Chelmsford, on the evening of the battle, announced that he did not intend to despatch a courier until the folloAv- ing morning with the intelligence of the victory, which was conclusive and virtually terminated the war. So I hardened my heart, and determined to go myself, and that at once. The distance to Landmanns Drift, where was the nearest telegraph office, was about one hundred miles ; and the route lay through a hostile region, with no road save that made on the grass by our waggon wheels as the column had marched up. It was necessary to skirt the sites of recently burned Zulu kraals, the dwellers in which were likely to have resumed occupation. The dispersal of the Zulu army by the defeat of the morning made it all but certain that stragglers CARRYING THE TIDINGS OF VICTORY. 45 would be prowling in the bush through which lay the first part of my ride. Young Lysons offered to bet me even that 1 would not get through, and when I accepted, genially insisted that l should stake the money, since he did not expect to see me any more. It was somewhat gruesome work, that first stretch through the sullen gloom of the early night, as I groped my way through the rugged bush trying to keep the trail of the waggon wheels. I could see the dark figures of Zulus up against the blaze of the fires in the destroyed kraals to right and to left of my track, and their shouts came to me on the still night air. At length I altogether lost my way, and there was no resource but to halt until the moon should rise and show me my whereabouts. The longest twenty minutes I ever spent in my life was while sitting on my trembling horse in a little open glade of the bush, my hand on the butt of my revolver, waiting for the moon’s rays to flash down into the hollow. At length they came; I dis¬ cerned the right direction, and in half an hour more I was inside the reserve camp of Etonganeni imparting the tidings to a circle of eager listeners. The great danger was then past; it was a comparatively remote chance that 1 should meet with molestation during the rest of the journey, although Lieutenant Scott-Elliott and Corporal Cotter were cut up on the same track the same night. The exertion was prolonged and arduous, but the recompense was adequate. 1 had the good fortune to be thanked for the tidings I had brought by the General Commanding-in-Chicf and by her Majesty’s High Commissioner for British South Africa; and it was something for a correspondent to be proud of that it was his narrative of the combat and of the victory which Her Majesty’s Ministers read to both Houses of Parliament, as the only intelligence which had been received up to date. It may perhaps have occurred to some among those who may have done me the honour to read this chapter that the profession of war correspondent is a somewhat wearing one, calculated to make a man old before his time, and not to be pursued with any satisfaction or credit by any one who is it) MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. not in the full heyday of physical and mental vigour. My personal experience is that ten years of toil, exposure, hard¬ ship, anxiety and brain-strain, such as the electric fashion of modern war correspondence exacts, suffice to impair the hardiest organisation. But given health and strength, it used to be an avocation of singular fascination. I do not know whether this attribute in its fulness remains with it under the limitations of freedom of action which are now in force. II. MOI.TKE BEFORE METZ. I The German “Staff History ”—Moltke’s posthumous “ Franco-German War ” —Saarbriiekcn and the Spicheren—The Battle of Vionville-Mars-la- Tour—Moltke’s estimate of the respective strengths in the Battle of St. Privat-Gravelotte—Moltke’s dislike to Prince Frederic Charles— The latter’s fierce gallop—The Battle of Gravelotte—The charge of the French from Point-du-Jour—Moltke at the head of the Second Corps — The horrors of Sedan. L ORD WOLSELEY has characterised the German “ Stall History of the Franco-German AVar” as a “weariness of the flesh.” This is a hard saying, and, I respectfully sub¬ mit, scarcely a just one. Necessarily minute in detail, the narrative of the “ History ” is always lucid, and there are few pages which are not illuminated by brilliant flashes of picturesque description that stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet. Apart from those “ purple patches,” in read¬ ing which one feels to hear the turmoil of the battle, the shouts of the combatants, the groans of the wounded, the scream of the shells, and the venomous whistle and sullen thud of the bullets, there are frequent stretches of disqui¬ sitional and elucidatory matter which are pregnant with sustained and almost majestic power and vigour, instinct with masterly thought and close reasoning, clothed in a style of singular simplicity, directness, and virile eloquence. Even if it were not an open secret that those passages— halting-grounds of instruction and reflection, studding the swinging march of minutely detailed action — came from the pen of the man who wielded the direction of the war, their intrinsic stamp of high, calm authority, disclosing in the writer the conceiver and the orderer, not less than the identity of the style with that of Moltke’s “ Russo-Turkish Campaign of 1828-29,” would betray their authorship. But if one may deprecate the strength of Lord AYolseley’s 43 MEMORIES OF WAR AND RE ACE. expression, Moltke himself is found to a considerable extent in accord with the English soldier-author. Proud as he was of the full adequateness of the “ Staff History,” he owned that “it is for the greater number of readers too detailed, and written too technically,” and he recognised that “an abstract of it must be made some day.” Of all men Moltke himself was plainly the man, not indeed to confine himself to an “ abstract,” but to write a concise history of the war, based chiefly on the authentic “Staff History” record, but infused also with his own unique know¬ ledge of men and things, of springs of action and motives; revealing certain phases, in a word, of the inner his¬ tory of the momentous period in which he was something more than merely one of the chief actors. His modesty, his dislike to personality even when not of an offensive kind, his detestation of gossip, were recognised characteristics; but he quite justly did not regard them as hindering him from writing the bright and amusing sketch of his personal experiences in the battle of Koniggratz, and the personally vindicatory denials of councils-of-war in 1866 and 1870-71 printed as appendices to his “Franco-Gennan War” volume. Amidst the wealth of curious inner history of which this quiet, reticent old man was the repository, and which only now is gradually becoming divulged, there was, of course, much that could not then, or, indeed, ever be revealed; but beyond question there was much which, so far as principle and even policy were concerned, he needed not to reserve. And a book on the Great War, written not only for soldiers but for the nations, illuminated by the perspicuity and graceful strength of style that marked Moltke’s previous works, enriched with such personal estimates of men and with such revelations of inner history as he could legiti¬ mately have made — would not -that book have shared immortality with Xenophon’s “ Anabasis,” with Caesar’s “Commentaries” on an earlier Gallic War, with Napier’s “History of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaigns”? Such a book Moltke might have written, and could have written had he chosen. Whether he could have done so TIIE GERMAN “STAFF HISTORY: 49 when, at the age of eighty-seven, he yielded to his nephew’s entreaties, and began the work which was given to the world after the ending of a life so full of years and honours, is a question that cannot be conclusively answered. It is sufficient to say that he did not do this, nor attempt to do it. In the main, in the book he did write, he clung to his conception of an “ abstract ” of the “ Staff History.” While he followed that guide—virtually following himself as he was when his years had been fewer—he was on sure ground; and he followed it so closely that in three out of four of his pages there is the distinct echo of the “ Staff’ History,” the actual words of which, indeed, are adopted with great frequency. When he turned away from that lamp to his path, he did not uniformly maintain entire accuracy of statement. His style, though mostly retaining its direct¬ ness and simplicity, is sometimes obscure ; and its dryness and absence of relief betray a certain tiredness. His nephew holds that the work, “ which,” he says, “ was under¬ taken in all simplicity of purpose as a popular history,” is practically the expression of Moltke’s personal opinions from his own standpoint as chief of the general staff'. On this it may be remarked that the book he wrote in his extreme old age, entitled “History of the Franco-German War of 1870-71,” exhibits no single element of a “popular history ”; and that Moltke’s statements are most open to question in the few passages in which he is transparently writing as the chief of staff'. How powerful is the glamour of Moltke’s name was evinced in the all but unanimous gush of indiscriminate and uncritical eulogy with which this posthumous book was received. His prestige is so high that it is probable the work might be accepted both by writers and by students of war as absolutely accurate. It may not be considered as quite sacrilegious if one who was an eye-witness of the Franco-German War, who had the honour of some personal intercourse with Count Moltke in the course of that war, and who has studied that great personage in his various characters as organiser, strategist, writer, and man, should E 50 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. venture to point out some errors in his “ Franco-German War.” It is not proposed to follow him beyond the first period of the campaign, which closed with the elimination of the French regular army from the theatre of actual war by the capitulation of Sedan. Moltke states that on the 2nd of August, 1870, the German garrison evacuated Saarbrticken, “ after a gallant defence and repeated counter-strokes.” Gallant front, quaint, cheery, dashing Yon Pestel did maintain, facing for fourteen days with his battalion of infantry and three squadrons of uhlans, the French masses gathered on the Spicherenberg over against the little open town at scarcely more than chassepot-fire distance, and craftily displaying his handful so that companies seemed battalions and his battalion a brigade at the least. Gallant and prolonged defence Gnei- senau and he did make when at length, under the eyes of their Emperor and his son, Frossard’s three French divi¬ sions streamed down from their upland and swept across the valley on the 1,500 Rhinelanders calmly holding the little town. But there were no “counter-strokes” on the part of the German defenders, which would have been, indeed, as futile as foolish. For several hours two bat¬ talions of Prussians fended off three divisions of Frenchmen who vacillated in their enterprise, and then they withdrew leisurely and in order. The only semblance of a “ counter¬ stroke ” was made by one man, and that man a British officer—Wigram Battye of the “Guides,” who died fighting- in Afghanistan in the early campaign of 1879. Battye was with a Prussian company which Avas just withdraAving from an advanced position. A soldier Avas shot doAvn by his side, Avliereupon Battye, rebelling vehemently against the retirement, snatched the dead man’s needle-gun and pouch- belt, ran out into the open, dropped on one knee, and opened fire on Pouget’s brigade. Pouget’s brigade re¬ sponded Avith alacrity, and presently Battye Avas boAvled over by a chassepbt bullet in the ribs. A German professor and a brother-Briton ran out and brought him in, conveyed him to a village in the rear, plastered layer upon layer of THE BATTLE OF THE SPICHEBEX. 51 stiff brown paper over the damaged ribs, and started him in a waggon to the Kreuznach hospital. The battle of Spicheren was an unpremeditated fight, and like most contests of that character, was extremely confused, a real “soldiers’ battle,” in which generalship played but a subsidiary part. From the first, writes Moltke, an intermixture of battalions and companies set in, which increased with every repulse; and the confusion, he adds, was increased by the circumstance that three generals in succession nominally swayed the command. He might have said with truth that not three but five generals were successively in command on this afternoon of desperate strife. Kameke began the battle; Stulpnagel arrived and superseded him in virtue of seniority; later came Zastrow, who, as full general and corps-commander, superseded Stiilpnagel in virtue of superior rank. Presently came Goeben and took command as being a senior general to Zastrow; and as the fighting was dying down, Steinmetz, who was an army commander and senior general, relieved Goeben and took over the command. Moltke, writing of the French possibilities on the day of Spicheren (August 6th), makes the statement that, since four French corps, the 3rd, 4th, 5tli, and guard, were lying within a short day’s march of Frossard’s corps (the 2nd) on the Spicheren heights, the French Emperor, had he chosen, would have been fully able to collect five corps for a battle in the Cocheren region, five miles in Frossard’s rear. But when he wrote this, he must have forgotten that in a previous page he had stated that the 5th corps (De Failly) had been assigned to the separate army which Marshal MacMahon commanded in Alsace; and it must have es¬ caped his memory also, that on this very August 6th Lespart’s Division of that corps was hurrying from Bitche towards Worth, eager to participate in the battle raging there. In his sketch of the battle of Vionville-Mars-la-Tour (16th August), Moltke states as follows, in regard to the 3rd German Army Corps: “ It was not until after three p.m., after 52 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. it had been lighting almost single-handed for seven hours, that effective assistance was approaching.” But the 3rd Corps did not come into action until after ten a.m.; and from ten a.m. until three p.m. is only five hours. The 5th and 6th Cavalry Divisions were on the battlefield considerably in advance of the arrival of the 3rd Corps. The liorse-guns of the 5tli Division were shelling Murat’s camp near Vionville so early as half-past eight; and by nine Rauch’s troopers of the 6th Division were falling fast under the fire of French infantry on the edge of the wood of Vionville. The two Divisions in conjunction had formed a wide semi-circle round the French flank and front, and, although yielding naturally to the pressure of heavy chassepot fire, were in a measure “ holding ” Frossard’s prompt infantry when the leading troops of the German 3rd Corps reached the field. Moltke entirely ignores this seasonable early work of the two Cavalry Divisions, which is described with full appreciation in the “ Staff' History.” Throughout the hours specified both of them were continually under fire, and almost continuously in action, now supplying the place of infantry in constituting Alvensleben’s second line, now engaged in independent fighting. When the crisis came, while as yet the day was young; when four French Army Corps were threatening to crush Alvensleben’s depleted Divisions; when that commander stood committed up to the hilt—“no infantry, not a man in reserve —all succour yet distant; there remained to him but one expedient which might avert the imminent defeat. That was the resort to a vigorous cavalry attack, “ in which the troopers must charge home, and, if necessary, should and must sacrifice themselves.” How Bredow’s horsemen fulfilled the stem behest, and of what momentous service Avas their devotion unto death, the Fatherland will never forget. But while the gallant reiters of the two cavalry divisions were thus doing and dying, and when it is remembered that an infantry brigade of the 10th Corps had joined Alvensleben before noon, was it either true or just to claim for the 3rd Corps, Avhose constancy and devotion were superb, that it had been fighting until three o’clock “ almost single-handed, and MOLTKE’S ESTIMATE OF T1IE FIlENCn STRENGTH. 53 without any effective support ? ” How perfunctory is Moltke’s sketch of this stupendous conflict, of which he was not a witness, may be estimated from the fact that he makes no reference whatsoever to the participation in the battle of portions of the 8th and 9th Corps, whose attitude and action mainly caused Bazaine to withhold troops from his front in order to reinforce his left and protect his communications with Metz, threatened by the troops referred to, which lost 1,200 of their strength. Moltke makes some very remarkable statements in regard to the respective strengths of the armies which fought in the battle of St. Privat-Gravelotte. The French army which capitulated at Metz in October, he writes, numbered 173,000, “ besides 20,000 sick who could not be removed; about 200,000 in all.” And he builds on this foundation, which is in itself erroneous, the assertion that “consequently the enemy in the battle of 18th August had at disposal more than 180,000 men.” He thus continues: “The exact strength of the eight* German Corps on that day amounted to 178,818. Thus, with the forces on either side of approximately equal strength, the French had been driven from a position of unsurpassed advantage.” The terms used here can have but one meaning: that the French army was over 180,000 strong, and the German army exactly 178,818 strong. And that being so, the thousand or two of asserted French superiority counting for nothing, the two adversaries were, in a numerical sense, equally matched. It was thus claimed, and that with all the prestige of Moltke’s name in support, that the German strength in the battle of 18th August was not superior to that of the French. That the claim was untenable can be shown easily and convincingly. That Moltke greatly understated the German strength needs little further evidence than the following brief extract from the official “ return, showing number of (German) troops employed in the battle of St. Privat-Gravelotte,” * Moltke had inadvertently written “ seven ’’; there were eight,—Guards, 2nd, 3rd, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 12th. The official state gives 178,818 as the collective strength of those eight corps 54 MEMORIES OF WAR AXI) PEACE. printed in tlic appendices to the second volume of the “ Staff History.” TOTAL STRENGTH. Combatants, exclusive of officers and train. Infantry and Pioneers. Cavalry. Ilorscft Guns. First army 42,455 5,753 180 Second arm} r 136,363 18,831 546 Total 178,SIS 24,584 726 Moltke, it will be seen, put forward the gross infantry strength of its eight corps, exclusive of officers, as the total strength of the German army on the field of battle. The addition of the cavalry, without reckoning officers, at once swells the total to 203,400. The Germans reckon their artillery by guns, not by gunners. While the latter are still hale and sound they do not show in the returns; but when killed or wounded they figure among the losses, an arrange¬ ment which seems anomalous. But as artillery is of no use without artillerymen, the men of that arm must obviously count in the actual strength of an army. In 1870 each German army corps before Metz had an artillery regiment 3,981 strong, so that the artillerymen of the eight corps on the field on the 18th of August would, at full strength, number 31,848. Making a very liberal deduction for previous casualties, there would remain 25,000, swelling the total army strength, exclusive of officers and train, to 228,400. Officers are not included in the figures of the above return; but they were unquestionably in the battle, and come within the count. Apart from artillery officers, who perhaps were included in their regiments, and not reckoning general and staff officers, the fifty-two infantry regiments and the 148 squadrons composing the infantry and cavalry forces of the army had about 4,000 officers on their establishments, of whom 400 may be written off for casualties. Adding, then, 3,600 officers to the previous count of 228,400, the German host “employed” MOLT EE'S ERRONEOUS DEDUCTIONS. in the battle of St. Privat-Gravelotte numbered, not as Moltke reckoned it for an obvious purpose, at a total of 178,818, but a total of 232.000 men; and, so far from the contending armies being of approximately equal strength, the Germans were stronger by at least 50,000 than were the