Chapter I: The Siege (1)

Instructions caused me at this juncture to quit the advance upon Paris, and I left Meaux on the morning of the 17th September. It may not be altogether devoid of interest to recall the position of the German armies on that day so far as accorded with my knowledge. The troops had hourly been pouring to the front since first the 6th Army Corps crossed the pile-bridge at Trilport. The object, it was already known, was completely to invest the capital. The 5th Army Corps, with the head-quarters of the Crown Prince, striking south from Coulommiers, was pushing on through the villages to Chaulmes, and thence to Brie, on its road to cross the Seine at Villeneuve St. George; the pontoon train was in front between the field artillery and the infantry. The 5th might have marched faster, but that it had to tarry till the 2nd Bavarian Army Corps (still on the road from La Ferté) should have got up with it, taking the more circuitous route through the villages of Montceaux, Vanteuil, Boutigny, and so on to the great Melun road at Segy. The 5th and the Bavarians were then to push forward round in the direction of Versailles; the interval between their right and the Marne to be occupied by the 6th Army Corps. The destruction of the bridge over the Marne at Lagny had occasioned some temporary inconvenience, but this had already been remedied by the erection of a pontoon. The artillery of the 6th Army Corps had all gone to the south front. General Vinoy, with a field army, mostly consisting of regular troops, was reported by the Uhlans to be outside the cordon of forts on the south of Paris; and it seemed as if the 3rd Army might have to fight for its passage across the Seine. The Saxons were in force at Dammartin, touching our right, while the 4th Army Corps, the right wing of the Maas Army, was feeling round the north side of Paris. The King was expected to move forward in a few days, and occupy the château of Ferrières.

The bridges over the canals as I drove back to La Ferté on my return journey had already been repaired, but the Marne was still crossed by the pile bridge, although there was an alternative pontoon lower down the stream. Some little distance on the Meaux side of La Ferté I encountered the advance of the 2nd Bavarian Corps, and I had to strike off to the right on the road to Montmirail, till I came to a cross road, which brought me down again into the valley of the Seine upon Nogent, right into the rear of the Bavarians. There were no troops on this road, but it had been extensively traversed during the few preceding days, and the people were only just beginning to return to their homes. The villagers were very timid, and, I may add, very hungry, all along it, but it was wonderful how little damage the Germans had done during their transit. The poultry still strutted about the road through the village, and there was hardly a broken pane of glass to be seen. Furniture and valuables the people had secreted before the troops had come upon them, and the chief injury seemed to have been sustained by the straw stacks, upon which the men had drawn freely to make beds wherewithal in the empty houses. Over Nogent the wave had passed a little earlier, and the place had proportionately recovered more. Meat, both beef and mutton, was hanging in the open butcher’s shop. All the way to Château Thierry was visible the eager desire of the peasantry and farmers to overtake temporarily arrested agricultural labour. Except for the occasional traces of a bivouac and now and then a broken down vine stem, there was no evidence that a vast army had so recently traversed this road. The children played around the doors beside the old crones at their knitting, the men and women were in the fields working with a clumsy assiduity, and it seemed to me not uncheerfully. The vine-pickers were in the vineyards, filling their creels with the great clusters of somewhat over-ripe grapes; but their number was, no doubt, smaller than had peace reigned in the land. There were cattle in the pastures and horses at the plough and between the shafts of the carts. I do not think any one not aware of the fact could have gathered from outward appearance that anything of exceptional importance had recently occurred in the beautiful and smiling valley. In Château Thierry were a handful of Bavarian bullock drivers and a few footsore infantrymen. The people of this beautiful town had never forsook it in numbers so great as had the inhabitants of some other places; nor had they any reason to repent of their courage. Now it seemed as if they had fallen again into the somnolent routine of a provincial town. The burghers gossiped on the pavement, the young ladies promenaded in the avenues of noble trees, the lads squatted on the brink of the Marne, angling with a lazy pertinacity. The Hôtel de l’Eléphant was empty, changed indeed from that Elephant which I had seen a few days before, when Von Tümpling’s staff were buzzing the bottles in the _salle à manger_, and the cook was in a white heat at the multiplicity of orders. The landlord, a gentleman himself of the elephantine pattern, confided to me, with a sage wag of the head, that he would be heartily glad to see _Messieurs les Prussiens_ come back to stop as long as they could make it convenient, for they were the best customers he had ever had, never grumbled, and invariably rejected red wine for champagne, for which they paid promptly the price demanded.

