Chapter III: Courcelles, Spicheren, and Gravelotte (3)

Yet in the south there were gleams presaging a victory to achieve which much had yet to be done. Von Göben had seemingly gained the wood, gaining thereby no respite from the persistent firing of the batteries at St. Hubert and Point du Jour. Von Zastrow, with intent as it appeared to give his friends of the 8th Corps some relief from this, had clothed the neighbourhood of Gravelotte, as soon as it was in German hands, with four batteries from Kamecke’s Division, but the reply to them was so strenuous that it seemed surprising how they were able to keep their ground, while the continuous explosion of shells in and about the Bois des Genivaux gave evidence that the 8th were still in purgatory. As it seemed in bitter chafing at their sufferings, ever and anon fierce attempts were made to crush the causes of them. Dimly and vaguely only could the movements be discerned from where I stood, but large detachments must have burst out of the wood, and pushing down into the dip where was the bed of the Mance, breasted the opposite slope, and debouched against Moscow and St. Hubert. Through the glass I could see the broken battalions as they clambered piecemeal out of the hollow, and tumbling together into approximate formation strove to push on up the gentler slope. Then there came heavier smoke banks on their right flank above the batteries at Point du Jour; the batteries of mitrailleuses at St. Hubert raged like wild cats right in their faces; the French infantry men, in position between St. Hubert and Moscow, fringed their ranks with spurting white smoke from their chassepots. It seemed as if, while a portion of the German attack fell back, the other moiety had lain down to get some cover and to bide the spending of the storm. True they had lain down, those soldiers who did not retreat; but it was not for them more to rear themselves into dressed ranks. It was for them to lie deeper yet, when the time should come, under the sod on which they were now prostrate. Effort after effort met with a similar fate, and at length the bootless and costly efforts were suspended. Von Zastrow had strengthened his artillery by Gravelotte, till, as I afterwards learned, he had fifty-four guns in position there, under whose pounding the French fire at Point du Jour somewhat slackened, giving at length some relief to the 8th Corps in the wood to the northward. Zastrow boldly pushed infantry forward in support of his artillery, which to say the truth seemed to have rather incautiously worked themselves out to the front, so as to be in danger should the French essay a rapid and energetic push from Point du Jour across the ravine. Not content with this, it was clear that he had determined on beginning the offensive on his own account. This act of Zastrow’s is the war incident of Gravelotte which has been most canvassed and controverted. It unquestionably resulted in disaster. As unquestionably it was done in the face of his positive orders to hold his own, and act as the stationary pivot for the corps to north of him. And it is certain, too, that Zastrow acted on his own responsibility in what he did, and in virtue of a certain far from narrow discretion which the German military policy allows to officers of any rank when placed in a position of self-reliance. Zastrow, it appears, had little to guide him as to the state of matters in the north. The wind had shifted as some say, and blew away from him the sound of the cannonade by Amanvilliers, Montigny, and Champenoise. As others have it, there was an actual lull in the firing soon after three o’clock, about the positions named. It is urged in favour of Zastrow that this inaudibility of the northern cannonade, from whatever cause, gave him some right to conclude that the French centre and right had been thrown back, and that the strenuous defence on the left was all that was between them and complete defeat. If these his premises had been sound, there is no doubt that Zastrow’s conclusion, and the action he based upon it, were eminently creditable to his generalship. Had the French right and centre really been pushed back while the left maintained its ground, it is plain that Bazaine would have proceeded at once to strengthen the latter with the troops driven back on the former, since he could afford to disregard the progress of the German left and centre, sure ultimately to be brought up all standing on the great rear-buttress before which the French fought—the fortress of Metz. This in fact was what Bazaine did some hours afterwards when the Saxons had turned his right and the Guards had smashed his centre. Zastrow, arguing accordingly, as it seems, judged that it would be good strategy to anticipate any such strengthening for the French left by attacking it at once, and forcing it to participate in the retrograde movement to which he had concluded the centre and right were abandoned. Nay more; a decisive move on his part on the extreme French left might let him get through to their rear communications, and once in possession of the throat of the great chaussée about Jussy, he blocked the chief line of French retreat, while the 8th Corps, relieved from terrible torment by St. Hubert and the Point du Jour, might debouch from the wood on to the plateau, and take its position in the final crushing of the French front.