French, even if Moltke’s estimate of the numbers of the latter were correct. But his estimate of the French strength was not correct— it could not, indee 1, in the nature of things, have been correct. Apart from the incidental miscalculation that 173,000 +20,000 make 200,000, Moltke erred in his statement that the 20,000 sick and wounded French soldiers found in Metz at the capitulation were in excess of the 173,000 officers and men recorded as having surrendered. The sick and wounded were included m the latter total, which comprehended every man, combatant and non-combatant, of the army and garrison of Metz at the date of the capitulation on the 29th of October. Moltke’s train of argument that, since there were 173,000 French soldiers in Metz at that date, “consequently” 180,000 French soldiers confronted the German army in the battle of Gravelotte, it is impossible to follow. The number of French soldiers, effective and ineffective, in and about Metz and on the battlefield on the morning of Gravelotte, was, roughly, about 200,000. But deduc tions to the amount of 58,000 must be made as follows: wounded of previous battles, 20,000; mobiles constituting garrison of fortress and forts, 20,000; Laveaucoupet’s regular division stiffening mobile garrisons, 5,000; departments, train, stragglers, etc., certainly over 8,000; sick, 5,000. Giving effect to those deductions, the conclusion is, that about 142,000 French soldiers were “employed” in the battle, including the reserve consisting of the Imperial Guard which had three of its four brigades engaged. This reckoning accords with great closeness to the statement of the efficient strength of the Army of the Rhine given in to Marshal Bazaine four days after the battle of the 18th. The number of all ranks, according to the statement, was 137,728 ; adding to which the 7,800 killed and wounded in the battle, the French strength on the morning of the 18th works out at 145,528; the O 56 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. difference between that amount and the strength at the October capitulation consisting of garrison troops and casualties before and after Gravelotte. The statements by the French of their strength at Gravelotte range from 100,000 to 150,000 men effective, which latter estimate, made by a Frenchman whose figures were accepted as quasi¬ official in the “ Staff History,” had been the highest until Moltke overtopped it by 30,000. The official German state¬ ment is that the French “ had an available force of from 125,000 to 150,000 men.” Moltke did not claim any new information after authorising the statement quoted above; his swollen total was based on the capitulation figures, which were public property the day after the surrender. And a certain inconsistency reveals itself between that swollen total and the result of his statement that there were eight to ten men to every pace of the seven miles along which extended the front of the French position. At ten men to the pace there works out a total of 133,200 men—which contrasts somewhat abruptly with “ more than 180,000.” In his preface to his uncle’s posthumous book, Major von Moltke quotes an utterance of his great relative as “ highly characteristic of Moltke’s magnanimity.” This is the utterance: “ Whatever is published in a military history is always dressed for effect; yet it is a duty of piety and patriotism never to impair the prestige which identifies the glory of our Army with personages of lofty position.” The naivete is edifying with which the principle is in effect laid down, that truth must go to the wall in favour of patriotism. The supersession of truth by the other virtue is not precisely a novelty; but to Moltke belonged the frank avowal of the preference as a sacred duty, and to his nephew the charac¬ terisation of this avowal as magnanimity. Throughout his book Moltke was true to his principle except as regarded two leading actors in the great drama, of whom he himself was one and Prince Frederic Charles the other. The strange fact is that, as I believe can be clearly shown, the strictures in both instances are unmerited. It never was any secret in the German Army that Moltke MOLTKE’S DISLIKE OF THE RED PRINCE. 57 disliked Prince Frederic Charles. There could be nothing in common between the composed, refined, accomplished and pious Moltke, fastidious, scholarly and reserved as he was ; and the bluff, coarse, dictatorial, loose-lived and loose¬ mouthed Frederic Charles. They met as seldom as possible, and their relations were always confined to the strictest formality. To do the Red Prince justice, he always admired the military genius of Moltke; but Moltke, from his methodical and exacting standard and notwithstanding his cold, unemotional impartiality, had not a high opinion of Prince Frederic Charles as a commander. In reality, as but for a rare prejudice Moltke Avould have discerned, the two men were the complement of each other. Moltke directed the storm and swayed the whirlwind, although he habitually rode outside of its vortex. The Red Prince was the storm itself—the actual mighty rushing whirlwind—“ a disciplined thunderbolt,” as I once heard a fanciful trooper of the Zieten Hussars describe him. Perhaps his dislike to and non¬ appreciation of Frederic Charles was Moltke’s weak point; and thence probably it was that he violated in the case of that Royal soldier his principle of upholding the prestige of “ high-placed ” warriors. Moltke is nearing the end of his description of the battle of Vionville-Mars-la-Tour. He has just finished a sketch of the great cavalry fight, which he records was at its height at a quarter to seven in the evening. And he continues thus: “ Prince Frederic Charles had hastened to the battle¬ field. The day was near its ending, darkness was approach¬ ing, the battle was won.” Does not the reader gather from the sentence in italics—the italics are mine—from the mentioned hour preceding that sentence, and from the words that follow it, that Prince Frederic Charles reached the field late—when it was falling dark, and when already the battle had been won ? The absence of precision tends to mislead. For the Prince, as a fact, was late in reaching the field. The battle had begun two hours before noon; nearly five hours later Prince Frederic Charles was still in Pont-a- Mousson, quite fifteen miles from the scene of struggle. As 53 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. is duly recorded in the “ Staff History,” the Prince reached the battle-field “ about four o’clock.” It was barely that hour when he came galloping up the narrow hill-road from Gorze ; the powerful bay he rode all foam and sweat, sobbing with the swift exertion up the steep ascent, yet pressed ruthlessly with the spur ; staff and escort panting several horse-lengths in rear of the impetuous fore¬ most horseman. On and up he sped, craning forward over the saddle-bow to save his horse, but the attitude seeming to suggest that he burned to project himself faster than the good horse could cover the ground. No wolfskin, but the red tunic of the Zieten Hussars, clad the compact torso, but the straining man’s face wore the aspect one associates with that of the berserker. The turgid eyeballs had in them a sullen lurid gleam of blood-thirst. The fierce sun and the long hard gallop had flushed the face a deep red, and the veins of the throat were visibly swollen. Recalling through the years the memory of that visage with the lowering brow, the fierce eyes, and the strong set jaw, one can understand how to this day the mothers in the Lorraine villages invoke the terror of “ Le Prince Rouge” as the Scottish peasants of old used the name of the Black Douglas, to awe their children wherewithal into panic-stricken silence. While as yet his road was through the forest, leaves and twigs cut by bullets showered down upon him. Just as he emerged in the open upland, a shell burst almost among his horse’s feet. The iron-nerved man gave heed to neither bullet-fire nor bursting shell; no, nor even to the cheers that rose above the roar of battle from the throats of the Brandenburgers through whose masses he was riding, and whose chief he had been for many years. They expected no recognition, for they understood the nature of the man—knew that after his rough fashion he was the soldier’s true friend, and also that he was wont to sway the issues of battle. He spurred onward to Flavigny away yonder in the front line; the bruit of his coming darted along the fagged ranks ; and strangely soon came the recognition that a master-soldier had gripped hold of the command as in a vice. MOLT EE’S ASPERSION OF THE RED PRINCE. 59 In regard once again to Prince Frederic Charles, Moltke deviates from the principle which he expounded to his nephew, in relation to a critical incident which occurred later in the same evening. The long bloody struggle was in its final throes, and the Germans now stood on the ground held by the French in the morning. In those circumstances, writes Moltke “■ It was clearly most unadvisable to challenge by renewed attacks an enemy who still greatly outnumbered the German forces; which, since no other reinforcements could be hoped for soon, could not but jeopardise the success so dearly bought. The troops were exhausted, most of their ammuni¬ tion was spent, the horses had been under the saddle for fifteen hours without food. Some of the batteries could move only at a walk, and the nearest army corps which had crossed the Moselle, the 12th, was distant more than a day’s march. Yet, notwithstanding, at about eight o’clock the Headquarter” [“ Obercommando,” an army euphemism for Prince Frederic Charles, who was no figure-head commander] “ issued an order commanding a renewed and general attack upon the enemy’s position.” The attack was but partially made owing to the darkness and the exhaustion of the troops, and it failed at most points, not without severe losses. Than the aspersion conveyed in the quoted sentences, none more grave can well be imagined. The charge, in effect, is simply this, that in a reckless attempt which in the nature of things could not be other than futile, Prince Frederic Charles had wantonly squandered the lives of his devoted soldiers. That chief had much experience of com¬ mand in the actual battle-field, and he closed his fighting career unvanquished in battle. In the Franco-German War he was in his mature soldierly prime, a veteran of war at the age of forty-two, as yet unimpaired by habits which subsequently deteriorated him. Experience had inured him swiftly yet coolly to penetrate the varying problems of the battle while it raged around him in its maddest chaotic tur¬ moil—a less easy task than meets the retrospective military 60 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. critic in the calm of his bureau. He had learned the stern lesson that gains can rarely be attained without incur¬ ring losses—the old cynical omelette-making, egg-breaking axiom; and this other lesson, too, that there are occasions when a commander must lay his account with severe inevit¬ able losses while the chances of success are very precarious, yet which it behoves him to adventure. It was such an occasion which presented itself to Prince Frederic Charles on the evening of Mars-la-Tour. With a far-spent army of some 60,000 men, he was standing right in the path of a host more than double his own numbers. Of that host it was true that probably more than one-half was not less exhausted than were his own people ; but it possessed powerful reserves comparatively fresh and unscathed, the possession of which might well encourage the French leader, with apparently so much at stake, to push a formidable night attack against a numerically inferior and worn-out adversary. Symptoms there already were, which seemed to portend such an effort. Bazaine in person, with fresh troops, was clearing his front towards the south-west, and thrusting the Germans there¬ abouts back into the woods. Moltke’s statement is incorrect that the 12th Corps, twenty miles away, was Prince Frederic Charles’ nearest reinforcement. One incentive to the opera¬ tion which Moltke condemns was the Prince’s knowledge that the 9th Corps was so near his right flank as to be able to make itself felt in the intended general movement. And this was actually so in the case of a brigade of that corps’ Hessian Division, which came into action so early as half¬ past seven, and continued fighting until after ten. Part of its other division was indeed already in the field. Any argument of mine in justification of Prince Frederic Charles’s motives can have no weight; and I prefer therefore to quote on this point the soldierly language of the “ Staff History,” compiled, it never must be forgotten, under the superintendence of Moltke himself:— “ As the firing became more vigorous after seven o’clock, and the reports gave reason to expect the arrival of the 9th Corps, Prince Frederic Charles considered the moment suitable MOLTKE’S ADVERSE CRITICISM ON HIMSELF. 61 for again making an attack in force. . . The staking of the last strength of man and horse, after hours upon hours of sanguinary fighting, was to show that the Prussians had both the ability and the firm will to triumph in the yet undecided struggle. The moral impression of such an advance, enhanced by the consternation to be expected from a sudden attack in the twilight, appeared to guarantee a favourable result.” No word of blame has Moltke for General Manstein, who, by his headstrong and reckless disobedience of orders, and his disregard of information brought him by his own scouts, dis¬ located the plan of the battle of Gravelotte, and gravely compromised the fortunes of the day; no breath of reflection on General von Pape, who sacrificed thousands of brave men in a premature and impossible attack on St. Privat—too impatient to wait an hour for the development of the turning movement by the Saxons which would have averted most of the butchery, lioth those officers were “ personages of high position ”—were of that “ bestimmte Personlichkeiten ” order, to uphold whose prestige Moltke held it to be a sacred duty. Patriotism questionless shielded them from adverse com¬ ment ; yet it did not avail to withhold his censure on Prince Frederic and on himself. It was in respect of the partici¬ pation of the 2nd Corps in the fighting during the latest phase of the battle of Gravelotte, that he considered himself to have incurred his unfavourable criticism upon himself, which he thus frankly expresses in his posthumous work on the Franco-German War:— “ It would have been more judicious on the part of the Chief of the General Staff, who was personally on the spot at the time, not to have permitted this movement at so late an hour. Such a body of troops, still completely intact, might have proved very precious next day, but on this evening could scarcely be expected to bring about a decisive reversaL” With all respect I make bold to aver that Moltke had no alternative but to permit—nay, to strenuously urge forward that advance of the 2nd Corps his sanction to which he G2 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. disapproved many years later—if there was to be retrieved a situation which was dangerously compromised, and which imperatively called for a “ reversal.” In the Gravelotte region of the vast battle-ground, the German right, consisting of the 7th and 8tli Corps com¬ manded by General Steinmetz, had been fighting fiercely and with varied fortune during the afternoon against the French soldiers of Frossard and Le Boeuf. As the day waned the cannonade abated its virulence and the musketry-fire fell almost silent. The French now lay supine in their shelter-trenches along the Point-du-Jour ridge crowning the bare glacis-like plateau which their fire had been sweeping ; quiet in the buildings and behind the enclosures of the Moscou farm farther northward. The Rhinelanders and Westphalians huddled among their dead and wounded in the shallow folds of the plateau, in the bush fringing the deep and steep ravine of the Mance streamlet, in and behind the precincts of the battered St. Hubert auberge, and about the edge of the wood below Moscou. The lull lasted for an hour ; the Germans believed that the Frenchmen over against them were exhausted, and that the strength of their resistance was broken. Away to the northward where Prince Frederic Charles held sway, the roar of battle was deepening in intensity; and this indication that the army of the Red Prince was entering on the decisive struggle was the signal for the order to the impatient Steinmetz, that he too should fall on and strain his uttermost to “end the business” in his specific sphere of action. In addition to his own two corps, the 2nd was placed at his disposal, to be used if it should be needed. The Pomeranians had travelled far and fast in their soldierly ardour to share in the battle. They panted for the fray, in spite of their fatigue after a long forced march ; but having regard to the seeming enfeeblement of the adversary, it was not expected that their services Avould be called for. For once the French had hoodwinked their enemy. They were not exhausted, but were merely saving their ammunition and resting in the comparative safety of their shelter-trenches THE UNEXPECTED SORTIE OF TIIE FRENCH. 63 and reverse slopes, while they watched for events. They believed, it seemed, that they had virtually won the battle, and were in full buoyancy and confidence. As the heads of Steinmetz’s columns came up out of the Mance ravine and showed themselves on the lower verge of the plateau, the French flung away the mask. Suddenly from their serried lines shot furious blasts of ehassepot- and mitrailleuse-fire. The thunder of their long-silent artillery burst forth in fullest volume. The supports at all points came springing forward to join their comrades of the front line. And then the French infantry, for the moment relieved from the irksome trammels of the defensive and restored to its congenial metier of the attack, dashed forward with the grand old elan, and swept the Germans backwards down the slope into the Mance ravine. Under the stroke of that fierce impact, under the hurricane of missiles that swept upon the troops assailed by the French infantry, Steinmetz’s army reeled to its base. There was a period when it may be said without exaggeration that the mass of that army was on the run. The old King 1 was carried backward in the press surging out from under the rain of bullets and shells, expostulating with great fervour of expression in his rearward career, with the component parts of the all but universal debacle. The Mance ravine was seeth¬ ing fidl of fugitives, struggling among themselves for cover from the plunging shells which fell thick among them. The quarries below Moscou were crowded with demoralised soldiers. The garrison of St. Hubert remained there—in the buildings and outlying enclosures it was safer than in the bullet-swept open; the place was not assailed, and some staunch troops out in the open clung to its lee. But the road in front of St. Hubert leading from Point-du-Jour down into the ravine, was a torrent of rushing, panting, panic-stricken men. Down this torrent were actually swept some of the brave Gntigge’s field guns; I saw old Brigadier Ilex thrown down and overrun when striving energetically to stay the rush. The French infantry having repulsed their adversaries, retired to their defensive positions, and the Germans began 64 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. to steady themselves in a measure. Reserves of the 7th Corps were sent forward, but made very little head; and it is not straining language to say that it was as a last resort that the 2nd Corps, no part of which had hitherto been engaged, was ordered up. The corps crossed the ravine by the great cliaussee from Gravelotte. How im¬ portant was regarded a fortunate issue to its exertions was vividly betrayed by the unparalleled anxiety to fire its ardour, and the exceptional solicitude for its most effective guidance. At the head of the corps rode down into the ravine old Steinmetz the army commander, and Franseky the corps commander; and with them rode none other than Moltke himself, accompanied by the staff officers of the royal headquarters. “ Under the eyes of those officers of high rank,” so it is written in the “ Staff History,” “ the battalions hastened across the valley, drums beating and bugles sounding, previous to throwing themselves into the struggle amid the encouraging cheers of the commanding general.” As the Pomeranians deployed on the edge of the plateau, the French fire struck them fair in the face; and they were struck, too, by a broad, rushing stream of fugitives from the front which, in the demure language of the “ Staff History,” “ seemed to point to the advent of a fresh crisis in the engagement.” This last incident alone would appear to justify the utilisation of the 2nd Corps, which, although it made no serious impression on the French position, maintained a footing on the plateau during the night. But, when its employ¬ ment is pronounced by the high officer who ordered it on that service to have been a surplusage and an error, a comment on this pronouncement may be made in the form of a couple of questions. Was not this the unique instance since Bluchers time of a Prussian army-commander—as Moltke virtually was—personally leading his troops into action ? And on what other occasion throughout his career in his great position, did Moltke concern himself personally with the actual direction and encouragement of any specific movement on the battle-field ? MOLTICE'S ESTIMATE OF DAZAINE. 