At Dormans were a considerable number of Germans, but no regular force—only sick and convalescents, and stragglers, chiefly belonging to the 63rd Regiment. Neither here did I find any misery. The disconsolateness of Madame at the hotel only proceeded from the circumstance that she had a son in MacMahon’s Chasseurs de France, of whose fate at Sedan she knew nothing. The shops were all open, and the show in the windows was by no means despicable. Next morning, in and about Ville en Tardenoise, I met and passed the whole of the 11th Army Corps on its march to the front. The men looked fresh and well, and the horses in capital condition; but the ranks were considerably thinner than before that terrible struggle on to the plateau above Floing. Rheims was occupied by a division of Bavarians and another of Würtemburgers. Although this town had been in a state of remarkable ferment on the occasion of the first entry of the Germans, it had got used to the situation in a very short time, and now it looked as if the German occupation was a thing from time immemorial. It was Sunday, and citizens and Bavarians were streaming out of the noble old cathedral and the various churches of the city in all the apparent friendliness of fellow-worshippers. Among the poorer classes in Rheims there had been considerable hardship, owing to the dearness of provisions and the obligation incumbent on them of providing food for the soldiers billeted on them. The German authorities had, however, averted further distress from this source, by establishing a commissariat for troops billeted on all those unable to support them.

Although the route between Rethel and Sedan had been traversed by a large portion of the German host on its south-western march after Sedan, the district, at least as far as Boulzicourt, seemed to have either suffered very little, or to have recuperated with surprising alacrity. As in the valley of the Marne, field operations were going on briskly. Agricultural horses seemed plentiful, and I saw several great herds of cattle in the flat water meadows. I felt a deep interest in the portion of road between Flize and Sedan. I had traversed it several times before—once on the day of the battle of Sedan, when a few scared old women, sitting crouching by their black hearths amidst the crashing of the cannonading, and an occasional scanty group of timid-eyed men peeping out from behind the stone dykes, were the only evidences of resident population in villages that bore the red-fresh impress of the fangs of the war-dog.

The people were gradually coming back to Flize, Dom de Mesnil, and Fernois, the three villages between Boulzicourt and Sedan. In Flize it seemed that there must be plenty of wine, as well as plenty to drink it, for the auberge was crammed with the blue blouses. The females of the families had fallen into the old familiar way of sitting knitting in the sunshine outside their doors. But many houses were still closed up, and here and there the blackened skeleton of a roofless house, a grim memorial of the hot shell-fire. Over against Donchery the peasants were fishing the dead horses out of the Meuse, and burying them in great holes. It is impossible to describe the emotions which almost every step of this road called up in my mind—associated as it was with events fixed so indelibly in my memory. Here was the little house at which I had seen Napoleon alight from his carriage on the morning of the 2nd September. A child was playing on the spot where the Emperor and Bismarck sat in that earnest colloquy of theirs which I watched so intently. A woman was spreading clothes on the path in the potato plot, up and down which I had seen the ruined man moodily pacing as he tugged his dishevelled moustache, after Bismarck had drawn the white cap with the yellow band down over his eyes, and posted off to take counsel with his master. To the left was the ruined railway bridge over the Meuse. In my immediate front was the Château Bellevue, before which I had seen the perturbed meeting of the monarchs—Napoleon bowing low to hide the workings of his face; Wilhelm studying not to hide his emotion. Away across the low alluvial plain and the sweep of the river, that ghastly schlacht-feld sloped upward from the low bluffs,—now brown and bare, but, when I saw it once before, a fearful space in which surged to and fro, in the gaps of the white smoke, the heaving masses of maddened combatants—when I saw it yet again a ghastly expanse of death, here chequered with dead grey horses and gay-clad dead riders, there flecked with the more sombre uniforms of the German soldiers lying thick where the mitrailleuse hail had beaten them to the earth. Below it was the island, with the château in its centre, on to which I had seen the ceaseless stream of French prisoners pouring on the 3rd—the once-gay gardens of the château now bare, and the trees stripped of their foliage. And farther to my right lay Sedan itself, with the German landwehr sentry on its ramparts; and farther to the right, Bazeilles of ghastly memory.

The scene had changed since last I looked upon it. As I drove down the gentle slope into Sedan I met the townspeople, male and female, the Cook’s tourists, and the relic-hunting riff-raff of Belgium, sauntering in dilettante fashion along the road, which three weeks ago had a ghastly fringe of corpses. The relic-hunters were picking up the knapsacks out of the ditch, and stealing the sword bayonets that had been set up in lieu of tombstones. In the open space between the enceinte and the minor fortifications stood the captured French artillery—five long straight rows of cannons, seventy-five in each row, besides numerous mitrailleuses and tumbrils. A single sentry did duty over the vast park. In the moats, German soldiers were punting, and from the bridges they were bobbing for weapons of war hidden by the water, occasionally bringing to the surface the bloated corpses of those who had erstwhile wielded these same weapons. All the shops in the town were open, and business seemed tolerably brisk. That the spirit of enterprise was not wholly dead was evinced by huge posters announcing “an immense consignment of cigars,” and every _Débit de tabac_ was doing a roaring trade. The convalescent wounded, with pallid faces and thin limbs, were placidly sunning themselves on the steps of the public buildings or tottering feebly about the streets. One young sous-officer interested me greatly. The reader may have seen the matrix of a branch covered by a round plaster of clay to prevent the canker from getting into the heart of the tree. This quiet, pale-faced lad had lost his left arm at the shoulder. It seemed to me that the shoulder itself had been taken out close to the collar-bone, and the bandages stood out just like the clay bole to which I have referred. He must have made a very quick recovery to be able to walk about not three weeks after a capital operation of this nature.