How Von Zastrow reasoned I do not know; but he acted as if he had reasoned in the groove I have indicated. A sanguine man, he had not counted the cost of success, even if he should gain it; he had not, indeed, sufficiently studied the question whether success at all were possible. He shot his bolt, a self-reliant and over-confident archer, and he failed even to get the distance of the target. It was close on four o’clock when the offensive movement became perceptible. From beside Gravelotte one brigade (the 25th, of Glümer’s corps) streamed down into the ravine inclining south-easterly, and the slackened French fire at Point du Jour kindling up upon them as they moved. Kamecke’s division, which was already astride of the ravine where it penetrates the Bois de Vaux, contributed the 28th brigade, which could be seen pressing up to debouch on to the plateau of St. Hubert, where the skirting wood ceases nearly due south of Point du Jour. The French seemed to catch at the significance of the movement instantaneously as it was begun: their infantry, rushing to the left through the poplar trees on the chaussée, formed across the southern plateau, so as to flank as well as front the Germans when they should come staggering up on to this new battle-field. More batteries were dashed hurriedly into position and got into fire. Those previously there swung their trails round to the north somewhat, and their muzzles thus looked the way the German brigades were toiling upwards. High up as were the French, the depth of the ravine afforded the Germans miserably little cover from their fire. For the French gunners could almost see into its bed; and although the inverse rise could not be reached by a direct fire, they yet let fall upon it a plunging fire which, from the steepness of the slope, was much more destructive than plunging fires for the most part are. The loss must have been terrible in those ranks while they were struggling on to the debouchment. At length the edge of the wood and the lip of the ravine was gained. You could see groups and isolated men straggling out into the open and falling into formation in that momentary confusion which always attends such a reorganisation. Just then cannon, mitrailleuse, infantry fire, as if by signal, burst into one fell combination of outpour. Had the formation been an inanimate structure, it must have been battered down by sheer weight of metal; how much less then could it stand, made as it was of sentient men! There were efforts to make head against it nevertheless; detached rushes of rash men who were not to be convinced of the impossible till overtaken by arguments which crushed conviction in, while they crushed motion and life out. It was piteous to watch the efforts. I have seen sheep swept away in a spate swirling down a Highland glen—watched their struggles as they caught foothold on a scaur, where the rushing water shallowed, to get out of the vortex on to the firm land on the bank that seemed so absurdly close; how the water kelpie seized them again as they strove, whipped them remorselessly off their legs, and sent them down stream again battling impotently, as they span in the eddies, or were hurried down the rapids. The sight recurred to my recollection as I watched those soldiers struggling grimly for foothold on the edge of that deadly plateau. They would not give it up. Ever as one attempt was beaten back and crushed down, there were men pushing staunchly on to make another. It seemed such a little way, such a very little way, up to the poplar trees there and to victory; surely, with the goal so nigh, it was not to be thought of that it should be pronounced inaccessible. A thief might as well have tried to steal the Koh-i-Noor from its case in the Exhibition, as these men have persisted in their struggles to get to those poplar trees through the storm of iron and lead, the serried ranks, the densely lined rifle-pits, which were its protecting show-case. “_Mörderisch_” was how one that had looked into the eye of the fire till it beat him down, described that fire to me the same night—a quiet, unemotional, blood-depleted Feldwebel, who had been brought into Rezonville that the _Stabsarzt_ might judge whether it was worth while tinkering at a man who had six bullet-holes in him. Von Zastrow’s heart must have bled as he watched his Kinder going down by sections. I know not whether an order came that the brigades should give up the useless persistence in courting annihilation, or whether they drew back in realisation of the insanity of such persistence. They did abandon it, and shrunk back off the plateau, lying down on the inverse bank of the ravine, screened from the enemy’s direct fire, but exposed to the plunging fire, and raked by French infantry detachments that had pushed forward to the brink of the ravine, further northward, opposite St. Hubert. The batteries whose duty it was to support the two infantry brigades had to seek the plateau by the only route practicable for wheels—the chaussée crossing the ravine by deep cuttings and steep fall and rise. They got down, as it appeared, into the ravine. We saw them wheel off into the road and clatter down the Gravelotte slope at a trot. Behind them, at a swinging canter to overtake the guns, dashed a noble regiment of Uhlans. How gallantly the horsemen rode on their way to death! Artillery and cavalry disappeared into the ravine. Was it bottomless, then, that they never came out? The French infantry fire spurted out of the rifle-pits on the further brink; several batteries of mitrailleuses, in regularly constructed emplacements, took to grinding sedulously their cursed output; the cannon further back on the Point du Jour made practice over the heads of the mitrailleuse men and the sharpshooters, down into the bosom of the gorge. The German artillerymen did, as it appeared, get into action, with the muzzles of their pieces sticking up into the air, but guns were dismounted, and the gun detachments had to be reinforced over and over again, from the reserves in the rear by Gravelotte. As for the Uhlans, the morrow furnished a chart of their doings—a chart on which the courses were traced in by dead men and horses. They had striven to charge up the inverse slope of the chaussée on to the plateau of St. Hubert, and they had failed. Men and horses, not many,—it must have been a mad forlorn hope of reckless men,—lay on the roadway in the gutters, just on the brink of the plateau; there were none further, but very many all the way behind. If ever horsemen were wantonly butchered by being sent where it was staringly impossible they could have been of service unless their horses had been winged, those Uhlans were. I believe that, after losing nearly half their number, they were got down the narrow bed of the Mance, somewhere behind the position where the two infantry brigades were lying. They might as well have been in the moon.