65 The incid *nts narrate 1 above are, in tlieir broad features, recorded in the “ Staff History,” and some details which can be fully verified from other sources have been added, in part from personal knowledge as an eye-witness. Moltke’s faculty of concentrated writing is strikingly shown in the following quotation, which embraces all he permits himself to say regarding the events adverted to:— “Later, the still serviceable battalions of the 7th Corps were sent again across the Mance ravine, and were joined by battalions from the Bois de Vaux in the direction of Point-du-Jour and the quarries. Frossard’s corps, thus attacked, was reinforced by the Garde Voltigeur Division, and all the French reserves moved up into the first line. The artillery came into action with redoubled activity, and an annihilating rifle-fire was ponied on the advancing Germans. Then moved out to the attack the French soldiers in the shape of a powerful mass of tirailleurs, which drove the small leaderless bands of Germans lying on the plateau back to the skirts of the w r ood. Here, however, the outburst was arrested, and there still remained in the hand a fresh army corps in full strength.” Moltke's estimate of Bazaine as a commander was not high, and he distinctly recognised that he was influenced by political as well as military considerations; he, however, acquits Bazaine of the charge of having betrayed his country. There is in Moltke’s last work one very curious and enigmatical sentence in regard to Bazaine. The period is shortly before the battle of Noisseville, 31st August, when Bazaine and his army had been enclosed in and about Metz for several days. This is the sentence—“Meanwhile Marshal Bazaine possibly might have recognised that he had deceived himself in regard to the release of his army by means of negotiation.” Is it not the reasonable inference that thus early, much earlier than ever previously had been suspected, Bazaine had attempted to open negotiations with the Germans, and had been repulsed ? As a skilful, untiring, and far-seeing organiser cf the F MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. 66 means which make for success in Avar, Moltke has never had an equal, and probably, in those respects, will never have a superior. The extraordinary success of the efforts on his part and that of his coadjutor von Roon, to perfect the national preparedness for war, produced the result that Avhile those two lasted, Germany could find in no other European power an equal antagonist. Still less has any power produced a strategist Avho has given proof of ranking as Moltke’s peer. Thus it is impossible to gauge the full measure of Moltke’s potentialities. He may have had reserves of strategical genius Avhich never Avere needed to be evoked. It is impossible to determine Avhether in the Franco-German War he put forth his full strength, or only so much of it as Avas proportionate to the requirements suggested by the known inferiority of the adversary. One thing is certain, that never Avas fortune more kind to the director of any great Avar than she Avas to Moltke in 1870. In spite of the significant warning of SadoAva, it seemed almost that in its later years the Second Empire, as regarded its military position, had been deliberately “ riding for a fall.” With the melancholy exposure of its military de¬ cadence all the Avorld is familiar. When Marshal Niel en¬ joined the defensive as the complement of the chassepot, he throttled the traditional elan of the soldiers of France. Her army, deficient in everything save innate courage, lacked most of all competent leadership ; and the assumption of the chief command by the Emperor Napoleon made the Germans a present of the issue before a shot Avas fired. The campaign begun, fortune continued to shower her favours on Moltke. It appeared as if the very stars in their courses fought for him. An essential feature of his plan Avas to push direct for the enemy’s capital. Bazaine unwittingly helped him in this by bottling himself up in Metz, and MacMahon yielded him the fair-Avay by moving out of his path. Another element of Moltke’s scheme was that the French should be driven from the spacious and fertile middle provinces into the barren and cramped pre¬ cincts of the north. Bazaine did not lend himself directly MOLTKE'S FLA1 \ t OF CAMPAIGN. C7 to the accomplishment of this object of his adversary, but he disposed of himself otherwise in a manner equally satis¬ factory to Moltke. MacMahon obliged by going northward without being driven—at least by the Germans; his coer¬ cion was from Paris. Moltke, fully convinced of the para¬ mount importance to the French that the army of Metz should make good its retreat on the Chalons force, con¬ centrated every energy towards the prevention of that union. It happened that, as Moltke genially observes, Bazaine did not share the German chief s conviction, and indeed played into his adversary’s hand by his preference for remaining in Metz instead of the prosecution of a retreat towards Chalons. Ready enough to tight—to do him justice—Bazaine was not earnest to march. But Moltke’s plan of campaign was based, beyond all other considerations, on the resolution at once to assail the enemy wherever found, and to keep the German forces so compact that the attack could always be made with the advantage of superior strength. Although the Germans had overwhelmingly superior numbers in the field, this latter aspiration was not uniformly fulfilled. Indeed, there is a certain pride in Moltke’s assertion that the Germans fought —and won—four important battles with the numerical odds against them, Spicheren, Coureelles, Vionville-Mars- la-Tour, and Noisseville, not to mention his claim of equal strength on the French side at Gravelotte. The failure always to make good the wise postulate of his plan in regard to concentration, resulted inevitably from the free hand accorded to subordinate commanders to briii" on an o unexpected battle at their discretion or indiscretion. It is true that because of various more or less fortuitous circumstances, no actual defeat resulted from this licence; but the risks it involved were certainly in two instances disproportionate to the possible attainable advantages. Is it credible that, had not Frossard at Spicheren been trammelled by Imperial restrictions, his three divisions would not have smashed Kameke’s two brigades as they clung to his skirts for hours before reinforcements arrived ? G3 MEMORIES OF WAR AND RE ACE. The German “ Staff History ” owns to the imminence of disaster at Courcelles ; and but that the French were there tied to the defence, it is inconceivable that five French divisions should not have defeated five German brigades. What soldier who has realised the practical value of numbers in battle, will deny that had Bazaine with 150,000 regulars at his back, been in dead earnest to force through at Mars-la- Tour, he could have swept Alvensleben’s 40,000 Prussians out of his path before support could have reached the latter ? Moltke writes of Noisseville, that there 36,000 Prussians repulsed 137,000 Frenchmen. With such odds in their favour as four to one, the Servian militia, fighting in earnest, would crush the best troops in Europe. The French did not break out simply because Bazaine fought merely to save appearances. With superior forces and copious reserves the brusque and butcherly offensive is a tempting game ; but its attractions wane when, as with the Germans at Gravelotte, it entails the slaughter of 20,000 men in inflicting on the enemy a loss of 8,000. It remains that the Germans were the conquerors; and that they conquered in virtue chiefly of Moltke’s strategical skill and infusion of energy into all ranks of the German army. It is a true saying that nothing succeeds like success, and its converse is not less true—that nothing fails like failure. But the spectator of the Franco-German War must have been purblind or warped who could dare to aver that the old spirit was dead in the army on which had once shone the sun of Austerlitz—that army which had stormed the Mamelon with a rush. No; the poor mis-commanded, bewdldered, harassed, overmatched, out¬ numbered soldiers in the blue kepis and red breeches, fought on with a loyal valour which ever commanded respect and admiration. The sad, noble story of unavailing devotion is to be told of the French regular army from the first battle to the ending at Sedan. With swelling heart and wet eyes I looked down on the final scene of that awful tragedy. The picture rises now before me of that terrible afternoon. The stern ring of German fire, ever THE HORRORS OF SEDAN. 69 encircling with stronger grip that plateau on which were huddled the Frenchmen as in the shambles ; the storm of shell lire that tore lanes through the dense masses, bare to its pitiless blasts; the vehement yet impotent protests against the inevitable, in the shape of furious sorties. Now a headlong charge of Margueritte’s cuirassiers thundering in glittering steel-clad splendour down the slope of Illy with an impetus that seemed resistless, till the tire of the German infantrymen smote the squadrons fair in the face, and heaped the sward with dead and dying. Now the frantic gallop to their fate of a regiment of light horsemen on their grey Arab stallions, up to the very muzzles of the needle-guns which the German linesmen held with steadi¬ ness so unwavering. Now a passionate outburst of red- trousered foot-soldiers, darting against a chance gap in the tightening environment, too surely to be crushed by the ruthless flanking lire. No semblance of order there, no token of leadership ; simply a hell in the heart of which writhed an indiscriminate mass of brave men, with no thought in them but of fighting it out to the bitter end ! I shudder as I write, at the recollection of the horrors of that ghastly field on the day after the battle. The ground was still slippery with blood, and in the hollows lay little puddles which made one faint. Napoleon’s one wise act was his displaying the white flag on the afternoon of Sedan. But, in their passion to keep on fighting, with what fury the soldiers execrated him and his conduct! III. THE DARK DAYS OF SEDAN. The discrepancies about Sedan—MacMahon wounded—Napoleon in the P'ield— Ducrot in Command—Wimpfen supersedes him—Napoleon and Duciot in the Sous-Prefecture—Wimpfen’s contumacy—The Final Bombardment and the White Flag—Bronsart’s return from Sedan—Anival of Reille on the King’s Hill—Letters of Napoleon and the Prussi in King —The Hymn of Victory : “ Nun danket alle Gott”—Bismarck’s supper in Donchery— The Midnight Conference—Napoleon’s exit from Sedan—The Weaver’s Cottage—The interview in the Chateau Bellevue after Capitulation—The French prisoner-Army on the Peninsula of Iges—The last of the Weaver’s Cottage—End of Madame Fournaise. O NE day, no doubt, tlie inevitable historian will undertake the task of writing a detailed account of the strange events which occurred about Sedan during the first week of September, 1870; but if in the endeavour he escapes falling a victim to softening of the brain, he may be accounted an exceptionally fortunate man. With certain salient facts, it is true, no difficulties will present themselves. It is unquestionable that a great battle was fought on the 1st, resulting in the defeat and surrender of the French army; that Marshal MacMahon, the French commander-in-chief, was struck down wounded in the early morning of that day; that on the same afternoon the white flag was hoisted by order of the Emperor Napoleon, who sent out to the German monarch a letter tendering the surrender of his sword; that Napoleon on the early morning of the 2nd came out from Sedan, and met and conferred with Bis¬ marck at the weaver’s cottage on the Donchery road; that, subsequently, the capitulation of the French army having been consummated, he had an interview with King Wilhelm in the Chateau Bellevue; that on the following morning he started on his journey to Cassel as a prisoner-of-war; and that the French army of Sedan, more than 100,000 strong, was sent away into captivity in the German fort¬ resses. Thus far, the historian’s task will be simple enough; WIMP FEN'S COMMISSION FROM PALI KAO. 71 it is the hopeless and bewildering discrepancies in regard to details which will cause him to tear, his hair, and bewail himself of his folly in choosing the avocation of a writer of history, instead of that of a frightener of crows. In those exciting Sedan days many people seem to have lost their heads, and more the faculty of memory. The hours at which events occurred were either unnoted or so noted as to be strangely discordant. Even the customary preci¬ sion of the German “Stall - History” is for once in default; and if it is vague, the vagueness of French generals and of irresponsible persons at large may be imagined. Marshal MacMahon was in the field by five a.m. When riding along the high ground above La Moncello he was severely wounded in the thigh by the fragment of a shell, and he then nominated Ducrot as his successor in the chief command. It is impossible to fix the precise time at which the marshal was wounded, or when Ducrot first learnt of his promotion; but certainly before eight o’clock the latter was exercising command and ordering a retreat on Mezieres, which, if it had been promptly carried out, might have temporarily saved at least a portion of the French army. But presently Wimpfen produced his commission from Palikao; and Ducrot, although for the moment indig¬ nant at his supersession, was probably not sorry to be relieved from a situation so complicated. Wimpfen coun¬ termanded the retreat on Mezieres in favour of a hopeless attempt to break out towards the east in the direction of Carignan; and thenceforth there remained no hope for the French. The Emperor when riding out in the direction of the hardest fighting, had met the wounded marshal being brought in; one account sa}-s in the town, another on the road beyond the gate. No reference was thought worth while to be made to Napoleon as to the command— whether Ducrot or Wimpfen was to exercise it; the unfor¬ tunate Emperor mooned about the field for hours under tire, but had no influence whatsoever on the conduct of the battle; and he sent no reply to a letter from Wimpfen begging his Imperial master “ to place himself in the midst MEM0111ES OF 1 VAR AXD PEACE. of his troops who could be relied on to force a passage through the German lines.” When the Emperor returned into Sedan is not to be ascertained; nor, except inferentially, at what hour he first directed the white flag to be exhibited. No person has avowed himself the executant of that order, but the flag did not long fly ; it was indignantly cut down by General Fame, MacMahon’s chief-of-staff, who did not give himself the trouble to communicate with Napoleon either before or after having taken this considerable liberty. By one o’clock, the battle in effect was lost and Avon; what followed was merely futile fighting and futile slaughter. How anxious the Emperor continued to be for capitula¬ tion ; liow obstinate was Wimpfen that there should be no negotiations and no capitulation, is shown, rather con¬ fusedly it is true, by the testimony of Lebrun and Ducrot. “Why does this useless struggle still go on?” Napoleon demanded of Lebrun, whoi a little before three p.m., entered his apartment in the sous-prefecture—“ an hour ago and more I bade the white flag be displayed in order to sue for an armistice.” Lebrun explained that certain additional formalities were reqrusite—a letter must be signed by the commander-in-chief and sent out by an officer with a trumpeter and a flag of truce. That document Lebrun prepared, and having procured officer, trumpeter, and flag of truce, he went forth to where Wimpfen was gathering troops for an attack on the Germans in Balan. As Lebrun approached him, the angry Wimpfen shouted, “ No capitulation! Drop that rag! I mean to fight on! ” and forthwith set out towards Balan, carrying Lebrun along with him into the fight. Ducrot had been fighting hard to the northward of Sedan, about Illy and the edge of the Bois de Garenne; straining every nerve to arrest, or at least to retard the environing advance of the Germans. Recognising that his efforts afforded no likelihood of success, he resolved. soon after three o’clock to pass southward through Sedan, and join in an attempt to cut a way out towards Carignan and Montmedy. Ducrot had no hope of success in such an enterprise, but, nevertheless, was prepared to obey the order. NAPOLEON IN THE SOUS-PREFECTURE. 73 But, as lie has written, he was alone ; he had not even a corporal’s escort. He sent word to Wimpfen by that com¬ mander’s orderly, that he would enter Sedan and attempt to gather some troops in support of Wimpfen’seffort. What Ducrot saw inside Sedan may be told nearly in his own words. The state of the interior of Sedan he has characterised as indescribable. The streets, the open places, the gates, were blocked up by waggons, guns, and the impedimenta and debris of a routed army. Bands of soldiers without arms, without packs, were rushing about throwing themselves into the churches, or breaking into private houses. Many unfor¬ tunate men were trampled under foot. The few soldiers who still preserved a remnant of energy seemed to be expending it in accusations and curses. “ We have been betrayed!” they cried—“ we have been sold by traitors and cowards ! ” There was really nothing to be done with such men, and Ducrot repaired to the Emperor in the sous-prefecture. Napoleon no longer preserved that cold and impenetrable countenance familiar to all the world. The absolute silence which reigned in the presence of the sovereign rendered the noise outside more awfully tumultuous. The air was on tire. Shells fell on roofs, and struck masses of masonry which crashed down upon the pavements. “ I do not understand,” said the bewildered Emperor—“ why the enemy continues his tire. I have ordered the white flag to be hoisted. I hope to obtain an interview with the king of Prussia, and may succeed in obtaining advantageous terms for the army.” While the Emperor and Ducrot were conversing, the can¬ nonade increased in violence from minute to minute. Con¬ flagrations burst out. Women, children and wounded were destroyed. The sous-prefecture was struck ; shells exploded every minute in garden and courtyard. “ It is absolutely necessary to stop the firing !” exclaimed the Emperor. “Here, write this!” he commanded General Ducrot:—“ 1 The flag of truce having been displayed, negotia¬ tions are about to be opened with the enemy. The firing must cease all along the line.’ ” Then said the Emperor “Now sign it!” “Oh no, sire,” replied Ducrot, “I cannot 74 MEMORIES OF WAR AMD PEACE. sign.: by wliat right could I sign ? General Wimpfen is general-in-chief.” “ Yes,” replied the Emperor, “ but I don’t know where General Wimpfen is to be found. Some one must sign! ” “ Let his chief-of-staff sign,” suggested Ducrot, “ or General Douay.” “ Yes,” replied the Emperor, “ let the chief-of-staff sign the order ! ” The subsequent history of this order cannot be distinctly traced, nor whether, indeed, it ever got signed at all. It may have been enclosed in the missive from the Emperor which presently reached Wimpfen, and which that recalcitrant chief would not even open. It appeared that Wimpfen’s troops had been gradually falling away from him ; and he had ridden back to one of the gates of Sedan, on the double errand of procuring reinforcements and of trying to prevail on the Emperor to join him in his forlorn-hope attempt to break out. What then occurred may best be told in Wimpfen’s own words :— “ Shortly before four o’clock,” he wrote, “ I reached the gate of Sedan. There, at last, there caine to me M. Pierron of the Imperial Staff, who, instead of announcing the arrival of the sovereign which I was expecting with feverish impatience, handed me a letter from his Majesty, and he also informed me that the white flag was floating from the citadel of Sedan, and that I was charged with the duty of negotiating with the enemy. . . Not recognising the Emperor’s right to order the hoisting of the flag, I replied to his messenger :— £ 1 will not take cognisance of this letter: I refuse to negotiate! ’ In vain did M. Pierron insist. I took his Majesty’s letter, and holding it in my hand without opening it I entered the town, calling on the soldiers to follow me into the fight. . . Having gathered about 2,000 men, at the head of this gallant handful I succeeded, about five o’clock, in penetrating as far as the church of Balan; but the reinforcements I hoped for did not arrive, and I then gave the order to retire on Sedan.” Wimpfen on his return to the fortress, forwarded his resignation to the Emperor, who then in vain attempted to persuade first Ducrot and then Douay to assume the THE DEATH-THROE AT SEDAN. 75 command. Wimpfen finally was sent for, and in the pre¬ sence of the Emperor a violent altercation occurred between him and Ducrot, in the course of which, it was believed, blows were actually exchanged. Ducrot, who was the more excited of the two, withdrew; and in the words of the Emperor, “ General Wimpfen was brought to understand that, having commanded during the battle, his duty obliged him not to desert his post in circumstances so critical.” Wimpfen would have been quite within his rights in persist¬ ing in resigning. The situation had been purely a military one, and he was commander-in-chief; yet the Emperor, who had no military position whatsoever, had overridden Wimp- fen’s powers while as yet that officer was in supreme command. Wimpfen showed patriotism and moral courage in taking on himself the invidious burden of conducting negotia¬ tions resulting from acts to which he had not been a party. The scene may now be changed to the liill-top south of Frenois, from which the Prussian King and his entourage had been watching the course of events ever since the early morn¬ ing. It would seem that the first white flag which Faure in his anger cut down, had hot been noticed in the German army. As the afternoon drew on the French defeat was decisively apparent; yet, although the fierceness of the fighting waned, the now surrounded army remained heroically stubborn in its resistance to inevitable fate ; and so its final death-throe had to be artistically quickened up. In the stern words of the German “ Official History,” “ a powerful artillery fire directed against the enemy’s last point of refuge appeared the most suitable method of convincing him of the hopelessness of his situation, and of inducing him to surrender. With intent to hasten the capitulation, and thus spare the German army further sacrifices, the King ordered the whole available artillery to concentrate its fire on Sedan.” This command, so states the “ Staff History,” was issued at four p.m., and was promptly acted on. The consequent exacerbation of the cannonade was, no doubt that of which Ducrot tells, whilst he was in conversation with the Emperor in the sous- prefecture. Results of the reinforced and concentrated shell 76 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. fire were soon manifested. Sedan seemed in flames. The French return-fire, gallantly maintained for a short time, was by-and-by crushed into silence. The “ Staff History ” yields no more time-data; to me the hurricane of shell fire seemed to endure for quite half an hour. Under its cover a Bavarian force was preparing to storm the Torcy Gate. At this moment the white flag was definitively displayed on the citadel flagstaff', and the German fire at once ceased. At the solicitation of the French commandant of the suburb of Torcy, the Bavarian leader then refrained from assault and remained in position outside the gate. As the news of impending negotiations spread, hostility ceased everywhere save about Balan, where the contumacious Wimpfen was still battling impotently. Tidings of the situation at Torcy having reached him, and the white flag being visible, the King of Prussia directed Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf of his staff to ride into Sedan under a flag of truce, and summon the French Commander-in-Chief to surrender his army and the fortress. The Prussian officer penetrated into the city and duly announced the nature of his mission ; but to his surprise he was ushered into the presence of the Emperor Napoleon, of whose presence in Sedan the German head¬ quarters had been ignorant. In reply to Bronsart’s application for a French officer of rank to be appointed to negotiate, the Emperor simply informed him that the French army was under the command of General Wimpfen. This answer he desired Bonsart to take back to the king; and to intimate further that he would shortly send out his aide-de-camp, General Count Reille, with a letter from himself to his Majesty. Personally I witnessed nothing of what was passing on the summit of theFrenois hill, being with the Prussian skirmishers on the plateau of Floing when the roar of the cannon fell suddenly still. But on the same evening a distinguished officer of the headquarter staff, who had been a witness of everything that occurred on the Frenois summit, dictated to me the following account:— “ Bronsart and his companion Winterfeldt came trotting up the hill, the time being a quarter past six. Bronsart “DER KAISER 1ST DA! spurred liis horse into a gallop as he came near, and, flinging his arm behind him in the direction of Sedan, exclaimed in a loud voice: 1 Der Kaiser ist da ! ’ There was a loud outburst of cheering. But as Bronsart dismounted, Moltke, with a very serious face, strode towards him, and said something which gave Bronsart obvious chagrin—a rebuke, as I suppose, for his informality and lack of self-restraint in the immediate presence of the King. It was at a quarter to seven when, with a trooper in advance bearing on his lance the flag of truce and with an escort of Prussian cuirassiers, the French officer came up the hill at a walking pace. He halted and dismounted some horse-lengths short of where the King stood, out to the front of his retinue; then he advanced, doffing 1 his kepi as he came, and with a silent reverence handed to his Majesty the Emperor’s letter. While the King, Bismarck, and Moltke conversed earnestly apart, the Crown Prince, with that gracious tact which is one of the finest traits of his character, entered into conversation with poor forlorn Reille, standing out there among the stubbles. Presently Bismarck beckoned up from rearward a gentleman in civilian uniform, Count Hatzfeldt, I believe, of the Foreign Office, who with¬ drew after a short interview with the Chancellor, after having, I presume, received instructions for drafting the King’s answer to the letter of the French Emperor. Presently there was a curious spectacle. The King, sitting on a chair, was using as his writing-desk the seat of another chair, which was being held in position by Major von Alten. The King, as we all knew later, was inditing his reply to Napoleon from Count Hatzfeldt’s draft.* After expressing sympathy and intimating * The fo lowing is the Emperor N tpoleon's letter :— “ Sire, my Brother, —Not having he n able to die in the midst of my troops, there is nothing left me but to render my sword into the hands of Your Majesty. “I am, Your Majes'y’s good brother, “Napoleon.” William’s reply runs thus : — “My Brother, —While regretting the circumstances in which we meet, I accept Your Majesty’s sword, and request that you will appoint one of your officers, and furnish him with the necessary powers to treat fur the capitulation of the army which has fought so \ aliantly under your command. I, for my part, have appointed General von Moltke to this duty. “ Y’our loving brother, “ Wilh ELM. 78 MEMORIES OF WAR AND RE ACE. liis acceptance of the Emperor’s sword, his Majesty desired that Napoleon should appoint an officer to conduct negotia¬ tions with General Moltke, whom he himself had delegated. Reille rode back into Sedan with the King’s reply. Soon after seven his Majesty and suite started on the drive back to Vendresse. Bismarck and Moltke rode into Donchery to take part in the conference for settling the terms of capitula¬ tion, and the Frenois hill was deserted.” The diary of Dr. Busch, Bismarck’s secretaiy, who was with the headquarter staff, accords in essentials with the foregoing. Dr. Busch relates further that at a quarter past five a Bavarian officer came to the King with information that his general (Maillenger) was in Torcy, that the French desired to capitulate, and were ready to surrender unconditionally; and that this messenger took back orders that all proposals as to negotiations were to be sent direct to the royal head¬ quarters. A little later an officer Avho had ridden out to ascertain something as to the German casualties, returned with the information that those were moderate. “ And the Emperor ? ” asked the King of him. “ Nobody knows ! ” announced the officer. Thus far, if the hour-data are not very specific, there are no important discrepancies in the testimony of eye-witnesses. But they are conspicuous in the evidence of the two Avitnesses iioav to be cited. The late General Sheridan of the United States army, a man of keen observation and unimpeachable veracity, trained by much experience to coolness in the midst of battle, Avas officially attached to the royal headquarters. He made notes on the spot which he told me he had implicitly folloAved Avhen Avriting his memoirs, published immediately after his premature and lamented death in 1888. And the folloAving is his testimony:— “ About three o’clock, the French being in a desperate and hopeless situation, the King ordered the firing to be stopped, and at once despatched one of his staff, Colonel von Bronsart, Avith the demand for a surrender. Just as this officer Avas starting I remarked to Bismarck that Napoleon himself would likely be one of the prizes; but the Count, incredulous, 79 THE “ WHITE DUSTER.” replied, ‘ Oh, no; the old fox is too cunning to be caught in such a trap. He has doubtless slipped off to Paris.’ Between four and live o’clock Bronsart returned from his mission to Sedan, bringing word to the King that General Wimpfen, the commanding officer there, wished to know, in order that the further effusion of blood might be spared, upon what terms he might surrender. The colonel also brought the intelligence that the French Emperor was in the town.” The late Mr. Holt White, the correspondent of the New York Tribune and Pall Mall Gazette, was with Sheridan throughout the day. He wrote “ About five o’clock there was a suspension of fighting all along the line. Five minutes later we saw a French officer, escorted by two uhlans, coming at a hard trot up the steep bridle-path, one of the uhlans carrying a white duster on a faggot stick as a flag of truce. This officer, who came to ask for terms of surrender, was told that in a matter of such importance it was necessary to send an officer of high rank. About half-past six there was a sudden cry among members of the King’s staff', ‘ Her Kaiser ist da! ’ and ten minutes later General Reille rode up with a letter from Napoleon to his Majesty, who wrote a reply begging Napoleon to come out next morning to the royal headquarters at Vendresse.” Of course this is an error ; but what of the French officer of whose mission Holt White reported ? The Bavarian officer from Torcy to whom Busch refers might have been mistaken for a Frenchman, when as yet people were not very well up in uniforms, were it not for the flag of truce. The “ white duster” was certainly no myth, for Holt White brought it to London, where many people saw it; and Sheridan told me he saw it given to White. Could this officer have brought out the paper drawn out by Lebrun, at which Faure would not look, but which some one other than the commander-in-chief might have signed, and which had got forwarded somehow ? But if this were so, how comes it that no mention was ever made by French writers of its exodus, or by the German “ Official History ” of its reception ? As it fell dusk a strange uncanny silence and stillness 80 MEMORIES OF WAR AXD VEAGE. succeeded to the thunderous noise and turmoil of the day. The smoke of the long cannonade still hung low on the uplands of Floing and Illy, and around the sombre fortifica¬ tions of Sedan. The whole horizon was lurid with the reflection of fires. All along the valley of the Meuse were the bivouacs of the German hosts. A hundred and fifty thousand Teuton soldiers lay in a wide circle around their beaten and shattered foe. On hill and in valley glowed in the darkness the flames of. burning villages, the glare here and there What were consummated triumph ? Celebrating their victory in wassail and riot ? No. There rose from every bivouac one unanimous chorus of song, but not the song of insolence or of ribaldry. The cliaunt that filled with solemn harmony the wide valley was Luther’s hymn, the glorious , , “ Nun danket alle Gott! reflecting itself on the face of the placid Meuse, the Germans doing on this their night of O O the Old Hundredth of the German race. To listen to this vast martial choir singing this noble hymn on the field of hard-won victory was to understand, in some measure, under what inspiration that victory had been gained. Late that same evening there was a great concourse of German officers in the little hotel in the Square of Honchery. The house had hours earlier been eaten out of everjHung except bread; but there was plenty of wine and champagne flowed freely. My companion and myself achieved great popularity by the free distribution of a quantity of sardines which were among the provisions stored in the well of our carriage. About eleven o’clock Bismarck, uniformed and booted to the thigh, strode into the salle-a-manger, hungry, and demanding supper. He made a formal statement to the assembled officers to the effect that the French Emperor had sent out to the King the surrender of his sword; and he read in a loud voice a copy of Napoleon’s letter. Adding no comments, he led off a hearty cheer, and then gave the toasts of “ the King ” and the “ Fatherland.” But his supper tarried. An officer ventured into the kitchen with intent to ascertain what was being prepared for the Chancellor. Alas, the TIIE MIDNIGHT CONFERENCE. 81 unhappy hostess protested, with many mow Dieus ! that the Germans might eat her if they chose and welcome, but that the only food in the place was half-a-dozen dubious eggs. From a ham among our stores we contributed sundry slices, and they, with the dubious eggs, were prepared for the Chancellor’s supper. But even so great a man as he was not exempt from the practical realisation of the adage that there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Between kitchen and dining-room the dish was cut out and carried off by a privateering uhlan officer; and it was not until after perquisi¬ tion throughout the depleted little town that a beef-steak was found, on which Bismarck at last supped, washing it down with a bottle of Donchery champagne. Thus fortified, the Chancellor about midnight joined Moltke, whom the King had designated to name terms for the capitulation of the French army. That was a strange con¬ ference which was held in the still watches of the night in the salon of a house just outside of Donchery. The greet¬ ings were curt. Wimpfen verified his powers, and pre¬ sented to Moltke Generals Faure and Castelnau as his colleagues. Moltke, with a brusque wave of the hand, introduced Count Bismarck and General Blumcnthal, and then seats were taken. On one side of the great' central table sat the three Germans, Moltke in the centre with Bismarck on his right and Blumenthal on his left. On the opposite side of the table sat Wimpfen by himself; be¬ hind him, somewhat in shadow, Faure, Castelnau, and a few other French officers. A Prussian captain stood by the mantelpiece, ready to commit to paper the proceedings in shorthand; on the French side a vivid precis was taken by Captain of Cuirassiers d’Orcet.. Moltke sat silent and impassive; and after an embarrassing pause, Wimpfen had at length to take the initiative by inquiring what were the conditions the Prussian King was prepared to accord. “ They are very simple,” replied Moltke curtly. “ The whole French army to surrender with arms and belong¬ ings : the officers to be permitted to retain their arms, but to be prisoners of war along with their men.” G 82 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. Wimpfen scouted those terms, and demanded for the French army that it should be allowed to withdraw with arms, equipment, and colours, on condition of not serving- while the war should last. Moltke adhered inexorably to the conditions which he had specified, and was adamant to the pleading of the French general. Losing temper, the latter exclaimed— “ I cannot accept the terms you impose. I will appeal to the honour and heroism of my army, and will cut my way out or stand on my defence at Sedan! ” Moltke’s reply was crushing. “ A sortie and the defensive,” he grimly remarked, “ arc equally impossible. The mass of your infantry are de¬ moralised ; we took to-day more than 20,000 unwounded prisoners, and your whole force is not now more than MO,000 strong. You cannot pierce our lines, for I have surrounding you 240,000 men with 500 guns in position to lire on Sedan and your camps around the place. You cannot maintain your defensive there, because you have not provisions for forty-eight hours and your ammunition is exhausted. If you desire, I will send one of your officers round our positions, who will satisfy you as to the accuracy of my statements.” At this point Bismarck and Wimpfen, somewhat to Moltke’s discontent, entered into a political discussion, in the course of which the Chancellor spoke his mind very freely but in which Moltke took no share. Assured that there could be no mitigation of the terms, Wimpfen exclaimed— “ Then it is equally impossible for me to sign such a capitulation : we will renew the battle ! ” Moltke’s quiet, curt answer was— “The armistice expires at 4 a.m. At that hour, to the moment, I shall reopen fire.” There was nothing more to be said. The Frenchmen called for their horses: meanwhile, not a word was spoken; in the language of the reporter, “ Le silence etait glacial.” It was at length broken by Bismarck, who urged Wimpfen not to allow a moment of pique to break off the confer- THE “LAST ADIEU ” FROM FRENCH SOLDIERS. 83 once. Wimpfen represented that he alone could not under¬ take the responsibility of a decision, that it was necessary that he should consult his colleagues; that the final answer could not be forthcoming by 4 a.m., and that the pro¬ longation of the armistice was indispensable. After a short colloquy between Bismarck and Moltke, the latter, with well-feigned reluctance, gave his consent that the truce should be extended until nine o'clock; whereupon Wimpfen quitted Donchery and rode back into Sedan. He went straight to the bedside of the Emperor, who, having been informed of the harshness of the German conditions, said— “ I shall start at live o’clock for the German head¬ quarters, and shall entreat the King to grant more favour¬ able conditions.” It was then about half-past three a.m. Napoleon did his best to act up to his resolution. He was in his carriage at the hour he had named. Expecting that he would be permitted to return to Sedan, not¬ withstanding that he had formally constituted himself a prisoner of war, he bade no farewells. As he passed through the Torcy Gate a little before six o’clock, the Zouaves on duty there shouted “Vive l’Empereur!”