The siege of Metz, to watch which was my new duty, had virtually begun on that woeful day for the French arms when the ravine of Gravelotte was stormed, and Bazaine, baulked in his last desperate effort to keep hold of any of the main roads leading Parisward from Metz, was hurled back under the guns of Fort St. Quentin. On the day after Gravelotte, the soldiers of Prince Frederick Charles and Steinmetz had begun, in the prompt and thorough German manner, to girdle the environs of Metz with a series of defensive earthworks, linked together by a continuous cincture of entrenchment, so well contrived and so formidable as to reduce to a minimum the apparent discrepancy in strength between a vast army free to make its concentrations on any selected point, and a host more numerous, indeed, but necessarily attenuated as regarded any one point by reason of the immensity of the circle around the radius-border of which it had to show an unbroken front. That there was a time, during which Bazaine could have hewed his way through this girdle, if he had commenced his effort with discretion, and prosecuted it with daring energy and regardlessness of loss, it does not appear that in the nature of things there can be any reasonable doubt. What effect his emancipation would have produced, had it been effected soon after Gravelotte, is a question involving considerations so various that, in such a work as this, I may be excused referring to them in detail. But it is obvious that had Bazaine been a leader of originality, self-reliance, promptness, and boldness, instead of, as I estimate him, an honest, rather sluggish man, thankful to get his initiative from some one else, instead of ready to take his own initiative—a military formalist mainly, distracted between his political and his military obligations, and utterly unversed in the rare art of regalvanising beaten troops,—had Bazaine been another sort of man, he might surely have seriously complicated von Moltke’s strategy.[3] Suppose that he had cut his way out in the obviously most eligible direction, somewhere between Plappeville and Maizières les Metz, and marched at the pace of the first Napoleon on the track of the Maas army. The Germans can march, but they cannot fly; the hot energy of the Red Prince could not have accomplished the impossibility of drawing in from the fringe of the wide circle an army strong enough to give Bazaine battle before he had won the start by several marches. It was the Maas army which met MacMahon in the teeth at Buzancy and Nouart as he came lumbering through the Argonne into the Maas valley; the third army had swung round, not in time to head him, but to take him on the right flank, extended in dishevelled march all along the valley. But if Bazaine had been close on the track of the Crown Prince of Saxony, the latter would have been in a vice. He could not have fought facing both ways. Had he elected to arrest MacMahon, Bazaine would have been upon him from behind; had he faced about and met Bazaine, the cannon of MacMahon would have been roaring on his new rear. His position, in fact, would have been untenable; and it seems plain that the only course open to him would have been to slip out of the _crux_ to the southward, and thus to have allowed the coalescence of the army of Châlons and the army from Metz. The outcome of a junction so formidable it would be folly to attempt to define. The French situation would still have been precarious—perhaps nearly as bad as it was the day before Sedan. For on three sides three German armies would still have hemmed it in, and there was nothing behind it but the frontier. On the other hand, there would surely have been much possible to an army of 300,000 men, supposing the troops in good fighting heart, and the generals worth the skin of an orange.

But Bazaine lay supine behind his forts till he got his initiative in the shape of the plan to co-operate with MacMahon. It seems clear that the planners of that general’s disastrous expedition contemplated that his march would be bloodless till he should have reached the north-western flank of the army environing Metz. Letters from Metz, intercepted by the besiegers, bore testimony to the fact that MacMahon was expected to make his appearance in that vicinity about the 30th of August. The signal for the Metz army was to have been three bombs fired in the air by MacMahon, and then a sortie was to be made at the same moment that the army of Châlons was to fall on the German rear. It is actually the case that Bazaine was cautioned against allowing the guns of the fortress to have too much elevation when fired in support of the sortie, to obviate the risk of the projectiles falling in the co-operating army on the further side of the Germans. But MacMahon had other fish to fry, and the three rockets never flashed into Metz the signal for co-operative action; so on the 31st, in blind bewilderment, Bazaine made his first great sortie, and made it in the direction in which success would have been most difficult to compass—in the direction of the north-east, the church spire of St. Barbe being seemingly his landmark. Apart from the actual difficulties to be encountered on unfavourable ground and against exceptionally strong opposing works, the selection of this direction for such a sortie seems simply inexplicable, unless Bazaine contemplated, not a junction with MacMahon, but a bold push into the Rhine provinces—a conception no admirer has ever dreamt of attributing to him. MacMahon was expected from the north-west. Bazaine, had he cut through on the north-east, would have had to march to the junction round a third of the circumference of the compass, giving time for a German concentration in the path of his circuitous march. But he failed to break out: it may have been for want of persistency, a faculty in which he seems to have been weak; it may have been that he recognised what the Germans contend was recognisable, that the longer he tried the worse he would fail; and after this effort, while his chances of extrication diminished daily, his prospects, were he once outside, grew more and more precarious. He seems in a great measure to have accepted his fate, and solaced himself with the reflection that, at all events, he was keeping from other work the great armies which constituted his besiegers. That not a man of those might be judged superfluous, he made sorties from time to time during the month of September, not of a character suggesting an attempt to break out, but in force enough to convince the makers of his toils that the ropes by which the captive elephant was bound were not a whit too strong. No doubt, too, although I believe Bazaine to have been a perfectly honest and loyal Frenchman, he was hampered in his generalship by political considerations—of all trammels the most ruinous to daring action. The last of these partial sorties, most of which seem to have had supplies for their object, took place on the 28th of September, the day before I reached the front, and from the Germans engaged in it I gleaned some particulars respecting it.