Except an effort to cover with infantry-fire in some measure the batteries in the ravine, by the sending forward a couple of battalions of the infantry brigade that had been kept in reserve, an interim paralysis was forced upon the 1st Army. The firing still continued, both artillery and musketry, quickening now without apparent cause, now falling away for a little into a dropping fire; but of offensive movements on either side there were none. The game had seemingly ended in a stale-mate. Von Zastrow had little or nothing in hand, for, as it appeared, he had sent a brigade away on a fanciful excursion through the Bois de Vaux with a wide circuit to come in from the south upon Jussy and outflank the extreme French left; a rash project, which, the direct attack having failed, whose success must surely have been assumed in devising the flank march, ought to have resulted in the annihilation of the detached brigade, if the French had been as enterprising as they were stubborn. Von Göben was jammed in the Bois des Genivaux so long as the French fire from Moscow, St. Hubert, and the Point du Jour could sweep him off the onward path. The 1st Army was clubbed. Von Zastrow’s intended _coup de grâce_ was arrested; in his haste not to be too late he had raised his arm too soon, and had spent himself prematurely.

The Germans invaded France with armies whose numbers it is easy enough to utter glibly off the tongue, but whose magnitude it is very difficult adequately to realise. How many Britons have ever seen 30,000 armed men in a mass? We go to an Easter Monday review, and see some 26,000 men march past a saluting point, and come home in the notion that we have been looking at an uncommonly large body of troops. Let our Easter Monday Volunteer Army stand as an equivalent to a German army corps. The former takes about an hour and a half to defile past the commander. The Germans had fourteen of the latter in France to make war wherewithal, besides Landwehr divisions, a Würtemburger contingent, and fortress artillerymen, equal, on a moderate estimate, to two army corps more. At our Brighton pace a whole day, just twenty-four hours, would be consumed in the marching past of this half-million of men. There are obvious advantages in war-making when your numbers are so large that you do not require to stand particular about the absence or presence of an odd army corps or two, when you can comfortably leave one as a force of observation, dispatch another on a distinct measure of precaution, and reckon with tolerable confidence on yet a third dropping in to help you finish off your work with the greater thoroughness. This was the happy condition of the Germans at Gravelotte. If you care to join in the French cry, “Over-matched by two to one!” the Germans grimly meet you with the rejoinder, “Why be overmatched then? or, if you cannot help yourselves, why fly in the face of all experience of war, and roar ‘À Berlin!’ at the head of your scantier levies?” War is not a game like a school-boy boxing-match, where the spirit of fair play insists that there shall be some approximation to an even match between the two combatants. And even the school-green instinct of fair play does not stand in the way of allowing the stronger boy to put forth his whole strength when the weaker boy denies his weakness and is the challenger. The opportunely arriving German army corps on the 18th of August was the 2nd, whom Fransecki had marched without a halt from Pont-à-Mousson to Buxières on the southern rear of Mars-la-Tour. There, as it seems, the Pomeranians had cooked and eaten, and, as giants refreshed, had come on to Rezonville, eager to have a share in the day’s amusement. Thence the King sent them into Gravelotte, to help Zastrow to a solution of the problem in which he had got mystified. It was a strange, grand sight to watch these fresh and splendid soldiers marching on in a stream that seemed endless. Nobody knew, within such ken as we had, whence the wonderful windfall had come. Some swore it was the 5th Corps from the Crown Prince of Prussia’s army, that there was General von Kirschbach himself on the grey horse, and that the Crown Prince was in colloquy with his father at Rezonville. Others had it that it was the 4th Corps which had thus turned up promiscuously. But be it what it might, sure it was it did not dally by the way. The leading regiments formed in front of Gravelotte, others went north-easterly, so as to touch von Göben’s flank in the Bois des Genivaux. By this time it was seven o’clock, and the setting sun going down in blood,—blood in the sky as on earth,—cast his ruddy rays slantingly on the lurid smoke-banks that overhung the battle-field, and battled with the yet redder-forked tongues of fire which were bursting out of the burning farm-buildings of Malmaison, where the wounded Frenchmen were being roasted alive in miserable helplessness. There was a general advance. The Zastrows straightened themselves up in their layer in the ravine, and once more essayed to get a grip of the ground on its brink. Fransecki’s leading brigade took the chaussée and the easier dells of the ravine towards the Bois des Genivaux. The 8th Corps pressed the branches aside and sprang out of the wood into the open, heading for Moscow. Behind, all along the rear of the grand movement in which some 60,000 men were concerned, the artillery of the three corps shelled incessantly the French positions. The scene in the deepening twilight was inexpressibly splendid—with a splendour, however, that was baleful, and made the flesh creep and the blood turn. Right gallantly did the French stand up against the huge living wave. Their army was fighting not for the feeblest chance of victory: hardly any conceivable freak of the captious goddess could have given it that. But it was fighting for something yet more critical than victory,—for its very life; for if the Point du Jour were carried by the Germans, then von Zastrow’s aspirations would have tardily yet surely been accomplished. The beaten centre and right would have had their line of retreat invaded; the defeat would have become a chaotic slaughter till the broken and bewildered battalions, barred from the chief line of retreat, had huddled somehow close under the guns of Plappeville and St. Quentin. The men who stood at Point du Jour, St. Hubert, and Moscow had it in their keeping to avert this terrible fate—to break the fall, all too dislocating already, of their brethren of the centre and right. Nobly they did their devoir. In numbers they could have been but slender as compared with their assailants; but they had a position, the merits of which were worth many men, and they were worthy of the position. The night fell, and still the bright streaks of flame shot westward from the batteries at the Point du Jour, evidence that French guns and gunners still stood there. Gradually the tongues of flames ceased to shoot forth, gradually a hush, such a contrast to the din of the day that it was almost painful, came over the bloody field. The dogs of war were satiated; they had lapped blood till they might lap no more. And still the Frenchmen stood by the Point du Jour, keeping at bay the foe while their friends defiled into safety behind the screen thus sturdily maintained for them. The 1st Army had fought well and squandered life recklessly; but spite of the late reinforcements it had to submit to the failure of its capital enterprise. The foreposts all but touched each other through the watches of the night. Those of the Germans were made specially strong, for the day’s work had taught the watch-setters respect for those men on the crown of the height above them. And what of them? One knew nothing till the morning broke, and then it was found that the shattered churchyard-wall, and the smashed and half-burnt wayside houses, the rifle-pits and the battery emplacements were silent, save for the groaning of the wounded left behind, and empty, save of those and of the dead who lay beside them. The French, having held the position so long as it was of use, had abandoned it, and by six o’clock Fransecki’s forepost men, creeping cautiously forward to the crown of the ridge, saw before them the brown scarp of Fort St. Quentin, with the beaten French host clinging round its base.