—“the last adieu which fell upon his ears ” from the voices of French soldiers. It was strange that the first greeting he received as he passed over the drawbridge, was a silent and respectful salutation from American officers. General Sheridan and his aide-de-camp Colonel Forsyth were con¬ versing with the German subaltern on duty on the picket¬ line, when there came out an open carriage containing four officers, one of whom, in the uniform of a general and smoking a cigarette, the American officers recognised as the Emperor Napoleon. They followed the carriage, which proceeded towards Donchery at a leisurely pace. At the hamlet of Frenois, about a mile from Donchery, it halted for some time, Napoleon remaining seated in the vehicle, still smoking, and enduring with nonchalance the stare of a group of German soldiers near by, who were gazing on the fallen monarch with curious and eager interest, c 2 S4 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. Looking out from my bedroom window into the little Place of Doncliery at a quarter to six the same morning, I observed a French officer, whom I afterwards knew to be General Reille, sitting on horseback in front of the house which I knew to be Bismarck’s quarters for the night. Reille presently rode slowly away. He Avas scarcely out of sight, \\dien Bismarck, in flat cap and undress uniform, his long cuirassier boots stained and dusty, as if he had slept in them, came outside, swung himself on to his big bay horse and rode away in Reille s track. I Avas close by him as he forced bis masterful Avay through the chaos that all but blocked the Donchery street. There Avas no redness about the deep-set e}^es or Aveariness in the strong-lined face ; it bad been midnight Avhen he drank his last glass of champagne in the Hotel de Commerce, and he and Moltke had been Avrestling Avith Wimpfen about the terms of capitulation for some three hours longer: yet here he Avas before the clock had chimed the hour of six, fresh, hearty, steady of hand and clear of throat, as the ringing voice proved in Avliich he bade the throng of soldiery give him space to pass. I folloAved him on foot at a little distance as he crossed the bridge and rode at a Avalking pace to- Avards Sedan, but fell behind when he started off at a smart canter. I Avas not up in time for the actual meeting between the Emperor and Bismarck; Sheridan told me that the latter came up at a canter, dismounted, letting his horse go, and draAving near on foot, uncovered his head and boAved low. The man to Avhom he spoke—the man with the leaden-coloured face, the lines of Avliich Avere drawn and deepened as if by some spasm, the gaunt-eyed man Avith the dishevelled moustache and the Aveary stoop of the shoulders, Avas none other than Napoleon the Third and last. As I came up, Bismarck had remounted, and Avas hoav following along the road toAvards Donchery a rather shabby open carriage, on the right of the principal seat of Avhich I at once recognised the Emperor. He Avore a blue cloak Avith scarlet lining, Avhich Avas tliroAyn back disclosing THE WEAVER'S COTTAGE. 85 the decorations on liis breast. There were three officers in the vehicle with the Emperor, and three more rode abreast of Bismarck behind the carriage. A few hundred yards had been traversed by the cortege in the direction of Don- chery, when at Napoleon’s instance the carriage was halted in front of a weaver’s cottage on the left-hand side of the road. I saw him turn round in his seat and heard the request he made to Bismarck, that he should be allowed to wait in the cottage until he should have an interview with the King. Bismarck placed at his disposal his own quarters in Donchery ; but the Emperor, who appeared to be suffering, reiterated his desire to wait in the roadside cottage. The cottage, two storeys high, its front painted a dusky yellow, is the nearest to Sedan of a block of three, standing some fifteen feet south of the highway and on a slightly higher elevation. Up to this point on the morning of September 2nd, there is approximate accord among the authorities: but beyond it the discrepancies are considerable. Sheridan’s account has the precedence, as he was earliest on the ground. His testimony was that the Emperor and Bismarck on alighting entered the cottage together, and that, re¬ appearing in a quarter of an hour, they seated themselves in front of the cottage on chairs brought out by the weaver. There, for fully an hour, they were engaged in an animated conversation, if much gesticulation on the part of Bismarck was to be taken as an indication. At length, soon after eight o’clock, Bismarck arose, saluted the Emperor, and strode towards his horse. On the way he asked Sheridan if he had noticed how, when they first met, Napoleon had started; and Sheridan replying in the affirmative, Bismarck said— “Well, it must have been due to my manner, not my words, for those were—‘ I salute your Majesty just as I would my own king.” Then, advising Sheridan to go to the adjacent Chateau Bellevue, as the next scene of interest, Bismarck himself, stated Sheridan, rode off towards Yendresse to communicate 86 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. ■with his sovereign. On this point Sheridan was certainly in error: Bismarck merely went to his Donchery quarters to breakfast and get into full uniform. Bismarck’s account of the morninsr’s occurrences was O given by him to Busch a few days later; it is condensed as follows :— He, Bismarck, met the Emperor near Frenois. Napoleon desired to speak with the King of Prussia, which Bismarck said was impossible, as the King was nine miles away. The Emperor then asked where meantime he could stay, and accepted Bismarck’s offer of the latter’s Donchery quarters. But he stopped the carriage opposite the weaver’s cottage, and expressed his desire to remain there. Bismarck accom¬ panied him to a small room on the upper floor of the cottage, a room with a single window, its sole furniture a deal table and two rush-bottomed chairs. The conversation lasted here for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of which Bismarck rode away to dress, and, on his return in full uniform, conducted Napoleon to the Chateau Bellevue with a “guard of honour” of cuirassiers. There Bismarck presently had himself called out of the room to evade further conversation with the Emperor, who was told that he could not see the King until the capitulation was settled. Soon Moltke and Wimpfen came to terms, and then the sovereigns met. “ When the Emperor came out from the interview, his eyes were full of tears.” In his official report Bismarck specifically stated that his long interview with the Emperor, “ which lasted nearly an hour,” was held inside the weaver’s cottage. The following are the recollections of Madame Fournaise, the weaver’s wife, a Frenchwoman, given soon after the close of the war, when, she maintained, the events were still fresh in her memory :— The Emperor, said Madame Fournaise, disliking to pass through the crowds of German soldiers on the Donchery road, alighted and came up her narrow staircase. To reach the inner room he had to pass through her bedroom, where she had just risen. The furniture of the inner room 87 “ WITH A KINDLY WORD OF FAREWELL .” consisted of two straw-bottomed chairs, a round table, and a press. Bismarck, “in a rough dress,” presently joined the Emperor, and for a quarter of an hour, said Madame Fournaise, the}' talked in low tones, of which she, remain¬ ing in the outer room, caught occasionally a word. Then Bismarck rose and came clattering out. “ II avait line tres mauvaise mine.” She warned him of the break-neck stairs, but he “ sprang down them like a man of twenty,” mounted his horse and rode away towards Donchery. When she entered the room in which the Emperor was left, she found him seated at the little table with his face buried in his hands. “Can I do anything for your Majesty?” she asked. “ Only to pull down the blinds,” was Napoleon’s reply, without lifting his head. He would not speak to General Lebrun, who came to him. In about half an hour Bis¬ marck returned in full uniform; he preceded the Emperor down the stairs, facing towards him as to “ usher him with a certain honour.” On the threshold the Emperor gave her four twenty-franc gold pieces—he “put them into my own hand ”; and he said plaintively, “ This perhaps is the last hospitality which I shall receive in France.” Bismarck, added Madame Fournaise, was looking hard at her, and recognised her as having served his supper in the Donchery hotel on the previous night. With a kindly word of fare¬ well “ which I shall never forget,” the Emperor quitted the poor house in which he had suffered so much unhappiness, and entered the carriage which was to convey him to the Chateau Bellevue. Madame Fournaise’s heart was better than her memory. The following is what I personally saw, condensed from copious notes taken at the moment with watch in hand. Immediately on alighting, at ten minutes past seven, Napoleon, who was obviously suffering, hurried round to the back of the house, while Bismarck and Reille went inside but almost immediately came out. Soon the Emperor returned, and he and Bismarck then entered together, ascending to the upper door. At twenty minutes past seven they came out, Bismarck a few moments in advance. ss MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. Two chairs were brought out in front of the cottage 1 y the weaver living on the ground floor; the two then sat down facing the road, the Emperor on the right; and the outdoor conversation began which lasted nearly an hour. Bismarck had covered himself in compliance with a gesture and a bow from the Emperor. As they sat, the latter occasionally smiled faintly and made a remark; but plainly Bismarck was doing most of the talking, and that, too, energetically. From my position I could just hear the rough murmur of Bismarck’s voice when he occasionally raised it; and then he would strengthen the emphasis by the gesture of bring¬ ing a finger of the left hand down on the palm of the right. The stubbly-bearded weaver living upstairs was all the while overlooking the pair from a front window. After they had parted, I asked this man what he had over¬ heard. “Nothing,” said he; “they spoke in German, of which I know but a few words. When the monsieur in the white cap first spoke to the Emperor, he addressed him in French; then the Emperor said, ‘Let us talk in German.’ ” Bismarck, happening to see my letter describing the events of the morning, instructed Busch to contradict certain of my statements. The assertion was persevered in that “he had spent three-quarters of an hour at least inside the cottage in the upstairs room; and was only a very short time outside with the Emperor.” He had never struck finger into palm, which was not a trick of his; and he did not speak German with the Emperor, although he did so with the people of the house. In this connection may be quoted the following extract from Sir W. H. Russell’s narrative of an account of the memorable morning given to him by Bismarck:—“He [Napoleon] alighted, and I proposed that we should go into a little cottage close by. But the house. . . . was not clean, and so chairs were brought outside, and we sat together talking.” After Bismarck’s departure the Emperor, who was then out-of-doors, spoke a few words with his officers, and then for a time sauntered moodily and solitary up and down “DRAW SWORDS! 89 the potato plot on the right of the cottage, his white- gloved hands clasped behind him, limping slightly as he walked, and smoking hard. Later he came and sat down among his officers, maintaining an almost entire silence while they spoke and gesticnlated with great animation. Busch was among the spectators, and he has described the Emperor as “ a little thick-set man, wearing jauntily a red cap with gold border, black paletot lined with red, red trousers, and white kid gloves. His whole appearance,” to Dr. Busch’s genial perception, “ was a little unsoldierlike. The man looked too soft, too shabby, I may say, for the uniform he wore.” At a quarter past nine there came from Donchery a detachment of Prussian cuirassiers, who briskly formed a cordon round the rear of the block of cottages. The stalwart lieutenant dismounted two troopers, and without a glance at the group of Frenchmen or a gesture of salute to the Emperor, marched them up to behind the Emperor’s chair, halted them, uttered in a loud voice the command, “ Draw swords ! ” and then gave the men their orders in an undertone. Napoleon started abruptly, glanced backwards with a gesture of surprise, and his face Hushed—the first evidence of emotion I had observed him to manifest. At a quarter to ten Bismarck returned, now in full uniform, his burnished helmet Hashing in the sun- rays. Moltke accompanied him, but while Bismarck strode forward to where the Emperor was now standing, Moltke remained among the group gathered on the road. Half¬ way to Vendresse Moltke had met the King, who approved of the proposed terms of capitulation, and intimated that he could not see the Emperor until they had been accepted by the French commander-in-chief. Wiping his hot face, Bismarck strode up to the Emperor, and spoke with him for a few moments. Then he ordered up the carriage, which Napoleon entered, and the cortege, escorted by the cuirassier “guard of honour,” moved off at a walk towards the Chateau Bellevue, which lies nearer Sedan than does the weaver’s cottage. The charming residence, bowered in a grove, overlooks a bend of the 90 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. Meuse and the plain on which Sedan stands. The garden entrance was on the fii’st floor, reached from without by a broad flight of steps. The Emperor occupied the principal salon in the central block, where he remained alone after Bismarck had left him, his officers remaining in the con- servatories on either side. Napoleon seemed ill and broken as he slowly ascended the steps, with drooping head and dragging limbs. It has been already stated that at the close of the nocturnal conference in Donchery, the armistice had been prolonged until nine a.m. The members of the council-of-war which Wimpfen had summoned for seven a.m., listened to that unfortunate chief, as with a voice broken by sobs he re¬ peated the conditions stubbornly insisted on by Moltke. Two officers voted for continued resistance, but ultimately the council was unanimously in favour of acceptance of the conditions. Nevertheless, during hour after hour, Wimpfen procrastinated. Before riding away to meet the King coming from Vendresse, Moltke had sent into Sedan an officer with the blunt ultimatum that hostilities would without fail he renewed at ten o’clock unless by that hour negotiations should have been resumed. Wimpfen still hesitating to act, Captain Zingler remarked cheerfully that his instructions, in case of an unsatisfactory answer, were to give orders as he rode back that the German batteries, numbering some 450 field-guns and commanding the French army as if in a ring-fence, should open fire promptly at the hour specified. Under stress of an argument so stern as that, Wimpfen accompanied the Prussian captain to the Chateau Bellevue, in the panelled dining-room in the ground floor of which, about eleven o’clock, the articles of capitulation Avere signed by Moltke and the French com¬ mander. Then Wimpfen had a moment upstairs with his Imperial master, whom he informed with great emotion that “all was finished!” “The Emperor,” wrote Wimpfen, “ with tears in his eyes approached me, pressed my hand, and embraced me. . . My sad and painful duty accom¬ plished, I rode back to Sedan, 1 la inort dans lame.’ ” 91 THE MEETING OF THE “GOOD BROTHERS.” The Prussian monarch, with his son and their respec¬ tive stalls, had been awaiting on the Frenois hill the tidings of the completion of the capitulation; and now the great cavalcade rode down into the grounds of the Chateau. As Wilhelm alighted, Napoleon came down the steps to meet him. What a greeting! The German, tall, upright, bluff, square-shouldered, with the flash of victory from the keen blue eyes under the helmet, and the glow of good fortune on the fresh old face; the Frenchman, bent with weary stoop of the shoulders, leaden-faced, his eye drooping, his lip quivering, bare-headed and dishevelled. As the two clasped hands silently, Napoleon’s handkerchief was at his eyes, and the King’s face was working with emotion. Then the “good brothers” mounted the steps and entered the chateau together. Their interview, which no man shared, lasted about twenty minutes; and then the Prussian King set off to ride through his victorious soldiers bivouacking on the battle-field. The Emperor remained in the Chateau .Bellevue. My companion and myself made haste to enter Sedan, now that the capitulation was completed. We got on to the glacis of the place without any difficulty, 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 subsequently saw inside Sedan. Everybody was friendly, and wine was pressed on us—the more warmly when it was discovered that we were English¬ men. One especially greasy and strong smelling Turco of a full Day-and-Martin colour, strove vehemently to kiss us, but we fled. Getting into Sedan itself was a difficult matter. The gates were closed, and were opened only to admit the wounded as they were brought in on waggons. By the advice of a friendly Turco who set us the example, we jumped into one of the waggons and passed in without hindrance. As rapidly as possible for the tumultuous press, we traversed several streets of the town. We saw where Marshal MacMahon lay wounded. The town was swarming with dis¬ banded soldiers, every foot of space densely packed. Of the 5)2 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. wounded some were in the churches, the houses, and the public buildings; many lay unheeded and jostled in the gateways and courtyards; the dead were everywhere—in the gutters, trampled on by the living, on the swampy margin of the moat, littering the narrow ways between the glacis and the ramparts, lying, some of them, on the steps of the churches. The sight was one never to be exorcised from the memory—a sight of misery, disorganisation, and general devilry assuredly unique in this generation—an eddying welter of ferocious or despondent humanity, trampling reck¬ lessly 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. The day was not yet far spent, and we betook ourselves to the section of the battle field on the plateau of Floing. The tract charged over by the Chasseurs d’Afrique was a scene of terrible carnage. The Arab stallions ridden by those troopers had died very hard; in many cases they had made graves with their struggles for their riders and themselves before they died. Higher up on the tableland there was fearful evidence of the power of shell-fire at short range. I counted half a dozen headless corpses within a space of two hundred yards—their heads had been blown away almost as clean as if they had been guillotined. Men disembowelled, trunks shattered into gory fragments, legs or arms blown away, were common but ghastly spectacles that turned one sick. Late the same afternoon I saw the Emperor again. He had come out into the park of the Chateau to superintend the reorganisation of his train, which had quitted Sedan in the course of the day. He looked very wan and weary, but still maintained the old impassive aspect. The Imperial equipage in its magnificence, the numerous glittering and massive fourgons, the splendid teams of draught animals and the squadron of led horses, presented an extraordinary contrast to the plain simplicity of the King of Prussia’s campaigning outfit. In gold and scarlet the coachmen and outriders of Napoleon glittered profusely. He of Prussia had his ZOLA'S GROTESQUE BLUNDER. 