The German foreposts occupied, in no great strength, the village of Colombey, where there are three large châteaux, in the upper stories of which there had been left by the inhabitants a considerable store of grain. They had taken refuge in Metz, and probably acquainted the French of the existence of these stores. Anyhow, in the afternoon of the 28th the French, in large numbers, and covered by the artillery of Fort St. Julien, made a dash at Colombey, their advance followed by a number of empty waggons. For once they surprised the comparatively weak German foreposts, and drove them out of Colombey. Covering their operations by throwing forward tirailleurs into the woods to the front and towards La Planchette, they filled the waggons with the grain and started them on the return journey. But, meanwhile, the Prussian artillery had come to the front, and the shells fell thick among the Frenchmen in Colombey and the convoy on the road. The former scuttled back in great haste under the guns of St. Julien; the waggons went on at a gallop, but out of thirty-six only fourteen succeeded in getting safe off. The rest were arrested _in transitu_ by the influence which the Prussian shells exercised on the animals which drew the waggons—an influence which manifested itself in limbs blown in a variety of directions. There was no great loss in killed or wounded on either side. A captain of the 44th Regiment was killed under circumstances which were a disgrace to civilized warfare. When his detachment was in retreat he fell wounded severely, but not mortally. His men placed him in shelter, and then left him as they fell back. When they recovered the village, they found the corpse of their captain mangled barbarously—his fingers cut off for the sake of the rings he wore, and his throat cut from ear to ear. I found the Germans justly incensed at this atrocity.

The cargo which the train carried that left Saarbrück on the morning of the 29th of September, was of a sufficiently diversified character. There were country-women, with great tubs of butter, which they were taking up to the front to find a good market; officers and soldiers, new men and convalescents, both from sickness and wounds, on their way to join and re-join their regiments; Saarbrück merchants going up for orders; a few Englishmen, who nourished the idea that the fighting was chronically in progress just outside the station at Courcelles, and that, by walking a pace or two, they would be able to command a bird’s-eye view of the whole affair; marketenders, who had been making investments; and a few Frenchmen on their way to the intermediate towns, who were doing their best to seem as German as possible. Our way to Forbach lay through a corner of the ground on which was fought the battle of Spicheren, and, as the train passed through the woods near Schönecken, I saw not a few graves of the men who had fallen in the fierce fight of the 6th of August. Near St. Avold we passed the débris of the train which had been shattered in a collision that brought death to several French prisoners, and at this town also we found a large depôt of military stores and provender. There was a still larger depôt at Falquemont, where also were collected a quantity of artillery waggons captured from the French at Gravelotte. The station at Courcelles was a sight. It was a centre from which radiated in every direction long lines of waggons of every description, carrying stores of all kinds to the different army posts, north, south, east, and west. All around the deserted little village itself are great herds of cattle, piles of stores, whole pyramids of medical comforts, and long lines of sick and relay horses. The bustle was immense, and yet everything seemed orderly. There was of course an Etappen Commando in the station, but the worthy lieutenant who represented the said Etappen Commando knew nothing whatever about anything. All he could or would tell me was that Prince Frederick Charles’ headquarters were at Corny, on the Moselle, to the south of Metz, but he did not know the distance. He had no waggons, no horses, very little temper, and less time to gossip. The circumstances were sufficiently unpromising. One might as well look for quartern loaves in the kennel of Fleet-street as for quarters in or around Courcelles; and the field-post, the only and that a precarious means of getting to Corny, did not leave till three in the morning. I took the resolution of pursuing the policy out of which I often found luck eventuate, of going straight to the front till the foreposts would let me go no further. Striking northward then, and inclining westward from Courcelles, I passed in succession through the villages of Laquenexy, Marsilly, Ogy, and St. Agnan. All these I found occupied by troops, constituting the second investing line environing the fortress and town of Metz.