The wearied and powder-grimed Germans threw themselves down on the field, and slept among the dead who littered it. Bivouac fires were sparse, the men were too spent with hard fighting to care for food or warmth. They were lighted to their slumbers by ghastly chamber candlesticks; by the pillar of fire that yet towered heavenward from the burning Malmaison, and by another fire that showed over the horizon by Verneville. In the darkness between nine and ten, there burst out the din of a furious cannonade to the north, and the tired soldiers who had piled their arms were made to resume them. But soon this in its turn died away, and the battle-field was left in peace.

Having now recounted what I personally saw of the battle of Gravelotte, I proceed to give a brief narrative of the occurrences which were not within the scope of my observation. The position of the several corps of the 2nd Army has already been detailed. By seven the three corps forming the 1st line were already on their north-easterly march in gigantic echelon of army corps. Their advance in this line was directed, as I have stated, to meet the expected contingency that Bazaine would attempt the northernmost of the three westerly routes toward Verdun. The German leaders had as yet no information warranting them in concluding definitely that this design had been abandoned, although indications pointed in that direction. These indications became so marked towards ten o’clock that Prince Frederick Charles judged it wise at least to arrest the march designed to meet a contingency, the occurrence of which was improbable; he therefore halted the Saxons, the flanking corps on the left, at Jarny, and the Guards at Doncourt; the 9th Corps had some time previously reached Caulre, and were halted there, cooking their breakfasts. It was not long before the Prince obtained additional assurance that the French were contemplating no advance move, but had elected to give him battle on ground of their own choosing on the plateau of Amanvilliers, and, as it appears, the King in his southerly position was early in possession of intelligence which led him to form the same conclusion. It would appear, however, that neither von Moltke nor Prince Frederick Charles had any idea that the French right was prolonged so far to the northward as it was; but on the contrary had the idea that their right flank rested on the village of Amanvilliers. It was in the light of this impression that the Saxons got the order to march on Batilly, where they would be close to Bazaine’s path if he should tardily move off by the Brie road, while in the absence of any such endeavour, their course was thought open to make an easterly sweep, and take in flank the supposed French right in Amanvilliers, while an attack was being made on that position in front.