93 postillions in plain blue cloth, with oilcloth covers on their hats to keep the dust off the nap. The Emperor and his suite left the Chateau Bellevue on the morning of the 3rd, driving through Donchery and by Illy across the frontier to Bouillon in Belgium, on the way to Wilhelmshohe. Zola, in his vivid but often grotesquely erroneous Debacle, has fallen into strange blundering on the subject of the Imperial equipage. He thus refers to it:— “ The Imperial baggage train—cause in its day of so much scandal—had been left behind at Sedan, where it rested in ignominious hiding behind the Sous-Prefet’s lilac bushes. It puzzled the authorities somewhat to devise means of ridding themselves of what was to them a bcte noire by getting it away' from the city unseen by the famishing multitude, upon whom the sight of its flaunting splendour would have produced the same effect that a red rag does on a maddened bull. They waited until there came an un¬ usually dark night, when horses, carriages and baggage waggons, with their silver stew-pans, plate, linen, and baskets of tine wines, all trooped out of Sedan in deepest mystery, and shaped their course for Belgium, noiselessly, without beat of drum, over the least frequented roads, like a thief stealing away in the night! ” This is utter nonsense. As I have stated, I saw the Imperial train in the park of the Chateau Bellevue on the afternoon of the 2nd September, the day after the battle. Apart from this personal testimony, the story told by Zola is transparently absurd. By the evening of September 3rd the capitulated French Army was disarmed and enclosed under guard on the peninsula of Iges. There remained then in Sedan only its normal, or less than normal population, far too crushed to attempt any irregularity. A German Governor of Sedan had been installed, German troops constituted the garrison of the place, and Sedan would not have dared to emit so much as a mild hiss if the Imperial train, assuming that it had remained in Sedan after Napoleon’s departure, which it did not, had perambulated the city in face of the population all day long. 94 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. The Germans, having determined to utilise as a prison for the capitulated army the peninsula of Iges, surrounded by the Meuse on three sides, and on the fourth by the closety guarded line of the canal, had marched on to it during September 3rd the disarmed French troops to the number of at least 100,000. The Germans themselves were tem¬ porarily short of supplies, having outmarched their com¬ missariat ; and could spare little for their prisoners. But for the first day or two on the peninsula the captives fared better than the captors. Nobody can accomplish a savoury mess under difficulties like a Frenchman, or house himself when another man would have to put up with the heavens for his roof. Innumerable fires were blazing; on every fire there was a saucepan, and in the saucepan were potatoes and something else. Whence came the potatoes was plain enough—we could see the fellows digging them out with their bayonets; but about the “something else” all that one could tell was that it smelt nice The men who were not cooking were rigging up their tentes d’abris and gathering bedding of boughs and leaves. They were the civillest, cheeriest, best-humoured set of fellows imaginable. We two, quite alone, and unable to contribute anything to the general good—for our flasks and tobacco pouches were but drops in the bucket—experienced no word but of the frankest courtesy and the heartiest cordiality, alike on the part of officers and men. After a long gossip with a group of captains, we strolled down to the river and accepted the invitation of a bivouac of Zouaves to join them at supper. The mess was better than good ; it was superb. It consisted of potatoes, the mysterious savoury “ something,” and flesh of some kind or other. The sunburnt Zouaves treated us like princes, but evaded a direct reply to our question what was the flesh-ingredient of their mess. After we had bidden good-night to the merry rascals, we came on the carcass of a horse which had been killed by a shell, and there was missing a considerable section of a flank. It was late before we quitted the peninsula, and when we were once outside and realised the difficulty of finding TIIE “ HISTORICAL ” INKS TAIN. ■95 quarters, we were sorry that we had not stayed with the Zouaves. Donchery we knew to have been invaded by a 'whole army corps; Frenois was seething full of Bavarians; the gates of Sedan were closed for the night. Our vehicle was waiting for as at the canal, but the driver could suggest no night quarters. As we were discussing the probabilities of a bivouac we drove past the front of the Chateau Bellevue. All was in darkness. A happy if audacious thought struck my companion. “ Let us sleep here! ” he cried with a veritable inspiration—“ the place is empty.” The gardener —now since the departure of the morning the sole inmate of the premises—seemed content enough to have for inmates a couple of quiet civilians, and he conducted us into the beautifully panelled dining-room, on the table in which the capitulation had been signed on the previous morning. Good quarters, it was true, we had, but no food ; for the Imperial party had exhausted the resources of the establishment, and the gardener assured us that he himself was extremely hungry. At the great oak table, sullen and hungry, I sat writing a letter to my newspaper, while my companion dis¬ consolately gnawed a ham-bone, the miserable remnant of our store of provisions. It had but scant picking on it, and my companion, with a muttered objurgation, threw it angrily on the table. As the bone fell it upset my ink-bottle and spilt its contents. Revisiting the Chateau after the war, I was gravely shown a great ink-stain on the table, which, the guide solemnly informed me, was caused by the upsetting of the ink-bottle used at the signature of the capitulation of Sedan. Wimpfen, I was assured, had overturned it in the agitation ol his shame and grief. The guide added that great sums had been offered for this table with the “ historic ” ink- stain, but that no money would induce the proprietor to part with it. Thus do delusions gradually crystallise into items of traditional history. The stain on the floor of Mary Stuart’s room in Holyrood, caused, we are assured, by Rizzio’s blood is probably the result of a saucerful of beetroot vinegar upset by the janitor’s baby centuries after Mary met her cruel fate. To me was assigned the bedroom which had been occupied 96 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. on the previous night by the Emperor Napoleon. It was in the state in which he had left it. Sheets and a quilt Avere on the bed; but one of the Avindow-hangings, Avith its semi¬ circular canopy, had been dragged doAvn and used as an additional covering. The glass doors of a book-case stood open; and on the night-table at the bed-head lay open, face doAvnvards, a \ T olume Avhicli had been taken from the case. The reader of the night before had made a selection in Avhich there Avas something ominous—the book Avas Bulwer Lytton’s historical novel, “ The Last of the Barons.” On the tenth anniversary of the great battle I revisited Sedan. Alike in city and on battlefield, there Avas scarcely a trace of the memorable contest. The bones of the fallen had been exhumed from the scattered graves and gathered into ossuaries, of Avhich the largest is the great crypt under the joint memorial of the French and German dead of the desperate fighting about Bazielles—a gruesome place Avith an alley doAvn the centre, on one side of Avhich had been stacked the skulls and bones of the fallen French, on the other those of the slain Germans. The only pilgrimage then still some- Avhat in vogue was to the Aveaver’s cottage, Avhich Madame Fournaise, uoav a AvIdoAv, continued to inhabit. Her recollec¬ tions Avere still fresh of probably the most momentous day of her life ; and she narrated them Avith not a little spirit and feeling'. Good-hearted soul as Avas Madame Fournaise, she Avas, all the same, a woman of business, and had made the most of her opportunities. It Avas to Bismarck she sold—not at his oavii price—the table at Avhich he had sat Avith the fallen Emperor. The purchasers of the tAVO veritably original straAV-bottomed chairs were the late Sir Beauchamp Walker, the English Military Commissioner Avith the German CroAvn Prince’s army, and the late General Sheridan. For years, although by this time the pilgrims were not so plentiful, Madame Fournaise had done Avell for herself by showing the upper chamber in Avhich the interview took place; and by selling, mostly, she said, to American travellers, relay after relay of straAV-bottomed chairs which she frankly owned to have passed off as the originals. 97 “ THE LAST HOSPITALITY ” “And what about the four twenty-franc pieces?” I asked. ‘ No doubt you have sold them over and over again ?” “ Oh, my God, no ! ” she exclaimed. “ Never—never ! Did he not give them to her with his own hand ? See! the original four are in that locked case with the glass top on the mantel yonder. Yes, I have had great offers for them. Over and over again I could have had 500 francs for the four pieces; but no money would tempt me to sell them ! ” Ten years later it happened that I once again was in Sedan. On my way back from looking at the pathetic and graceful monument overhanging the bend of the Meuse, which France had recently raised to the memory of her dead, I halted in front of the historic cottage. I found it uninhabited and in dilapidation. The door was locked, and the key far away in the possession of the proprietor, a farmer of Carignan. There was no longer access to the upper room wherein sat Napoleon and Bismarck on that memorable morning of September 1870. In one of the adjacent cottages I found a crone who told me that Madame Fournaise had been dead for several years. She lies in the Donchery graveyard. Three of the twenty- franc pieces, it seemed, were coins of Louis XVIII. Of the four pieces she had cherished so long, she had directed that those three should be dedicated to the payment for her grave and to defray her funeral expenses; the fourth, a Napoleon, was to be buried with her—in the coffin of the poor woman who had given to the unfortunate Emperor Napoleon “ the last hospitality which he received in France.’ H IV. AMBUSH AGAINST AMBUSH. LEASE you, Herr Major, Corporal Zimmermann has JL returned to the picket with Sly Patrol No. 2. He reports that in the gap of the hedge in front of the large held over against the park wall of the Schloss Launay, No. 1,420, soldier Claus Spreckels, of Captain Hammerstein’s company, was killed by a shot fired from the little house by the gate. That makes the seventh man killed this week by the pig-dog who lurks there and never misses a chance! ” The speaker was Under-Officer Schulz, of the third battalion, infantry regiment No. 103, forming part of General von Montbe’s division of the 12tli (Royal Saxon) Army Corps, doing duty on the east side of Paris during the memorable siege in the winter of 1870-71. Under-Officer Schulz would have made an excellent model for a painter anxious to limn a Cameronian or one of Cromwell’s ironsides. Instead of Schulz, his name might have been Praise-the-Lord Barebones. Tall, gaunt, thin- flanked and square-shouldered, with high cheek-bones, lantern jaws, and narrow peaked forehead, Under-Officer Schulz, Saxon though he was, had nothing of the genial informality so characteristic of his countrymen. He had entered the apartment, taken three measured steps from the door with accurately pointed toes, had halted smartly, bringing his heels together with an audible click; and then he stood motionless, stiff, and severely erect while he made the above report to Major von Schonberg, the commander of the battalion. “Pig-dog, indeed!” said the major savagely. “He takes every chance, as you say, and never gives one! Have the dead Spreckels buried according to form. That will do, Under-Officer Schulz! ” “At your order, Herr Major!” answered the under-officer, SOLDIER CLAUS SPUE CUE IS. 99 with a salute; then he went right about in three motions as if he were a piece of mechanism, took three measured paces to the door, and disappeared. The scene was a handsome but sorely dilapidated salon in a chateau on the outskirts of the village of Gagny, on the German fore-post line of the section of environment between Rainey and Yille Evrart right opposite to Mont Avron, over the lower summit of which showed grimly the sullen face and menacing embrasures of Fort Rosny. There were big guns then on Mont Avron, and yet bigger in Fort Rosny; and neither had been very tender to the fine suburban mansion which for the time was the headquarters of Major von Schonberg’s battalion. There were shot-holes in the roof, the walls, and the parquet floor of the drawing-room which was now the common room of the officers, the furniture of which was in a curiously fragmentary condition. A shell had burst in the grand piano that stood in the bay-window looking towards Avron, and had wrought indescribable havoc among the keys, hammers, and strings. The place was rather a favourite target both from Avron and Rosny, and we may be said to have lived within constant fire. While, for instance, Schulz had been making his report, a shell had exploded on the roof of the chateau. It is needless to mention that this occurrence did not occasion in that automatic person so much as the twinkle of an eyelid. Christmas, the time of peace and goodwill among men, was but three days off, and soldier Claus Spreckels, with the blood still oozing on to the doorstep on which the body had been deposited, lay waiting while his grave was being dug. His would be the most recent, but the region round about us was one great graveyard of recent dead. Rut seven weeks previously, on the swelling peninsula a little to the south of us formed by the loop of the Marne, had occurred the desperate struggle that ended, after several blood} 7 days, in the defeat of Ducrot’s great sortie—a struggle in which Schonberg’s battalion had lost half its officers and one-third of its rank and tile. On the day before but one it had been fighting hard for six hours to repel the sortie of a French 100 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. force heading up the Marne Valley from Neuilly, between the Maison Blanche and Ville Evrart. That had been a strange scene on the evening before, when, under cover of the dusk—no vehicle dared move hereabouts in broad daylight—one of the battalion carts had brought out to us from the held post-office in Le Vert Galant the Christmas “ love-gifts ” (Liebesgaben), packed by loving hands, that came to those fore-post regions of blood and death from the quiet homes in distant Saxon-land. It was a curious medley of souvenirs that streamed out as the tail- board of the cart was let down in front of the quarter-guard behind the house occupied by the major. The German Feld post was a more elastic institution than had ever been a king’s messenger’s service-bag in the good old unreformed days. I do believe that if his friends at home had chosen to send to a soldier in the field a bee-hive or a rabbit-hutch, there would have been no objection on the score of bulk. Out rolled cigar-boxes stitched up in canvas wrappers, long cocoon-like shapes every outline of which spelt “ wurst,” flabby packages which evidently consisted of underclothing, and little boxes that rattled as they dropped and, for certain, contained thalers. A pile of gifts was stacked against the wall, and a space in front was cleared in which stood, wooden and stiff even when off duty, Under- Officer Schulz, calling out the name as each packet was handed up to him by a corporal. It was rather a dreary, even, indeed, a solemn roll-call, deeply eloquent of the casualties which war had wrought in the ranks of the battalion. “Schumann!” called out Under-Officer Schulz. “ Shot dead in battle ! ” was the curt response. “ Caspar! ” “ Wounded! ” “ Stolberg! ” “ Dead.” “ Bergmann! ” “ In hospital.” “ Schrader! ” “ Weg.” W1£G.” 101 Now the dictionary definition of the word “Weg” is “ away,” “ gone ” ; but on campaign it had a wide and rather vague significance. “ Weg,” then, might mean indeed almost anything: prisoner, missing, unburied, deserted—only that one never heard of a German soldier deserting. The sum and substance of the word was, “ Not here, and Lord knows where he is ! ” When Schulz had done, there was still quite a heap of packets which the men to whom they were addressed would never claim. I had seen Spreckels tear open the box of cigars addressed to him, before I left the place of distribution. Now he was lying dead on the slab there, with a bullet-hole through his head ; and from between the buttons of his tunic stuck out some half-dozen of the cigars that had come to him overnight from his mother in Kamenz. The French outpost line opposite to that section of the German front occupied by the Saxon Regiment followed a road which skirted the lower slope of Mount Avron, crossed the little valley in front of the village of Villemomble which the French held, and then took up the line of the wall bound¬ ing the finely wooded park of the Chateau de Launay. Though here and there they approached more closely where the ground was broken, the opposing lines were for the most part distant from each other about eight hundred paces. In most civilised wars it had been the humane custom that the outposts of two opposing armies in ordinary circumstances did not molest each other. In the Peninsular campaign this mutual forbearance was carried to curious lengths. In that excellent book, “ The Subaltern,” the late Chaplain-General Gleig gives many instances of the “excellent understanding ” which prevailed between the armies, and of their genuine cordiality one towards the other. At one time “ the Subaltern ” used to go a-fishing in a river which divided the lines, and he tells how “ many a time I have waded half across the little river on the opposite bank of which the enemy’s pickets were posted, whilst they came down in crowds only to watch my success, and to point out particu¬ lar pools and eddies where they thought I could find the best 102 MEMORIES OF WAR AND RE ACE. sport. On such occasions the sole precaution I took was to chess myself in scarlet, and then I might approach within a few yards of their sentries without being molested.” Another instance which “ the Subaltern ” gives betokened so much too good an understanding between the outposts, as to cause Wellington to forbid all intercommunication whatso- ever—a prohibition at which one can scarcely wonder when the story is told :—“ A field-officer, going the rounds one night, found that the whole sergeant’s picket-guard had disappeared. He was both alarmed and surprised at the occurrence ; but his alarm gave way to utter astonishment when, stretching for¬ ward to observe whether there was any movement in the enemy’s lines, he peeped into a cottage from which a noise of revelry was proceeding, and beheld the party sitting in the most sociable manner with a similar party of French soldiers, and carousing jovially. As soon as the British officer presented himself, his own men rose, and, wishing their companions good-night, returned to their post with the greatest sang froid. It is, however, but justice to add that the sentries on both sides faithfully kept on their posts, and that on neither side was there any intention of desertion. In fact, it was a sort of custom, the French and British outposts visiting each other by turns.” Other times, other manners. In other respects than the observance of outpost etiquette, the French soldiers of 1870 were different from their ancestors of the Peninsular period. From the very beginning of the war, from the early days before Saarbrucken, before any battle had been fought, and therefore before defeat could have exacerbated the troops of the Second Empire, they had caught at every chance that offered of firing on the German outposts, sentries, and patrols. The first man I ever saw killed by a bullet was a poor fellow of the Hohenzollern Fusiliers—one of a “sly patrol” which I was accompanying one July morning through the copses lining the base of the Spicherenberg. The French soldiers on the outposts of the Paris defence-line often were not regulars, and when they were regulars, were recruits who, if they had ever heard of them, had no respect for the old civilised COLD-BLOODED MURDER. 