All the district was dotted over with the graves of the battle fought by Steinmetz on the 14th of August, and of men who had fallen in the various forepost fights. From Courcelles the scene was one of utter barrenness and desolation, wastes traversed everywhere by tracks of waggons, chequered by abandoned bivouacs, the leafy bowers of which, plastered with mud, stood forlorn and unused, all the troops having been got under cover except the foreposts who necessarily had to remain in the open. Very few of the inhabitants still remained in the district, and of these the plight was very miserable. Agricultural occupations were at a standstill; the vineyards, traversed by waggon roads and cut in two by entrenchments, were utterly ruined. The houses were wrecks, many of them wholly or partially burned by fires kindled by the shells. In Courcelles, the only living thing not German was a mongrel dog which stuck to his kennel when his owner ran away. The Germans had christened him “Courcelles,” and the time-serving rogue was already more than half German—traitor that he was. In the forepost village of Montoy, which I visited the same evening, I found a considerable number of inhabitants. One old woman sat placidly before the door knitting stockings, while the troops lined the entrenchment just in her front. I suppose she had got so used to shells and bullets that she did not mind them, or it might be that her despair had culminated in a sort of apathy of equanimity. The poor country folks and villagers around Metz were in cases so miserable that it seemed they must inevitably starve the moment that the Germans should withdraw. Though they had horses, and though the bullets had not been sweeping their farms, yet last autumn they durst not put a spade or a plough into the ground. Every field holds the “sacred and precious seed” that will germinate never till the last trumpet sounds. It is right comforting to know that good friends—Friends in more than the mere name—came to the aid of these poor wretches, with a promptness, tenderness, and efficiency characteristic of a sect that ever prefer acting to speaking. But this is anticipating. From St. Agnan I proceeded two kilometres, still in a north-westerly direction, till I reached the village of Flanville, where lay the 4th Regiment of East Prussian Infantry, forming part of the 2nd division of the 1st Army Corps. The regimental staff was comfortably located in a pleasant château, and liking the looks of the place and the friendly ways of the officers, I asked permission to attach myself for the time to the regiment, a civility which was frankly and unhesitatingly granted. I was informally taken on the strength, the good old Oberst made me free of his modest table, the officers of No. 6 company, right hearty fellows all, assigned me six feet by four of straw in the corner of the drawing-room, in which there was not a scrap of furniture but a grand piano, on which a sequence of voluntaries, sometimes accompanied by singing, sometimes by dancing, seemed constantly going on, and everybody was anxious to show attention to the Englander who had strayed on to the foreposts. In the afternoon Lieutenant Werth, the officer in command of the 6th company (vice the Hauptmann shot on the 31st of August), accompanied me on a ride round a considerable radius of the eastern forepost circuit, and the lucidity of his explanations enabled me to arrive at what I afterwards found was a correct idea of the position, as it was in the end of September.

Next the Moselle, and eastward therefrom, the 8th Army Corps kept watch and ward, its left on Ars-sur-Moselle, its right interlacing, at the village of Magny, with the 7th Army Corps. From Magny the 7th held the line of environment lying in the village of Peltre, the château and house of Mercy-la-Haut, shattered and burnt, and on as far as Ars Laquenexy. It had foreposts and _Feldwachen_ a little further forward, but not so far as they had been a few days previously, when the foreposts were at La Grange aux Bois. The left of the 1st Army Corps lay in Colombey, which was also considerably burnt, feeling the right of the 7th in Mercy-la-Haut. Its second line extended to the northward in the villages of Ogy, Flanville, Retonfay, Château Gras, and Ste. Barbe. The first line lay in Coincy, Montoy, Noisseville, Servigny, and Failly. The whole of this latter line was within range of the big guns of the great Metz outwork of St. Julien, which occupies the summit of a mamelon. Between the first and second line there was an interval of only about a mile. To the front there lay, first, the foreposts, then the _Feldwachen_, and lastly the single sentries, within 1,500 yards of St. Julien. The first line occupied a section of the continuous entrenchment which ran right round Metz. All the villages were roughly fortified by barricades, _chevaux-de-frise_, &c.; holes had been broken through all the houses for firing, and, indeed, every village formed a very respectable, if rough and ready fortress. The foreposts lay either in single houses, also well fortified by entrenchments and barricades, or in the field behind earthworks of no inconsiderable magnitude. The _Feldwachen_ chiefly occupied woods or the gardens of châteaux. A _Feldwache_ which may be taken as typical, I noticed in the village of Lauvallière on the route to Saarlouis, two kilometres nearer Metz than Montoy. Here lay two companies, arms piled close at hand, and ready for a sortie from the enemy at a moment’s warning. To the left, in the hamlet of la Plancette, was another _Feldwache_ in a deep ravine. Here I had to dismount and walk up the slope beyond to the knoll on which the solitary sentry kept his watch within point-blank range of a chassepot bullet from the French works at the hamlet of Belle Croix. We could see with the naked eye the Frenchmen moving about the forts of les Bottes and St. Julien, and circulating about the environs both of them and of the town, while the great eminence of Mont St. Quentin, with its mass of fortifications on the summit, shut in the scene, dominating the whole valley from the further side of the Moselle. All the front was pitted over with the craters of shells. The men of one of the regiments were erecting quite a permanent barrack of wood, the sides covered with earth, behind an isolated brewery a little way in the rear of Lauvallière. Further north, Noisseville was densely filled with German troops; Nouilly, which lies between it and St. Julien, was neutral ground, occupied by neither army, while the French were in force in Mey and Vantoux, villages still nearer the fortress. We went forward to the edge of a wood near Mey, accompanied by two Prussian patrols, and got a warning to go back in the shape of a sharp fusilade from out a garden in the environs of Mey. To complete the narrative of the localities, the environment was taken up on the right of the 1st Army Corps by the Landwehr Division, consisting of three brigades, each six battalions strong, under the command of General von Kummer. They covered at that time the ground round nearly to the Moselle on the north, but were afterwards moved to the other side of the stream, changing places with the 10th Army Corps. The General commanding the 1st Army Corps, his Excellency von Manteuffel, lay in Ste. Barbe, a little to our north rear. Our immediate commander was General von Pritselwitz, the chief of the Second Division of the First Army Corps, who had his quarters two kilometres behind us, in the little village of Puche, where likewise was the Feldpost.

