Two such staggering and unexpected blows filled the civil population with terror, the aspiring soldiers at head-quarters with anger, and the Imperial Commander-in-Chief with dismay. Disorder, consternation, and amazement reigned in Metz. And no wonder. From Alsace came the appalling news that the 1st Corps had been hopelessly shattered and that the Marshal was already fleeing for safety, by day and night, through the passes of the Vosges. Strasburg reported the arrival of fugitives and the absence of a garrison. “We have scarcely any troops,” wrote the Prefect; “at most from fifteen hundred to two thousand men.” The chief official at Epinal asked for power to organize the defence of the Vosges at the moment when the passes were thronged with MacMahon’s hurrying troops. It was known that General Frossard had been defeated and that he was in full retreat, but during twenty-four hours no direct intelligence came to hand from him. That De Failly, left unsupported at Bitsche, would retire at once was assumed, but the orders directing his movements did not reach him until, after a severe night march, he had halted a moment at Lutzelstein, or, as the French call the fort, La Petite Pierre. From Verdun and Thionville arrived vehement demands for [p 132] arms and provisions; and from the front towards the Saar no report that was not alarming. Turning to the south-east, the Imperial head-quarters did not know exactly where Douay’s 7th Corps was; and in an agony of apprehension ordered the General, if he could, to throw a division into Strasburg, and “with the two others” cover Belfort. When the telegram was sent one of these had been heavily engaged at Woerth, and the other was at Lyons not yet formed! The anxiety of the Emperor and his assistants was embittered by the knowledge that not one strong place on the Rhine had a sufficient garrison; and that the rout of MacMahon had not only flung wide open the portals of Lorraine, but had made the reduction of ill-provided Strasburg a question of weeks or days. So heedlessly had the Ollivier Ministry, the Emperor and Empress rushed into war, at a time when even the fortifications of Metz were glaringly incomplete, when the storehouses of the frontier fortresses were ill-supplied, when arms and uniforms were not or could not be furnished to the Mobiles; when, in short, nothing could be put between the Germans and Paris except the troops hastily collected in Alsace and Lorraine—now a host in part shattered, in part disordered, and the whole without resolute and clear-sighted direction.

Prince Louis Napoleon, sitting passively on his horse in the barrack-yard of Strasburg, in 1836, was defined by a caustic historian as a “literary man” whose characteristic was a “faltering boldness.” The phrases apply to the Emperor in Metz. It may be said that he could use the language employed by soldiers, that he had some military judgment, but that, when called on, he could not deal at all with the things which are the essence of the profession he loved to adopt. After a lapse of more than thirty years, he found himself, not alone in a barrack-yard facing an [p 133] “indignant Colonel,” but at the head of a great, yet scattered and roughly handled Army, with formidable enemies pressing upon his front, and equally formidable enemies pouring through the rugged hill paths upon his vulnerable flank, and threatening the sole railway which led direct through Chalons to Paris. He was now a man, old for his years, and a painful disease made a seat on horseback almost intolerable. He could not, like his uncle in his prime, ride sixty miles a day, sleep an hour or two, and mount again if needful. He was an invalid and a dreamer, who had, against his fluctuating will, undertaken a task much too vast for his powers. The contemptuous words applied to him by Mr. Kinglake seem harsh, still, in very truth, they exactly describe Louis Napoleon as he was at Strasburg in 1836, and as he sat meditatively at Metz in 1870. Yet, be it understood, he never at any period of his career was wanting in coolness and physical courage, though what Napier has finely called “springing valour” had no place in his temperament. He was scared by the suddenness of the shock and the rapidity of events, and he was bewildered because he was incapable of grasping, co-ordinating, or understanding the thick-coming realities presented by war on a grand scale; and stood always too much in awe of the unknown. He could not “make up his mind,” and in the higher ranks of the French Army there was not one man who could force him to make it up and stand fast by his resolution. But, inferior as they were when measured by a high standard, it is probable that any one of the Corps Commanders, clothed with Imperial power, would have conducted the campaign far better than the Emperor. Another disadvantage which beset him was a moral consequence inseparable from his adventurous career. He could not add a cubit to his military stature; but he need not have “waded through slaughter to a [p 134] throne.” In Paris before he started for the frontier, in Metz on the morning of August 7th, he must have felt, as the Empress also felt, that his was a dynasty which could not stand before the shock of defeat in battle. He had, therefore, to consider every hour, not so much what was the best course of action from the soldier’s standpoint, as how any course, advance, retreat or inaction, would affect the political situation in Paris. Count von Bismarck’s haughty message through M. Benedetti in 1866, if Benedetti faithfully delivered it, must have come back to the Emperor’s memory in 1870. Remind the Emperor, said Bismarck, that a war might bring on a revolutionary crisis; and add, that “in such a case, the German dynasties are likely to prove more solid than that of the Emperor Napoleon.” It was a consciousness of the weak foundations of his power, breeding an ever-present dread alike in the capital and the camp, which, making him ponder when he should act, falter when he should be bold, imparted to his resolutions the instability of the wind.