103 traditions. Every reverse made them the more venomous; and the Germans, who at first showed a great deal of for¬ bearance, had, by the winter season, long ceased to refrain from reprisals. Accordingly, during the siege of Paris, there was a miserably great amount of simple cold-blooded murder per¬ petrated on the foreposts. No other term than murder expresses the killing of a lone sentry by a pot-shot at long range. It was like shooting a partridge sitting. Of this wretched work the French had the better, because of the longer range of their chassepots. Their marksmen used to remain on the outposts and practise this deliberate homicide ; when they had potted some half-dozen Prussians at 1,000 yards, they took rank as heroes, and were feted by the citizens when they gave them¬ selves a holiday from their trade of cheap death. One of those slaughter-men it was whom P T nder-Officer Schulz had taken the liberty of describing as a “ pig-dog.” He had located himself, apparently permanently, in a cottage which had probably been the gardener’s residence, about a couple of furlongs in front of the approach-gate of the Chateau de Launay; and for days previous to that on which poor vSpreckels came by his end, the Frenchman had occupied the period of daylight in taking deliberate aim at every Prussian soldier exposing himself within reach of the chassepot. The Prussians had marksmen, and they had chassepots too, by this time; but the fellow never gave them a chance. He shot out of a window, but he never showed himself, firing from the back of the room, and standing, no doubt, well out of the direct line of fire. I fear I must own to the veteran’s besetting sin of dis¬ cursiveness. I apologise, and return to the departure of Under-Officer Schulz from the presence of Major Schonberg and his officers, after he had reported poor Spreckels as “ expended” “That scoundrel wdl decimate the battalion!” exclaimed the Major, as he took a long drink of the lager-beer, a little barrel of which had been among the Christmas love-gifts sent him by the Frau Majorinn. “And,” he added, “how to mend matters beats me ! ” 104 MEMORIES OF WAR AXD PEACE. Then impulsive Captain Kirchbach, the Hanoverian, spoke out. ‘ Let us rush the infernal hut, Major, and burn it down: that will destroy the fellow’s cover. I volunteer to lead the arson-party. Why not to-night ? ” “ It must not be as you propose, Kirchbach,” said the Major mournfully. “ You know the French fore-post line is close in rear of the cottage—I suspect it moves forward with nightfall; and you know also that not half a rille-shot to the rear there is a brigade of the red-legs in Villemomble. We’d risk them with as light a heart as Ollivier accepted the war, but you know my orders are absolute not to do anything that might bring on fighting now, while they are making the battery-emplacements for the siege-guns up there behind us in front of Maison Guyot.” “ Ach, so ! ” came from half a dozen lips, in that long, un¬ dulating intonation which is so characteristic of the Saxon speech. “ And yet,” piped little Hammerstein, “ it is a cursed pity that our good fellows should be murdered thus.” “ Fortune of war ! ” cried Helldorf the reckless, as he made for the herrings, sardellen, and schinken which a soldier- servant had just placed on a section of the shattered piano that did duty for a buffet; t£ if you are to be bowled over, it may as well happen on a ‘ sly patrol ’ as in the melee of Gravelotte. Spreckels’ turn to-day ; mine, mayhap, to-morrow ! The Frenchman don’t respect officers the least in the world. One of the seven he has already killed was, you will remem¬ ber, our comrade Ensign von Ernsthausen.” “ Permit me the word, Herr Major,” spoken in a modest tone, were the bashful words that came from the mere lad in the light blue uniform who was standing by the door. The speaker was such a slight fellow, and had so young a face, that he did not seem full-grown. The moustache had not budded on his lip, but there was a fire in his eye and a quiet, modest resolution in the whole aspect of him, which gave the assurance that he was equal to a man’s part. The brass scales on his shoulders showed him to be a cavalryman, the only representative of that arm present. His rank was that of • DA VID” 105 Ensign, and he commanded the little detachment of the Crown Prince’s Reiter Regiment which was detailed with the infantry battalion in the forepost line to perform orderly duty. “ Well, baron, are you going to offer to cut the fellow out with your galloping sergeant’s party ? ” asked Schonberg, rather in a tone of banter—there was a little jealousy between the cavalry and infantry before Paris, as there mostly is during a long siege, because of the easy times the former have in com¬ fortable quarters well to the rear. By the way, I have for¬ gotten to mention that the name of the cavalry youngster was the Baron von und zu Steinfurst-Wallenstein. But if the young fellow had a swagger name, that was all of swagger there was about him ; though, mere lad as he was, the Iron Cross was at his button-hole, gained in a slashing charge on the evening of Beaumont. “ I think, Herr Major,” said the baron quietly, “my fellows would snatch at the opportunity if you were to give it them. But, of course, from what you have just told Captain Ivirch- bach, that is out of the question. Yet if you will allow me— my sergeant can see to the duty for a day or two—I should like to try whether, with good fortune, I may not stop this fellow’s devilry. They reckon me the best game-shot with the sporting-rifle in our part of the Saxon Switzerland, and I have got my favourite weapon with me here. One never knows when one may get a chance at something. What I want to do is to go and stalk this French devil. May I. Hen- Major ? ” “ Oh, you may try your luck, and welcome, baron, for me,” replied the major. “ Mind, unless you bring his head back with you, we shan’t believe you’ve wiped him out.” It must be said that, besides the rather elephantine badinage of the worthy major, the young cavalryman was the butt of a good many jokes that evening. It was the brilliant Helldorf who christened him “ David,” and offered to go and help him search around for an eligible stone to put into his sling. But the little baron took the chatt" with a modest serenity, ate a hearty dinner (I have said he was a Saxon), renounced both the Frau Majorinn’s beer-barrel and the generous red wine 106 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. which Kirchbach contributed to the joint-stock mess, and was in bed bright and early, after having first given his trusty rifle a thorough overhaul and filled a bandolier with Eley’s best cartridges. Very early in the morning his batman brought him some breakfast. He dressed himself warmly, for the weather was very bitter, poured some schnapps into his pocket-flask, put some sandwiches into his haversack, and, rifle in hand, started out for the extreme front. He had the watchword and countersign, of course ; but they would not avail to carry him outside the German cordon of advanced sentries, and that was just whither he meant to go. So at the Repli he had the officer on duty to go forward with him to the outlying picket—the Feldwache; the sergeant in com¬ mand of which, at the officer’s order, escorted him through the outer chain of sentries. It was on the railway embank¬ ment close to the long since burnt Gagny station that he left the sergeant and the final double-post; and after descending into the hollow beyond, began to climb the gradual slope on the crest of which, among the trees, stood the Chateau de Launay. It was not yet dawn, but the morning was not very dark and it was rather ticklish work. The ground was covered with deep snow the surface of which was frozen hard, and the crystallised surface threw up a faint sparkle even in the darkness, while it crackled crisply under every footfall. Clumps of evergreens were dotted over the slope, and if they had a danger of their own as possibly concealing French out¬ liers or patrols, they also gave the advantage of covering to some extent the young officer’s advance. He had taken the bearings of the cottage to the watching of which he intended to devote himself, and instead of heading directly towards it, with the result that the hiding-place he designed to take up would be right in the French marksman’s line of sight, he edged away somewhat to his own right, with intent to locate himself somewhere on the proper left front of the cottage. When about three hundred yards distant from it, he found him¬ self close to a dense clump of evergreen shrubbery-—a bosquet forming the outer fringe of the pretty grounds, in the heart of which stood, and no doubt still stands, the villa then WAITING FOR A CHANGE. 107 possessed by the late Dr. Nelaton, the famous surgeon of the Second Empire. This clump the baron penetrated, and lying down on the moss in the heart of it, whither the snow had not penetrated, he waited till dawn, and then gingerly twisted and broke the shrubs till he had a clear vista of aim on the cottage, now visible dimly through the frost-haze. Its sharp-shooting occupant he judged to he cooking his breakfast, for smoke was lazily rising from the chimney of the cottage. Then the sun came out and chased away the haze, and the baron thought he caught a glimpse of the dull gleam of a rifle-barrel back in the room inside the wide oridce where in peace-time there had been a window-frame. His first im¬ pulse was to aim a little behind where he had seen the glint, and then tire ; but he restrained himself. In all likelihood, he reckoned as he steadied himself, not more than one chance would come to him, if even that much, so crafty, evidently, was the Frenchman. For that one hoped-for chance, then, it was for the baron to wait hour after hour with the patience of a red Indian—it might indeed be for days, for, to use Kirk¬ patrick’s words, he was bound to “ mak siccar.” So he lay supine, gazing steadfastly at the white front of the cottage, up against which almost to the window-sill the whiter snow had drifted, making a bank sloping away from the wall, its frozen surface sparkling where the sunrays struck it. The hours passed wearily but intently. Three times the flash of a shot and the little pillow-like cloud of white smoke had darted out from the window-space in the front of the cottage. For aught the baron could know, as he lay there in the slow torments of inability to accomplish his purpose, each shot meant the life gone from out a Saxon soldier. Would he risk a return shot? he asked himself each time, when next that cool, cruel devil up there pulled trigger. And each time the stern resolute answer he made to himself was, “ No ! be calm ; everything comes to him who can wait.” The Frenchman tired a fourth time just as the sun was going down, but, as before, from out the gloom at the back of the room. When it became dark the lad, half frozen, stiffly rose and trudged his way back into the Saxon 108 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. position. The sentries had been warned of his probable com¬ ing in, and did not interfere with him. He had rather a bad evening of it. During the day the marksman of the cottage had killed one sentry as he peered rather recklessly over the edge of the railway embankment, and had wounded another fellow when on “ sly patrol ” duty. The poor baron was ruth¬ lessly chaffed. One officer supposed that he could not get his rifle to go off, another that he had gone to sleep and lost his opportunities; a third gave it as his deliberate conviction that the baron had spent the day fraternising genially with “ Bob the Nailer.” The mansion occupied by the headquarters of Major Sclibn- berg’s battalion had belonged to an English family, in whose library Hammerstein, who was himself half an Englishman, had found a history of the defence of Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny days, in which work was recorded the pestilential marksmanship of a native sharp-shooter, who from a turret opposite to the Bailey-Guard Gate used to take deadly pot¬ shots at members of the beleaguered garrison. The English soldiers, it seemed, had bestowed on this destructive individual the nickname of “Bob the Nailer”; and this appellation the Saxon officers had transferred to the objectionable Frenchman who did his shooting from the cottage in the foreground of the Chateau de Launay. Stern and serious business as is war, human nature is so constituted as to find a humorous side to the most ghastly transactions, but it must be owned that the complexion of the jokes is of the grimmest. The little baron had an imperturbability beyond his years. The rough badinage of his comrades did not in the least dis¬ concert him. He was modestly confident that if the French¬ man should but once give him the merest flicker of a chance, he could and would kill him ; and he had the conviction that, be the man ever so artful, this morsel of good-fortune was bound, sooner or later, to come to him. Next morning before daybreak he was back in his lurking-place among Dr. Nelaton’s evergreens, lying prone there, his rifle ever at the shoulder, his gaze centred steadily on the aperture in the wall of the cottage. BOB THE NAILEB: ] 09 On the second evening he sauntered into Major Schon- berg’s salon, his manner quiet, unassertive—almost timid, indeed, as was his wont. A shout of derisive laughter greeted his entrance. “ Back again empty-handed, 0 doughty younker ? ” shouted lvirchbach. The battalion surgeon in his silkiest manner—he was a most sarcastic man, this quiet German Mr. Brown—asked whether “Bob the Nailer” stood in need of his professional services ? “Do you know, Herr Baron,” said Captain von Zanthier with a sneer, “ that your adversary up yonder bowled over another fellow of my company this afternoon ? ” Then out spoke Major von Schonberg himself: from the outset he had considered Steinfurst’s offer as rather a piece of impertinence. “ You have had two whole days, baron, for this experiment of yours with the rifle that wrought such execution in the Saxon Switzerland; to-morrow, if you please, you will return to your regular duty with your cavalry detachment.” “ Zu befehl, Herr Major !” replied Steinfurst, springing to the attitude of rigid attention on receiving a formal order. That acknowledged, he relaxed his muscles as much as a German officer in his most unbending moments ever does, and made a few quiet observations. “ I should not,” said he, “ have proposed going out again, major, in any case. Doctor, I don’t think ‘ Bob the Nailer,’ as you call him, has the slightest occasion to avail himself of your most valuable offer. Captain Kirclibach, I have not come back empty- handed ; I brought with me my ride—its barrel is fouled.” Then immediately arose the loud clamour of questioning. “ Have you really killed the fellow ? ” “ Are you really serious ? ” and so forth. The little baron, in his quietest manner, demurely replied, “Perhaps those gentlemen who are interested in this little matter will take the trouble to-morrow morning to go out to the front as far as the railway embankment, and from thence survey the front of the Frenchman’s cottage through their 110 MEMORIES OF WAR AXD TEACE. field-glasses.” And with that he bowed, said “ Good-night! ’ and went away to his sleeping-quarters over the stables in which were the horses of his detachment. Next morning was the morning of Christmas Day. In peaceful England, as throughout the German Fatherland— with peace indeed within its borders, but with sore or anxious hearts in palace and hovel, the church bells would presently be ringing out their chimes through the winter air. They were different sounds to which we listened that Christmas morning from the foreposts under the shadow of Mont Avron. From its blunt summit up yonder in the winter sunshine one of Colonel Stoffel’s big guns at intervals gave fire, the great shell hurtling and screaming over our heads as it sped on its swift flight to wreak mischief in Clichy or Montfermeil on the upland behind us. Never for five minutes were the forepost lines wholly silent from that uncomfortable, venomous, inter¬ mittent crackle of musketry fire—so futile, so savage, so bitterly eloquent of inveterate man-to-man hatred. The Feld- pastor, a little later, would be essaying to deliver his message of “ peace and good-will among men,” mocked to his very face by those nois}^ tokens of strife and rancour; and for his poor consolation might bethink himself of the stern aphorism, “ A la guerre comme a la guerre The war and its devilry meantime did not hinder us, as we met soon after sunrise for morning coffee in the salon, from wishing each other “ A Merry Christmas ”; and, coffee drunk and cigars lit, we started on the errand which the baron had so enigmatically suggested overnight. The major, devoured though he was by curiosity, did not think it compatible with his dignity to go; the baron himself did not put in an appearance. The ex¬ ploration party consisted of Kirchbach and his brother-in- law Hammerstein, Zanthier, Helldorf, Freiherr von Zehmen, three or four youngsters, and the Briton who had the run of the Maas Army forepost line from Sartrouville on the Seine north-west of Paris, round to Bonneuil and beyond to the Seine on the south-east. When we reached the railway embankment we found the men of the picket peering over at the distant cottage, each IT IS A DEAD MAN!” Ill man with his hand shading his eyes from the dazzle of the sun on the snow. Said the corporal of the picket to Captain Kirchbach :— “ There is something hanging out over the window-sill, Herr Hauptmann ; it looks like the upper part of a great-coat with the hood falling lower between the arms.” Hammerstein had his sight soonest adjusted. “ By God ! it is a dead man ! ” he shouted on the instant. Yes ; he was right. Hanging limply there from the lintel of the orifice that had been a window was the upper portion of the figure of a man, inverted and perfectly motionless. The broad shoulders showed out distinctly against the white of the wall, as did the black hair of the occiput; the face of course was invisible, being towards the wall. The arms had dropped at full length, their extremities reaching down to the snow-bank piled up against the lower part of the cottage wall. I was the only one of the party who carried a telescope. The binocular is handy, but its powers are limited. The telescope is a clumsier weapon, but once focussed and accu¬ rately aimed, it tells you twice as much as the best binocular. I had seen what I have just described through Hammerstein’s binocular; now I proceeded to train my telescope on to the spot, and with its assistance to go more into detail. What I saw was this. The clenched hands had clutched into the snow. The Ion" hair hung straight, discoloured—a dingy crimson. A rifle had slipped away from the figure’s grasp, and I could see it some twenty feet away fr ,m the window, lying on the level after it had skidded down the frozen slope of snow. There was no mistake about the matter; the baron had done his work thoroughly, and the sarcastic doctor’s services were not in the least required. It seems rather a ghastly sort of thing to recount; but, as a matter of fact, the French marksman’s extermination—the Irish equivalent, “removal,” was an inapplicable term— was accepted by universal acclamation as Baron Steinfurst’s Christmas-box to the battalion. A deputation formed up to him after Divine service, headed by Under-Officer Schulz, who, heels duly clinked together, the proper degree of motion- 112 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. less rigidity satisfactorily attained, opened his lantern-jaws, stammered vigorously, then got out: “ In name of battalion, a thousand thanks—verdammte Franzosicher Schweinhund ! ” Whereupon he went right about with extraordinary abruptness, nor recovered his customary measured and angular gait until he had got away several paces from where the little baron stood blushing. In as few words as might be, the modest lad told us the story as we stood around the piano buffet eating a scrappy luncheon. Till the afternoon of the second day of his watch he had resolutely held his fire, determined to wait till he could “ mak siccar.” During that day the Frenchman had fired several times, but had never given a glimpse of himself to the young marksman down among Dr. Nelaton’s hollies and laurels. His last shot he fired just before dusk ; this was the shot that killed the man of Zanthier’s company, and the only occasion that day on which his fire took effect. He then, as ever, fired without exposing himself; but when the bullet had sped, he forgot himself for the first time during the two days. Anxious, no doubt, to ascertain whether he had done execution, he had moved forwards out of his safe retirement, and projected his head and shoulders over the window-sill, peering out to his own right front—the direction in which he had fired. All this he did with a jerk. He was in the act of retracting himself when the little baron took his snapshot at him. Steinfurst had not for nothing practised rabbit-shooting with the rifle. The Frenchman dropped on the instant, falling, as we had seen him, with head and shoulders outside the window. The baron had seen the momentary convulsive grasp, the tearing up of the snow with the hands, and then the sudden stillness which showed that the “ pig-dog ” would take no more German lives. Being within range of the French forepost line in rear of the cottage, he did not quit his position until the dusk was merging into darkness. That was all he had to say. The dead marksman had no successor in the occupation of the cottage. Strangely enough, the French never ventured up to it, although there could have been little risk in doing so THE END OF TIIE “FIG-DOG. 113 under cover of night; and the body hung there as it had fallen until early in January, when Colonel Stoffel, his big guns, and his troops were bombarded away from the summit of Mont Avron by the fire of the German “ walruses,” as we used to call the siege cannon, from Maison Guyot and else¬ where. Then the French outpost line was of course drawn in, and the region about Yillemomble and the Chateau de Launay lapsed to the Saxons, who buried the dead sharp¬ shooter under the window from which he had sped death so often while alive. He had regularly lived in the cottage, it seemed. It was found quite copiously victualled with bacon, tinned food, wine, and coffee ; and the man had brought with him a small library of good solid reading, as well as writing materials. On the table in the back room there lay a half- finished letter which began, “ Ma tres chere femme,” and which told in the most matter-of-fact manner of the results of his ball-practice. He sent his love to his children and begged them to pray for his continued success. He was not a soldier of the Line. He wore the coarse uniform of a private of the national guard, but his linen was fine and marked with a good name. In the left breast-pocket of his tunic was found the photograph of a handsome woman, with a little child at her knee and a baby in her arms. No doubt the “verdammte Franzosicher Schweinhund” was a devoted patriot according to his lights, and regarded himself as fighting the good fight pro aris et focis. There are so many different ways of looking at a thing, you see. Schonberg’s fellows gave me the relics of the dead man when next I visited them. The capitulation could not be very far off now, and I should be early in Paris. Well, the capitulation came, and I was early into Paris. One of the first things 1 did after attending to my work was to deliver the relics at the address I had, leaving along with them a short note. The sharpshooter turned out to be one ot our own profession. As did so many other gallant French soldiers of the pen, he had run to arms the moment danger threatened the sacred soil. He had escaped from the field of Sedan to form an item in the huge garrison of Paris, and I 114 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. burning with zeal and devotion to duty, he had thrown himself into the unworthy business of pot-shooting. The poor wife thought him a veritable hero, and his work glorious and patriotic. His children had a cribbage-board, with the pegs of which they had proudly kept the tally of his homicides. 