Even so early as the time of which I am writing, deserters and the German prisoners whom Bazaine had sent back, concurred in representing the condition of the troops inside and around Metz as being very bad in the matter of food. They were represented as living chiefly on horseflesh, and as having neither flour, rice, nor salt—the latter want being the subject of much complaint. The discipline of the troops was said to be good, and the morale of a character very different to that of the disorganised horde who threw down their arms at Sedan. But the German returned prisoners united in abusing the domineering greed of the French officers, who cared nothing comparatively for their men, provided their own wants were satisfied. This selfishness seems forcibly to have struck the honest Germans, used as they are to treatment so different.

It could not fail to strike even the most cursory observer that the alertness and completeness of the German forepost system was a great feature of the army, and one of the leading causes of its success. At night the _Feldwache_ always went forward to the post occupied during the day by the farthest outlying sentry. Here it broke right and left into small picquets, leaving a strong nucleus in the centre. The front, at a distance of 200 or 300 yards, was continually traversed by cavalry patrols, who often rode right in among the sleeping Frenchmen, whose system of night vigilance was not brilliant. Then there would be a pistol shot and a round of wild chassepot firing in the dark, and the daring Uhlan would dash out through the red legs, back to his supports. Writing of chassepots, it may be noted that the German forepost troops were by this time extensively armed with these weapons to enable them to cope on equal terms with the French tirailleurs. Of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Regiment seventy-five men were so armed, or rather seventy-five chassepots were in use and were transferred from _Feldwache_ to _Feldwache_, as the changes of guard were made. This seemed to settle the question as to the relative merits of the Chassepot and the Zundnadelgewehr in the eyes of the Germans.

On the evening of September 29th it was officially made known to the troops that the French were constructing three bridges across the Moselle to the westward of Fort St. Julien, it was believed with a view to a sortie in the direction of Maison Rouge and Woippy. About four o’clock next morning the sky became brilliantly illuminated with the shells under the fire of which they attempted to carry out their design, and with the return fire with which the German artillery met it. In the thick darkness the effect as seen from our position (about four miles away) was magnificent. Between the louder crashes of the cannon was heard the sharper rattle of the musketry fire, singly and in volleys. The firing became fainter towards six o’clock, and by seven had died away altogether—the presumption being that the French attempt had been baulked, and this we afterwards learned was the case. A few days previously the garrison of Thionville had surprised and captured a German provision train, which was carried into that fortress. The food being more needed in Metz than in Thionville, it was anticipated that an effort would be made to fight the train through the German environment into the beleaguered fortress. In all probability the affair of this morning was a diversion intended to facilitate this movement. The Germans, however, were fully alive to the contingency, and they succeeded in foiling the attempt.

I found that the Germans were in possession of detailed drawings and full particulars of the French troops lying around Metz, the correctness of which I was afterwards able to verify. Bazaine’s forces—that is to say, the army driven back on Metz after the battle of Gravelotte—were not permitted to enter the town of Metz. The whole army was encamped on the slopes of the outlying fortifications either of the town or of the outlying strongholds, in the intervening country, and in the various villages which still remained in the possession of the French. The forts were garrisoned by Mobiles and National Guards. Bazaine’s head-quarters were at Ban St. Martin, outside the town, and around him lay the camp of the Imperial Guards. Opposite us on the east side lay the 3rd Army Corps of the French army—Lebœuf’s corps. Its forepost nearest us was in the wood in front of Mey, and the chain extended southward to the front of the hamlet Belle Croix. The mass of the corps lay to the rear. Within the previous few days a considerable camp had been established on the slope of St. Julien, looking toward us. We could see the white tents, and the red-legged gentlemen strolling about them. Their patrols, mounted and on foot, were wont to cross our front so near that the countenances of the men could be made out with the glass. The German _Feldwachen_ could have picked them off quite easily if they had chosen; but there was an order against firing at small detached parties. The French did not show the same civility. A single man could not show himself on the advance line without being blazed at by a regular volley, which seldom, however, took any effect, the firing being so wild. The guard changing was wont to be a great time for a waste of French powder and shot all along the line, and the field guns at Little Belle Croix made a point of spitefully throwing a few shells on the brewery on the great chaussée constituting the chief forepost on our right front.