It is on record that the first impulse of the Emperor and his intimate advisers was to retreat forthwith over the Moselle and the Meuse. General de Ladmirault was ordered to fall back on Metz; the Guard had to take the same direction; Bazaine, who had responsibility without power, was requested to protect the retirement of Frossard, who, driven off the direct, was marching along the more easterly road to Metz, through Gros Tenquin and Faulquemont, which the Germans call Falconberg; De Failly was required, if he could, to move on Nancy. MacMahon, it was hoped, would gather up his fragments, and transport them to Chalons, where Canrobert was to stand fast, and draw back to that place one of his divisions which had reached Nancy. Paris was placarded with the Emperor’s [p 135] famous despatch; and the Parisians read aloud the ominous sentences which heralded the fall of an Empire. “Marshal MacMahon,” said the Emperor, “has lost a battle on the Sauer. General Frossard has been obliged to retire. The retreat is conducted in good order.” And then followed the tell-tale phrase, used by Napoleon I. himself on a similar occasion—“Tout peut se rétablir,” all, perhaps, may come right again. But so inconstant was the Imperial will, that the hasty resolve to fly into Champagne faded out almost as soon as it was formed; for the next day the dominant opinion was that it would be better to remain on the right bank of the Moselle. MacMahon and De Failly accordingly got counter orders, indicating Nancy as a point of concentration, and based on a feeble notion that they could both be drawn to Metz; while once again Canrobert was told to bring the infantry of the 6th Corps up to the same place by rail. Orders and counter orders then showered down on De Failly—thus, he was and he was not to move on Toul—but the enemy’s movements dictated the future course of a General rendered as powerless as his superiors were vacillating; and finally both the Marshal and his luckless subordinate, as well as Douay’s 7th Corps, made their way deviously to the camp of Chalons.
The Emperor resigns his command.

When the Emperor suddenly revoked the order to retire upon Chalons, he was influenced partly by military, but chiefly by political considerations. Remonstrances were heard in the camps, remonstrances arrived from Paris, and the combined effect of these open manifestations produced an order to establish the Army in position behind the French Nied, a stream which, rising to the southward, flows parallel to the Moselle, and, after receiving the [p 136] German Nied, runs into the Saar below Saarlouis. The weather had been wet and tempestuous; the retiring troops, exhausted by night marches and want of food, struggled onward, yet showed signs of “demoralization;” in other words, were out of heart, and insubordinate. Frossard’s men, who had passed the prescribed line before receiving the new instructions, had to retrace their steps; and Decaen, now in command of the 3rd Corps, begged for rest on behalf of his divisions. Yet the three Corps and the Guard occupied, on the 10th, the new position which, selected by Marshal Leb?uf, extended from Pange to Les Etangs. It was intended to fight a battle on that ground, and the men were set to work on intrenchments, some of which were completed before another change occurred in the directing mind. The position was found to be defective; and, on the 11th, the entire Army, abandoning its wasted labours, moved back upon the outworks of Metz itself, almost within range of its guns. Thus had three precious days been spent in wandering to and fro at a time when the military situation required that the Army should be transferred to the left bank of the Moselle, and placed in full command of the route to Chalons, even if it were not compelled to fall back further than the left bank of the Meuse. One explanation, drawn by the official writers of the German Staff history, from French admissions, is that, instead of Metz protecting the Army, the Army was required to protect Metz, seeing that the forts were not in a state to hold out against a siege of fifteen days! The Imperial Commander had not even yet quite made up his mind; but, late on the 12th, finding the burden too severe, and the clamour of public opinion too great, he appointed Marshal Bazaine Commander-in-Chief of “the Army of the Rhine.” It was a damnosa h?reditas; for the campaign was virtually lost during ten days of weakness and vacillation, [p 137] and especially by the want of a prompt decision between the 7th and the 10th of August, while there was yet time.

As we have said, the main reason was political. The eager aspirants for power, and the friends of the Empress in Paris, ousted the Ollivier Ministry on the 9th, and the new combination, with the Comte de Palikao at its head, felt that they could not retain office, that the “dynasty” even could not survive unless the Emperor and the Army fought and won. Everything must be risked to give the dynasty a chance. The Regency and the Camp fell under the influence of hostile public opinion, which had already begun to associate the name of Napoleon, not only with the reverses endured, but the utter want of preparation for war, now painfully evident to the multitude as well as to the initiated. Yet so menacing and terrible did the actual facts become that even the Emperor could not resist them, and, in handing over the command to Bazaine on the 13th, he ordered that unfortunate, if ambitious, officer to transfer the Army with the utmost speed to the left bank of the Moselle, place Laveaucoupet’s Division in Metz, and gain Verdun as quickly as possible. It was too late, as we shall see; for the Prussians were ready to grasp at the skirts of a retreating Army, and once more thwart the plans of its leaders. In order to track the course of events to this point, the narrative must revert to the morrow of Spicheren.
The German Advance.

On the morning of the 7th of August, some French troops were still in Forbach, and Montaudon’s Division had not departed from Sarreguemines. The fronts of the two invading armies were hardly over the frontier, and the [p 138] chiefs had not yet learn............