The latter attack was entrusted to the 9th Corps, supported by the Guards. Manstein marched his men off from Caulre about half-past ten, and headed direct on la Folie by Verneville. It was at the latter place where he experienced the first resistance from the French holding it as an outpost position, and as soon as he showed his columns beyond it, began the furious cannonade, which to us in the south had been the token that the battle was begun in earnest. He had to fight his way hard after passing Verneville. To get at the French position he had to march through the interval between the Bois de la Cusse and the north end of the Bois des Genivaux. The end of this gap toward Metz is closed in by Amanvilliers and Montigny-la-Grange; and here the French were posted in great strength, and indeed took the offensive against Manstein as he strove to deploy. He was not strong enough to make much impression on the position. Part of his artillery he got forward nearly as far as the farm of Champenoise, which was terribly mauled by his shell-fire, and with a part of Wrangel’s division he occupied the edge of the Bois de la Cusse fronting toward Amanvilliers, supporting the infantry by several batteries. The Guards, in the meantime, had in part received another direction, the result of Prince Frederick Charles’ appreciation of the fact that the French right extended further than he had at first reckoned upon. Von Pape marched his first division over Jouaville to Habonville, on the north of the Bois de la Cusse, while Budritski, whose first orders were to march his division (the 1st) on Verneville to support Manstein, had his course presently altered also upon Habonville. St. Privat was found strongly held by the French, and as it would have made a gap in the German line had the Guards gone so far north as to attack it, recourse was had to artillery practice to drive the French out of it. From a position between St. Ail and Habonville, Prince Hohenlohe, the General commanding the Guard artillery, converged on St. Privat the steady fire of no fewer than fourteen batteries of artillery, or, in other words, of 84 guns. Under the personal orders of Prince Frederick Charles, who visited that part of the scene of action between one and two, this pitiless fire was persevered in for more than an hour, as a means of marking time till the Saxons should come up on the left; and Prince Hohenlohe was able gradually to improve the positions of his batteries directed against St. Privat. But although the Saxons, pressing on from Jarny, were true to time, it was found that there was other work for them still further on the left. The French were in force also in St. Marie-au-Chênes, and before the Saxons could co-operate with Prince August against St. Privat, it was necessary to sweep this obstacle out of their path, and also to ascertain exactly how far this French right, ever seemingly elongating itself further and further, really did extend. Prince George of Saxony with the 24th Division, supported by a brigade from von Pape’s left, fell upon St. Marie, while Montbe, with the 24th Saxon Division, swept round by Auboué and found that at length he was on the right of the French flank, and had at last got their weather-gauge. It was half-past three already when the Saxons (23rd Division) had carried St. Marie, and were ready with the 24th, looking now straight at Roncourt, to co-operate with the Guards in an attack on the formidable position of St. Privat. Meanwhile Manstein with his 9th Corps was not prospering. He had got a grip of the gap with Amanvilliers in its throat, and of the two woods flanking that gap; but farther he might not come. Amanvilliers was a position of great natural strength, and the French had accumulated about it a force of artillery which fairly coped even with the strong artillery that Manstein had brought into opposition. Fifteen of his guns were dismounted or otherwise rendered unserviceable by the French fire.

It was with difficulty that his infantry, by the Chantrenne Farm and the north-east corner of the Bois des Genivaux, could maintain themselves against the repeated and furious attacks of the French from la Folie, raked as they were also by mitrailleuse and artillery fire from Amanvilliers. On his right, the Hessians in the Bois de la Cusse were lacerated by a persistent infantry and mitrailleuse fire from the hamlet of Jerusalem, while the French artillery at St. Privat, firing over Jerusalem, showered shells upon the wood; and, in short, so far from being able to pursue the offensive, he had quite his work to hold his own. But the advantage of practically unlimited reserves told in his favour. The 3rd Army Corps had been marched on Verneville, and halted there. Its artillery was available to support Manstein, and it was used in this way, as also was a portion of its cavalry. Then the Guards and the Saxons were perfecting their dispositions for storming St. Privat, and that would relieve his pressure from the left. Already before five the Guards were distracting the attention of the French holders of Jerusalem. The Garde Schützen Regiment had spread itself through the sparsely wooded Bois, and were scrambling forward through the underbrush. Soon the whole of the 4th Brigade of the Guards was marching on St. Privat from Habonville, and it was speedily followed by the bulk of von Pape’s division from St. Privat. The Guards got near St. Privat, but they could not get into it. It was held by the French with inveterate stubbornness, and the natural strength of the position backed their defensive efforts. Prince August of Würtemberg had to hold his hand, and betake himself to artillery fire till assured of the co-operation of the Saxons, who were marching southward from Roncourt. The 10th Corps, too, was summoned close up in reserve, and, indeed, a part of Kraatz-Koschlau’s division actually took part in the storm. At half-past six the Guards, standing waiting on the south and west, heard the music of the Saxon guns from the north, and then the von Papes got the word to show of what metal were the Prussian Guards. They stormed furiously into the place; as furiously came Montbe’s Saxons in from the north. The double attack carried St. Privat; but after the Germans were in it, the French refused to go out, and had to be turned out, fighting desperately every step of the way, and causing terrible loss to their assailants before the operation was accomplished. Thus the French had their right flank turned, and were forced from the strong position on which it had rested. They were rolled backward into the woods of Jaumont and Saulny, but not utterly broken or completely disheartened. For it seems unquestionable that Bazaine was able to march toward the maintenance of his left-wing position at Point du Jour not only a portion of the Imperial Guards who constituted his reserve, and of whom he had made some, but hardly a sufficient, use during the day, but also some of the troops who were engaged at St. Privat, and who were moved under cover of the forced attack made on Manstein’s position from Amanvilliers, just at nightfall.