When the French made a sortie, Lieutenant Werth informed me, their scheme of advance was very characteristic. They scuttled out from the shelter of the fortresses in the loosest skirmishing order and with great rapidity till they had reached intermediate spaces sheltered from the German fire, whether by woods or by the configuration of the ground. In those they accumulated their masses, and came forward in dense columns. But they had never, save on the great sortie of the 31st of August, and at Colombey on the 28th September, succeeded in getting to close quarters with the first line of the Germans. The artillery of the latter came into play with its deadly practice, and then there was no alternative but a rapid retreat. Their demonstrations were always accompanied by a cannonade from Belle Croix and St. Julien, but seldom by the discharge of field artillery. This latter circumstance had led the Germans to the conclusion that the French were short of ammunition for their field guns, and this seemed probable, looking to the lavish use they made of them at Gravelotte. There must have been artillery of great calibre in the forts, for Lieutenant Werth pointed out to me, by Lauvallière, lying in the ditch, a huge shell, which could not have been less than a 72-pounder. It was unexploded, a fact noticeable of a large proportion of the French shells.

The losses that had been suffered by some of the regiments of the 1st Army Corps since it had come within hail of Metz were stupendous. On the 14th August, and in the minor fights of the 30th and 31st of the same month, and those during the course of September, the 4th Regiment lost (killed and wounded) 35 officers out of a total of 60, and 1,000 men out of 3,000. The 45th Regiment, lying in its vicinity, had lost yet more of its officers. Out of 60 no fewer than 42 had fallen. The result had been that a large number of Vicefeldwebels and several sergeants had received commissions. As these were comparatively inexperienced in their new duties, they were daily receiving assiduous instructions from their seniors. These informal lectures were highly interesting—not a few officers of the British service would have greatly benefited by attending them. The troops also were drilled daily, notwithstanding their position in front of the enemy. On the morning of the 30th I watched a whole battalion at skirmishing drill, and a right pretty sight it was. The recruits that had come forward since the beginning of the war spent hours daily in perfecting their drill, and the efficiency of the whole army was sedulously maintained at the highest pitch.

I was present the same morning at the very interesting ceremony of the distribution to the 4th Regiment of the iron crosses awarded to members of it for valour in the field. The ceremony took place at Puche, the head-quarters of the general of division, who personally distributed the crosses in the presence of the officers of the regiment. The band played the old regimental air, the “Hohenfriedberg,” and the colours were on the ground. The gallant 4th had earned no fewer than twenty crosses already, and the award seemed to have been made with the most rigid impartiality, the men taking their full share of the coveted distinction with their officers. The 4th is one of the old regiments of the Prussian service, and its annals record a long and gallant career. Its regimental march, the name of which I have just mentioned, is secured to it by a special royal order in remembrance of the valour which it displayed at the battle of Hohenfriedberg, fought in 1745.

To understand the means of defence which the French army enclosed in Metz had to keep wherewithal the Germans at bay, a detailed description of the remarkable fortifications with which the virginity of La Pucelle was guarded may not be out of place. Although Metz is no longer French, these works still exist in their entirety, to say nothing of their having been strengthened, and therefore respecting them the present tense may be used.

The town of Metz, with the great Cathedral, lies for the most part on the east side of a branch of the Moselle, which forks off from the main stream near La Grange aux Dames, and forms the islands of Chambière, and lower down of Sauley and St. Simphorien. A large suburb, however, stands on the first of these islands. The inner fortifications surround the town continuously, with the exception of one gap to the southward, which is covered efficiently by the branch of the Moselle which divides the islands of Sauley and St. Simphorien. On the north of the Ile de Chambière are two important forts on the inner line, one at the north-western angle of the enceinte, the other detached in the plain of the island, but connected with the enceinte by a covered way. On the south of the inner line are the Redoubt du Pate to the east, and the Lunette d’Arcon to the west, both connected with the enceinte by a covered way. The western side of the inner line is covered by the great Fort Moselle on the farther side of the main stream of the Moselle, a double crown work of immense strength and magnitude, inclosing great magazines and arsenals. To the south of it the bastion of Ile de Sauley sends out a long spur of fortifications, which crosses the Moselle, and terminates in a redoubt on the farther side. Nor is the eastern side of the inner line less strongly protected. In front of the enceinte looms the great double crown work of Belle Croix, to the full as large as Fort Moselle, and more highly favoured by its natural position. To the south of it stands Fort Gisors, a minor detached fortification which serves to complete the circuit of connection with the Redoubt du Pate on the south. Thus the town of Metz is, in fact, environed by two lines of fortifications, the continuous enceinte with its bastions and what I may term the outer cordon of the inner circle having intimate connection with the enceinte.