1 believe, before the Commune days came, that I had almost got to look at the matter from their point of view. I never knew sweeter children. y. PARIS IN PROSTRATION. Tidings of Capitulation of Paris received at Margency, evening January 23th — Inclusion of St. Denis Forts in Capitulation Convention—January 29th, Crown Prince of Saxony entered St. Denis—Attitude of St. Denis— Solicitude uf Inhabitants for Protection of Cathedral—The Misery of the Five Days’ Bombardment—Devotion of International Ambulance— Luncheon on Horse-flesh—Entry into Paris, “Cochon,” “Assassin”— Thankful for Prussian Money—“Paris utterly Cowed”—Sadness and Self-respect—American Legation—Dr. Charles Gordon—The last Fowl— Questions and Answers—Absence of Crime during Siege—The Queues outside the Butchers’ and Bakers’. URING the period from the surrender of Metz to the -L' capitulation of Paris—in other words, from the beginning of November, 1870 until the end of January, 1871—I was attached to the headquarters of the Army of the Meuse, holding the northern and eastern sections of the invest¬ ment of Paris. The chief of that army was the Crown Prince (now the King) of Saxony, who with his headquarter staff abode for the most part in the chateau of Margency, about ten miles due north of Paris, in the heart of the forest of Montmorency. At nine o’clock on the evening of January 28th, while the headquarter staff were assembled in the Crown Prince’s drawing-room after dinner, an orderly brought in a telegram to the Prince. His Royal Highness, having read it, handed it to General von Schlotheim his chief-of-stafif. That officer perused it in his deliberate way; then rising, he walked to the open door communi¬ cating between the billiard-room and the salon, and there read the telegram aloud. It was in the name of the German Emperor, and it announced that two hours earlier Count Bismarck and M. Jules Favre had set their hands to a convention in terms of which an armistice to last for twenty-one days was already in effect. It was not easy to settle down to cards or billiards after such news as that. i 2 116 MEMORIES OF WAR AXD PEACE. The terms of the armistice included the capitulation of the St. Denis forts, which had undergone a five days’ bom¬ bardment by the heavy guns that the German engineers and artillerists had brought up and located in prepared battery-emplacements in commanding positions. On the morning of the 29th the Crown Prince and his staff rode towards St. Denis. There was a long halt at the half-way village, to await the return of the officer who had gone forward into the place to arrange with the com¬ mandant for the surrender of the forts. Reports came that Admiral de Ronciere, the officer commanding in St. Denis, was sulky and impracticable and that the aspect of the French troops was threatening. Meanwhile two infantry regiments and four field-batteries had pushed forward and occupied a low eminence midway between St. Denis and Enghien; and a staff of engineer officers with a detachment of pioneers and artillerymen had gone on into Fort de la Briche, to draw the charges from the mines and to take over the guns and magazines. It was now afternoon, and although Major Welcke had not yet returned from the fortress, the Prince and his staff went forward. Near the enceinte Welcke was at length met, bringing the report that all the French troops had not yet evacuated St. Denis, and suggesting that as the civilian population, most part of which was armed, had rather a threatening aspect, a strong force of occupation should be sent on in advance. We rode forward with Fort de la Briche close on our right. It had suffered some¬ what severely from the heavy German fire, but clearly no practicable breach had been effected. Fort du Nord, which was presently passed, had been more heavily dealt with. Great pieces of the earthwork had been torn away, and the wall of the scarp had been shattered and penetrated in places. A terrible fire had converged on the gate; one drawbridge had been demolished and the other could not be raised. Just inside the works there was a halt to permit the delegate from the French Etat Major to make some explanations. He came forward—a wan, sad-faced “ THE UHLANS ! THE UHLANS ! ” 117 young officer of marine artillery, with a grave dignity in the pale face and in the weary, anxious eyes that commanded respect and commiseration. He was quite alone, and the solitary man looked forlorn yet full of a gallant mournful pride, as he rode up to the Crown Prince with a high¬ bred greeting that assuredly was not of republican France. His statement was that all the St. Denis troops had been withdrawn into Paris, that the mobiles, national guard, and sedentaries had been disarmed, and that the population had come to its senses. The supporting force being close up, a German military band struck up the “Paris March”; and behind the music the Crown Prince and his staff rode up the main street over shattered barricades and undrawn mines. The whole town was a ruin. There was a strange, un-French silence: one marked the lowering brows and caught many a “Sacre!” muttered from between the teeth. That all the arms had not been given up was very apparent: and the chief-of-staff ordered to the front the Crown Prince’s escort of Saxon Guard-Cuirassiers. As the splendid horsemen clattered forward at a sharp canter, the women and children and indeed many of the men, ran into the battered houses shrieking, “The Uhlans! The Uhlans!” In the Place the Prince halted while there marched past him in solid ranks the brigade which had been detailed to garrison St. Denis, its band playing the “ Paris March ” and then “ Ich bin ein Preusse.” I could hear the French spectators gloomily owning one to another their admiration of the physique and soldierly bearing of the German troops. Strong patrols of occupation were at once marched into the forts, and a forepost line was established five hundred paces nearer Paris than the forts. The French commandant of Fort de l’Est reported that there had fallen in and on it during one day of the bombardment no fewer than 1,200 heavy shells. When I rode into St. Denis in the forenoon of the 30th, I found that the town had in a measure recovered its tone since the German entry of the day before. Some 118 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. business was already being transacted between the shop¬ keeping inhabitants and soldiers of the German garrison. I made in haste for the venerable cathedral, anxious to ascertain what amount of damage it had sustained. The Republicans who had painted Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite on its portals had not allowed their republicanism to render them negligent of the historic edifice and the monuments it contained: the exterior had been banked up high all round with sandbags which had stopped many shells. Only four shells had penetrated into the interior. The mediaeval stained glass was almost entirely intact. One of the elaborately-carved crosses on the top of a buttress had been splintered off, and a coping-stone had been shattered; this, it appeared to me, summed up the damage done to the cathedral from the shell-fire of the enemy. The aspect of the interior was very strange. The tombs of the kings of France had all been protected by sandbags; the statues had been enclosed by wooden frames and sandbags built around the framework. Con¬ sidering- the weight and duration of the bombardment, the cathedral had escaped wonderfully well. The same could not be said of the utterly-demolished houses in its vicinity, nor of the new church of St. Denis, the steeple of which was wrecked, one side of it stove in, and its interior a chaos of mortar, stones, and smashed para¬ phernalia. The little Protestant chapel bad suffered worse than any other religious edifice in St. Denis, and its poor pastor was to be seen trotting dolefully about, engaged in the task of picking up the fragments of his chapel from the open spaces in the vicinity. It must have been verily the reign of the Prince of the Power of Darkness, that period of five days during which the bombardment of St. Denis lasted. The shells were continually crashing into the houses, and they were ploughing up the streets as with the deepest subsoil plough ever invented. There was no safety for any but in the cold and dark cellars; so heavy were the German pro¬ jectiles that not always in the cellars was there found UNDER FIRE. 119 safety. There were houses the garrets and cellars of which had been battered into a shapeless mass of stone and mortar. If you asked the loafing bystanders whether any had been buried in the ruins, they moodily muttered “ Qui sait ? ” shrugged their shoulders, and turned away. It seemed to me that there must be not a few unfortunates buried under those jagged rubbish heaps: but there was nobody who had interest or energy to explore, and “Qui sait ? ” might have stood for the vague epitaph. It happened that in St. Denis during the bombardment there was a branch of the International Ambulance, the devoted members of which took their lives in their hands and bravely went out to do what good they might. They dragged the maimed and ailing out of the shattered houses, they collected the corpses from the streets and the ruins, and they buried the dead with some semblance of decency. They went round the town urging that the women and children should go forth from the doomed town, and retire into Paris. The women and children had huddled into the semi-security of the cellars. The shells were crashing into the streets, and avalanches of stone and brick were continually crashing down upon the side-walks. The women peeping forth shudderingly, declared that they would rather die where they were than incur a more certain and fearful death by sallying forth into that tempest of iron, stone, and bricks. So they turned back to hunger and cold in the dank caverns, and cuddling their children to their bosoms utterly refused to budge. The Pastor Sacdier had gone to the commandant and asked for permission to go out as a padementaire and beg of the Germans to grant but two hours’ cessation of the bombardment, that the women and children might have the opportunity to get away without the risk of being struck down as they went. The admiral refused, and the ruthless devilry went on. Then the Pastor sent an appeal to the Paris journals, begging all who owned vehicles to send them to St. Denis for the removal of the women and children. The response was weak: there appeared not a solitary representative of 1-20 MEMORIES OF WAR AND PEACE. those ambulances whose members took delight in flag's and gave themselves to the vanities of brass buttons and fantastic uniforms. About half a dozen private vehicles did present themselves, and the sick and wounded were removed into factories on the plain between St. Denis and Paris. Then children followed and women exeat with child, and then the other women, till the factories on the plain became like caravanseries. Meanwhile a detachment of this ambulance was engaged in carrying under cover the wounded struck down at the guns, toiling with a zeal and energy that merited better support. For that species of service the bold national guards did not offer themselves: their sphere of duty was the wine-shop. There they drank till their debauch made them reckless, and they sallied out into the streets, as often as not only to give the ambulance more trouble with their worthless carcases. In the afternoon I accompanied two German officers in a ride beyond the foreposts in the direction of the Paris gate of La Chapelle. In the course of the day the re¬ strictions on passing out of Paris had been materially relaxed, and the Avenue de Paris was thronged with the outward bound. It seemed to me that if they could get out I could get in, and quitting my companions I rode towards the gate. But as I went, it appeared advisable to make sure that I had the important document with me which vouched for me being a British subject, and, consequently, a “ benevolent neutral.” Alas, not anticipating the occur¬ rence of such an opportunity I had left my passport in my Margency quarters, and there was no alternative but to postpone the attempt to enter Paris until the following day. Next morning, that of 31st January, I started out better equipped. Calling en route on M. Saglier the good pastor of St. Denis, he hospitably asked me to have lunch. I accepted the invitation, he bade his servant “ bring in the meat,” and I made an assault with vigour and per¬ severance on the rather lean and ragged roast joint which was placed before me, the good cleric looking on benignantly the while. I asked no questions till the edge “A BAS LE PRUSSIEX!” 121 was off my appetite, when I inquired of the minister what I was eating. “ Well,” said he, “ of course you are eating horse, and a very choice joint it is. I knew the animal very well while he was alive. He was young and plump and of a grey colour, which, it is well known, indicates tenderness.” The pastor had been eating horseflesh for four months; not because he was forced to do so, but because he had a numerous dependency of poor people to aid whom he chose to practise economy. Taking leave of the good clergyman I rode towards Paris along the great chaussee to the gate of La Chapelle, which I found barred. After the group of which I was one had waited for half an hour, an officer appeared and shouted “ To the gate of St. Ouen! ” St. Ouen was the next gate to the northward, and we all therefore made to the right, I being mounted beating the others who were all on foot. This gate was open and a gendarme was examining passes. I rode on slowly, looking straight between my horse’s ears; and somehoAV no person in authority took any heed of me. As I rode down the Boulevard Ornano, I came upon sundry groups of more or less drunk national guards. One of those, as I passed him raised the shout “ A bas le Prussian! ” for which I own he had some reason since I wore a Prussian cap and paletot. He further complimented me by calling me “ cochon ” and “ assassin.” Others took up the cry, and matters were get¬ ting serious. The clamour was spreading and men tried to clutch hold of my bridle. I judged boldness to be the wisest policy; so, facing about, I pushed up to the man who had flrst shouted, proclaimed myself a harmless Englishman, and reproached my denouncer for molesting an inoffensive and peaceable wayfarer. The demon of cowardly and venomous suspicion had not yet been developed. A fortnight or so later, I should have thought myself fortu¬ nate to get clear off after having been marched back to the guard-house, half a dozen roughs on each bridle-rein, half as many more at each leg, and made to exhibit my 1-2 MEMORIES OF WAR AXD RE ACE. passport to the officer on duty. But hunger is a wonderful agent in tending to influence men to concern themselves with their own business, and in keeping truculence in a state of dormancy. I cannot say, even after I had got rid of the citizens who had assailed me with cries of “ cochon,” that I much admired the aspect of the Boulevard Magenta. It was densely crowded with soldiers, and some of them might be unpleasantly patriotic. But no; they were all too much busied with their own affairs, getting their pay and drinking it while they discussed events. Halting to go into a shop to make an inquiry—I was not familiar with the geography of Paris—I called a soldier of the Line who was strolling on the pavement to hold my horse. On coming out I had a little talk with him. Yes, he had had enough of it! They had nearly killed him, those terrible Prussians, and he was very hungry. When would the gates open for the introduction of food ? I put my hand into my pocket to find a tip for the poor fellow, when I discovered that I had only Prussian money. I asked him whether he could do anything with a ten- groschen piece. It was silver, and might have had the devil’s pitchfork stamped upon it instead of the Prussian eagle, for all that the hungry linesman cared. Three weeks later it was not wise to carry, much less to show, German money. “ Paris is utterly cowed, fairly beaten,” so said the first Englishman I met. I had not been long enough inside, either to agree with or to dissent from him. What I did see was that Paris was orderly and decent. The streets were crowded, almost wholly with men in uniform. Civil¬ ians were comparatively rare, and the few seen wore an aspect of dejection. Many shops were open, but a consider¬ able proportion were closed. It seemed possible to purchase everything except edibles. There was assuredly no lack of intoxicants; yet with the exception of my friends in the Boulevard Ornano, I saw scarcely a tipsy man. The food shops had a very sparse show in their windows. There were confitures, jellies, preserves, etc.; but solid comestibles THE LAST FOWL IN PATHS. 123 were conspicuous by their rarity and probably also by their price. In one shop I saw several large shapes of stuff that looked like lard. When I asked what it was, I was told that it was horse-fat. The bakers’ shops were closed, and the gratings were down before those of the butchers’. Sad with an exceeding great sadness—that was my impression of Paris long before I reached the American Legation; self-respecting, too, in her prostration; not blatant; not dis¬ posed to collect in jabbering crowds. Each man went his way with chastened face and listless gait. After visiting the American Legation, where undisguised amazement was expressed at my appearance, I made my way to the little Hotel St. Honore in the Faubourg of the same name, and close to the British Embassy. I had tilled my wallet chiefly with newspapers, and had stowed away for an exigency only a few slices of ham. When I reached my quarters the women-servants of the house asked permis¬ sion to take the meagre plateful out and exhibit it as a curiosity to their neighbours; and visitors, attracted by the news, came straggling in and begged to see the long unaccus¬ tomed viand. The worthy landlord of the house, himself a Briton, had for his boarder throughout the siege Dr. (now Surgeon-General) Charles Gordon, the British medical Com¬ missioner in Paris; and he took pride in asserting that the doctor had lived as well as any man in Paris. When dinner came it bore out the boasts of our Boniface. Positively there was a fowl; pretty well, so it was said, the last fowl in Paris. Our host had been offered eighty francs for the bird while yet it had its feathers on, but had refused the tempting offer; and so we had him for dinner with my ham as an accompaniment—only I stood out of participa¬ tion in the ham so that the rarity might go the further with the others. There are advantages in bein