How was it faring with Manstein while Prince August was relieving him of one embarrassment by carrying St. Privat? He, too, had made an offensive attempt on Amanvilliers simultaneously with von Pape’s push at St. Privat, sending forward a brigade of the Hessians and a part of Wrangel’s Division in combination with a detachment of the Guards detailed from the right of that corps, the whole supported by the artillery of the 3rd Corps. But even now Manstein could not get at the heart of the French centre in Amanvilliers, Montigny, La Grange, nor could his artillery get the dominance over that of the French. Alvensleben with his 3rd Corps was close up, and prepared to back up the labouring 9th Corps with the whole of Buddenbrock’s Division. But Buddenbrock’s men were not to be used just then in an offensive movement, for as they were coming the French took the initiative in great force, and hurled large masses of infantry on the Bois des Genivaux. It is a moot point whether the Imperial Guard participated in this attack in any strength. Next day, behind la Folie, I saw several dead Guardsmen, and after the capitulation of Metz an officer of the corps told me that a whole brigade of the Guards had been in action about Amanvilliers late in the day. If this was the case, it must have suffered little in proportion to the line regiments engaged, for the crop of corpses in Guard uniforms was comparatively very scanty. This late effort on the part of the French, made in twilight that had deepened into darkness before it was finally quelled, could scarcely have had any other object than to mask the retirement of the beaten right wing. It answered its purpose then not inefficiently, and there seems no ground for concluding that the Germans succeeded at all that night in carrying the position of Amanvilliers any more than the southerly one at Point du Jour. But it must have been tenable only on sufferance and by the favour of the darkness, and like Point du Jour it was abandoned in the early morning. The Saxon cavalry, with dashing enterprise, penetrated the northern forests the night of the battle and cut the railway and telegraphic communications between Metz and Thionville. By the following night the ring of Germans around Metz was well defined.

The battle of Gravelotte was both positively and relatively less bloody than that of Vionville. With more than double the number of troops engaged on the former day as compared with the latter, the Germans lost about 14,000 men; the French probably about the same number. What force Bazaine had in the field is difficult to estimate. When he surrendered, his strength, 173,000 men, was as surprising as it was inexplicable on the estimates to which the Germans had access. It seems impossible that he could have had fewer than 150,000 men at his disposal on the 18th of August; and it seems equally impossible that a man in possession of his senses, even without a scintilla of military capacity, should not on such an occasion have mustered out to the last man.

About noon on the 19th, I crossed over the ravine of Gravelotte, where in the gutters of the chaussée the blood of the Uhlans stood in red puddles, and pushed on past the ruins of the Auberge of St. Hubert and up to Point du Jour. The burying parties had hardly begun their work, the wounded were still lying on the slopes in great numbers. From the sharp angle formed by the chaussée, where it turns sharp to the south above St. Hubert, I went forward on the old Roman road over the flat. The Germans had not lost a minute. Already they were reversing the front of what the day before had been French battery emplacements and rifle pits. The replis lay behind entrenchments shaded by boughs of trees which the French had cut. And the French looked so strangely near—seemingly just over the way. They were encamped in peace on the slopes and the summit of Mont St. Quentin, the white _tentes d’abris_ clustering round the fortress, and the smiling villages on the slopes. The scene was like a gigantic pic-nic or a gipsy camp, with the French tents beyond, and the Germans lolling in their bowers. There was no formal truce, but the peace was unbroken. Fort St. Quentin might have shelled the plateau where lay the Germans—in the morning, indeed, it had sent two shells into a group of mounted men standing before the detached house at the sharp turn of the road; but it seemed as if this had been merely a kind of formal protest against any supposition that it was not solely of its own will and pleasure that the fortress was quiet. The assertiveness was too emphatic to have been agreeable to the two dragoons killed by one of the shells; but the Germans were quite content to concede what they could not well have challenged, all the more readily because St. Quentin rested satisfied with the somewhat grim formality.

For a day or two immediately after Gravelotte there was a good deal of confusion as regarded several matters in the army which lay on the battle-field where so many gallant soldiers were yet without graves. The commissariat arrangements were hardly equal to the strain put upon them, while the great dearth of water, and the badness of quality in what was to be found, combined with the already ripe taint of putrefaction, the heat of the weather, and the revulsion from the excitement of the battle, to stimulate disease among the soldiers. Men who had to trust to the field-post for the transmission of letters, had their tempers sorely tried. On the 19th I consigned a letter to a fussy but civil functionary who was in charge of a field-post wagon a little way in front of Rezonville, and who professed his expectancy to start “_gleich_,” which experience had taught me was a very elastic word. I found the field-post wagon was still stationary the following morning, the civil and fussy gentleman cooking at a bivouac fire a diabolical mess, consisting of fat bacon, onions, biscuits, minced something or other (it might have been postage stamps), coffee-grounds, and rice, while his horses placidly slept the sleep of the just as they stood ready harnessed for the start, even as they had done on the previous night. Again the courteous official professed his belief that he was to start _gleich_, although he owned that he had not the remotest idea what was his destination. In reply to my proposal to take my letter away and give it to some other less indefinite field-post, he professed his readiness to give it up, but advised me not to make bad worse. The ultimate result was that the letter miscarried altogether, and it was the case that letters which did arrive took longer time in reaching England from Gravelotte and the vicinity about this period, than they did from before Paris at a later period of the war.