Of themselves these defences would make the place all but impregnable, but they are by no means the most important defences of this extraordinary fortress. There is an outer circle of detached fortifications, each of which is the complement of the other, and of which no one can be assailed without the assailant laying his account to be enfiladed by at least two of the others. Let me begin with these at the Moselle, on the north of the town at La Grange aux Dames, and work round, proceeding first in an easterly direction. After climbing the bank of the stream we come to the chaussée leading to Bouzonville, and crossing it we almost immediately come on the great glacis of Fort St. Julien. This is an outlying fort of the first magnitude, covering the whole of the round summit of a natural eminence, and having on three sides a natural glacis, therefore of great extent. It lies about two English miles from Metz, in a north-easterly direction; and a little to the north-east of it is the Monastery and wood of Grimont, the former of which Bazaine’s engineers had scientifically diverted from ecclesiastical to military purposes. About a mile and a half due south of St. Julien, and about a mile due east from Fort Belle Croix, is Fort les Bottes, a great bog-backed structure chiefly of earth, which was thrown up as a precautionary measure, either immediately before or immediately after the outbreak of the war. The Germans, I believe, are engaged in altering it from a “provisional” to a temporary fort. Its position is very important as a link between St. Julien and Fort Queleu on the south. It stands a little to the south of the great chaussée from Metz to Saarlouis and Saarbrück, while as yet the bisection has not taken place. Forward about a mile from les Bottes, and on the chaussée just before it bisects, is a hamlet named Belle-Croix, which must not, however, be confounded with the fort of the same name. Here, also, the French had strong earthworks mounted with guns, but these, for the most part at least, were field artillery, and paucity of ammunition kept them tolerably quiet. About a mile and a half south of Fort les Bottes, and about the same distance from Metz, is Fort Queleu, also an important structure, dominating the main road to Strasburg and the adjoining flat country as far as the telegraph on the elevated ground before Mercy-le-Haut. Turning now westward, and inclining to the south, we come to Fort St. Privat, at a distance of about two and a half miles both from Fort Queleu and Metz. Its value consists in the command it has of the eastern side of the valley of the Moselle, of the road from Nancy, and of the railway lines which converge behind it. Leaving it, we come to the Moselle again, this time on the south-west side of the town, and striking up nearly due north, we have nothing in the shape of permanent fortifications, although during the siege there were several temporary batteries, till we climb the great hump, on the top of which stands Fort St. Quentin, the greatest outwork of Metz. St. Quentin is a complete fortress in itself; it could hold out were all its neighbours taken, and it may safely be termed impregnable, looking at the combined strength of its natural position and its skilfully devised fortifications. Not only does it dominate the country to the south, south-west, west, and north-west, but it frowns outward to the east, and its great guns would play an important part in the defence against an attack on the inner fortifications of Metz. North-west of it, about a mile on the top of the bluffs, lies Fort Plappeville, or les Carrières, the natural position of which is not so strong as that of St. Quentin, because the elevation on which it stands is not isolated, while it is open in the rear, and therefore requires St. Quentin as the complement of its defence, a defect the Germans are remedying. It acts as a defence over a great tract of country to the west, and keeps a besieging force at a respectful distance, so that it cannot reach the edge of the bluffs and pitch projectiles down into Metz. Due north from Metz, about two miles, and standing in the middle of the plain, bounded by the Thionville Railway on the west, and the Moselle on the east, lies the improvised work of St. Eloy, the last and not the least important of the outworks of Metz. Its province is in combination with St. Julien to take care of the valley of the Moselle to the northward, and to dominate the great road to Thionville. All these fortifications (except the little Belle-Croix) were furnished with heavy guns of position, and the French had no lack of ammunition for the use of those great fortress guns, although field artillery ammunition might have been short. Besides their field artillery, the Germans had two or three batteries of siege 12-pounders on the western side of the Moselle, and I am not aware that during the siege they had either any more numerous or more formidable siege artillery on the ground. Their quiescently defensive, or rather obstructive, position, then, was dictated by sound military conditions, since a blockade answered exactly the purpose they had in view, viz., to reduce the place by famine.

None of the villages around Metz are very large, and Flanville is one of the smallest of them—consisting of a few hovels huddled by the side of a country road, under the lee of two large châteaux. Small as it was, it had to accommodate the whole of a battalion of the 4th. The men were packed closely in the houses, occupying lofts, passages, sheds, and every other available shred of cover. The officers occupied the two châteaux, both of which had been beautiful residences before war had laid them waste. The colonels château still had its garden undestroyed—in this autumn time a paradise of sweet-scented flowers, with here a fountain, and there a leafy bower. Our château had sustained harder fortune. A company of men, as well as a number of officers occupied its spacious chambers; on the lawn outside were stacked the needle-guns, ready for immediate use, and the flower-beds had been trodden down almost beyond the power of recognition. A Corporalschaft occupied the conservatory, and the flower-garden was a drill ground. The château had been pelted by the French in the battle of the 1st of September—it was still inside the range of their guns—and the roof had been shattered by shells. We occupied the drawing-room, in which were two great mirrors reaching to the roof. The one over the mantel-piece had been penetrated by a bullet exactly in the centre, and fantastically starred in all directions. Here is a sketch written on the spot, of the manner of our daily life, when the gentlemen over the way did not happen to be bellicose.