Chapter IV: Sedan: Before and After (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nun danket alle Gott,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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