On the morning of the 20th August I revisited the flat in front of the hamlet of St. Hubert, on which were stationed the German outposts, behind the entrenchments which they had been steadily working upon, and from which, the day before, the French army was visible, lying on the face of Mont St. Quentin, and around the villages of Scy, Lessy, and Lorry. To my surprise the French had totally disappeared. On the Friday the ground was white with their tents, around which swarmed the brisk gentlemen in the red trousers. Now, on the Saturday, not a tent or a pair of red trousers was visible. The surly fortification on the top of Mont St. Quentin frowned across in its solitude, the church-spire of Lorry smiled in the sunbeam that slanted across it, but the traces of a great army had as completely disappeared as if the ground had opened and swallowed up the host. I followed the concavity of the German semicircular entrenchments round to the left through the corner of the wood of Chatel, which extends under various names, but in one continuity, as far as Saulny, which is nearly due north from Metz. The Germans held the wood, and were entrenching its verge. Thus, within my own observation, a German belt extended thus early around Metz, from the Moselle at Moulins, in a sweep first to the west and then to the north, till it reaches within a mile and a half of the Thionville road. The troops which lined this belt consisted chiefly of Prince Frederick Charles’s army. The completion of the ring was taken up by the army of General von Steinmetz. His district, so to speak, began at the Thionville road, and swept round the eastern semicircle of environment to the Moselle below Metz. Of course a space of such a magnitude as is here indicated could not in so short a time be invested with that closeness which would have been the case had the siege been simply that of a fortified town and citadel. But the investment was close enough for this,—that the army which was inside could not hope to get outside without fighting a pitched battle. Such a force as that of the French lying in and around Metz was not like the garrison of a detached fort, capable of an effort at cutting its way out by a sudden sortie. It must, as it seemed, break the cordon in form, and with warning sufficient to admit of a German concentration to oppose the endeavour.

In view of the long and weary inaction which the soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Armies endured while summer waned into autumn, and autumn had all but chilled into winter, it may not be uninteresting if I quote the _ipsissima verba_ of a passage which I find in the notes which I made on this 20th of August, as calculated to show how, even thus early, circumstances rendered it possible to forecast the policy of the German leaders.

“Hitherto the German army has taken the _rôle_ of aggression, and the French army has stood solely on the defensive. On the part of the Germans the aggressive tactics hitherto have been at once politic and characteristic in a national sense. It was necessary as a feature of the German programme that the French army of Metz should be got “into chancery,” and that there should be some desperate and decisive fighting, in which might be demonstrated the impossibility of resistance to the fury and persistency of the German assaults. Both these ends have been accomplished. The army of Metz is beleaguered under its walls, the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles grimly standing sentry over it. The steep of Gorze, the plains of Vionville, of Rezonville, and of Gravelotte, the ravine beyond it, and the plateau of St. Hubert, strewn as they are with German dead, but left, nevertheless, in the rear of the unrelenting advance of the German host, bear bloody but unquestionable testimony to the fury and obstinacy of their attack. Thus the double purpose is attained. Now, therefore, the German tactics undergo an alteration. The children of the Fatherland will no longer spill their blood in attacks which would be purposeless, and therefore wanton; they await in their turn the assaults of the beleaguered French army. Sooner or later that assault must come. Want of supplies must precipitate the assumption of the offensive on the part of the French. But if they can manage to live till Christmas on the traditional French wealth of resources in the way of edible matter, it will not accord with German policy to attack them. So long as they are surrounded as they are now, they are harmless; if they would break the environment, and become again dangerous, they must fight for the freedom. The German leaders will not court the affray. Why should they, since their great object is the maintenance of the blockade? But since this is their object, it may well be imagined how they will resist any attempts to raise that blockade.” It afterwards fell to my lot to be an eye-witness of the manner in which at least one of those attempts was resisted.

And was this investment of Metz, then, with its result, to all appearance, postponed indefinitely and uncertain, to be the end of all the German forced marching after Spicheren; of the rapid push across Lorraine; of the double battle above Gorze; of the German dead whose corpses are fertilising the plains of Vionville and Gravelotte; of the thousands of wounded who cumbered the towns and the villages all the way in the rear to Cologne and Mannheim? No. While there was another French army still in the field it was not for the Germans to linger about the scenes of their victories, and take to Lord Russell’s policy of “Rest and be thankful.” Prince Frederick Charles and General Steinmetz were reckoned, together, capable of sitting on the brink of the French well at Metz, and looking down on the French army in its depths. The Crown Prince, his army rested and refreshed in la belle Nancy, was already pushing westward, giving the contemptuous go-by to the obdurate little Toul. Already we heard rumours that his cavalry scouts were swarming in the valley of the Marne. About St. Marie, Amanvilliers, the blood-stained St. Privat and the battered Jerusalem, the picked soldiers of Germany—the army corps of the Guards, the Royal Saxons with their lissome dash, and the slower-pulsed Saxon Province men of the 4th Corps, were making haste to bury their dead, and were girding up their lines, to form a new—a 4th—army under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, and march westward and northward along the river from which the army took the name under which it made itself famous.

In a day or two the hotels of Pont-à-Mousson were to lose the custom of the princes and counts who were on the royal staff, for the King was to strike southward _viâ_ Commercy, and joining his son at Ligny, accompany the 3rd Army in what seemed then was to be the straight, if not the bloodless road to Paris. What had occurred before Metz was but the first act of the tragedy, what should occur thenceforth in its vicinity was in this Titanic drama only “secondary business;” the piece was to be played on and out nearer and yet nearer to the torn heart of France.

But enough of what then was the future. On Saturday the 20th I traversed the whole of the battle-fields of Tuesday and Thursday, and the outward and visible signs of slaughter more and more convinced me that the fight of the former day had been unquestionably the fiercer and the more hotly contested. Let me attempt to give some idea of what may be termed the area of slaughter in the two days’ fight. Within a space of about six miles in length by four in depth there was not a space so large as Piccadilly Circus that did not bear some token that one or more men had fallen upon it. Now the tokens were dead bodies, sometimes straggling so that several yards intervened, sometimes so close that you could hardly step without treading on the dead; again they consisted of bloody coats, pieces of linen, helmets, cuirasses with the tell-tale holes in them, knapsacks riddled by bullets, dead horses all but blown into fragments by the bursting of shells. The lines of demarcation between the German and the French dead were in places drawn with almost mathematical accuracy. On one of the roads leading up the steep slope out of Gorze I came on an outlying part of the table-land where the Germans lay very thickly. It looked as if they had advanced in a column along the road, for its margin was quite bordered with the dead. Here it was where the column had come up which an American of genius and fancy likened to a great anaconda, pushing forward with long tortuous folds till a battery opened on its hinder parts and amputated and all but destroyed its tail. Then I came to the place where the column had struggled into deployment and had got within the fatal 200 yards’ distance of the Frenchmen. The latter lay far thicker then than the Germans had lain in the first space. Burial parties were at work at this place, but seemed bewildered to decide where to make a beginning. I advised one of the officers to double-trench the ground all over, laying the dead along the hollow of each successive trench, something like a celery bed; so many were they that this market-gardening style of grave would have been, I am convinced, the best plan for getting them out of sight; saving transport to isolated grave-pits, and lessening the temptation to bury too near to the surface, which is always strong with burial parties who have excavated with labour a large pit, into which they are anxious to crowd all the corpses in the neighbourhood, regardless of the fact that the uppermost are so near the surface that the plough of the next spring must uncover their remains. The surface of the little churchyard of Gravelotte had been raised three feet all over in one day. The church had been crowded with the most severely wounded in the Thursday’s battle, and as the poor fellows died they had been carried out into the churchyard. This with its loopholed wall had been the scene of a desperate stand on the part of the French, and already had more than its own share of corpses: so that, when I had seen it on the Friday, the bodies, chiefly of Frenchmen, were lying two deep all over its edge. The interior of the church was a sight I never can forget. Most know the ornamental character of these Catholic churches on the Continent, the meretriciously decorated altar, with the pictures, the candles, and what not. The white altar-cloth was splashed with blood, the floor was bedded all over with the wounded, and the atmosphere had become tainted and malaria-laden. In the churchyard I had noticed the little wooden memorials over the village dead, with the wreaths of immortelles around them, sticking up through the stacks of dead. To-day they were out of sight, covered with the earth that had been thrown over all as the easiest and quickest method of a wholesale interment.

I have referred to the “fatal 200 yards” of the Germans. Always the attacking force, as they had hitherto been, their fire was confessedly, and in the nature of things, wilder than that of a body waiting in a stationary position for them to come; and it was ever at the long-range distances that the French did so great execution among them with the chassepot. As to the question of the comparative accuracy of the zund-nadelgewehr and the chassepot as weapons of precision at long range, the Germans did not as yet appear inclined to express an opinion, yet one might gather even thus early what a terrible respect they had already learned for the weapon which they afterwards confessed to be “pale death” itself. But when they got within the 200 yards, and brought their needle-guns down to the point-blank range, then it was that their fire was of the “fatal” character I allude to. French prisoners with whom I spoke told with a shudder of the shower of bullets from the needle-gun at and within this range, that fell upon a column about the breasts and faces of the men, and against which nothing could stand. It is only on such vantage grounds as the top of the Spicheren or the edge of the ravine above the Gravelotte ravine that the French stood up for any time against this fire of the Germans.