Before the war Auguste Ducrot had been a vocal prophet of the danger from Prussia. He considered French acquiescence in Prussian expansion cowardly, and had predicted in 1869 that ‘the Emperor will smoke his cigarettes and twirl his moustache; revolution will take hold, and one fine day Prussia, having become arbiter of Europe, will put her jackboot on France, annexing Alsace and Lorraine to the greater German Empire while disorder and anarchy bring down our own poor country.’4 Ducrot could be remarkably prescient at times, but he had been far from wanting to avoid war. During the Hohenzollern crisis he had correctly predicted that Prussia would not risk her leadership in Germany by backing down in the face of French threats, but he approved his own government’s firmness.5 He welcomed war as ‘a necessary evil, which alone allows truly strong spirits to show their brilliance’. War with Prussia was ‘not only inevitable but highly desirable; … it is the only way of warding off the dangers that threaten France, and one might say the whole of European society!’ An ardent Catholic, he believed that only a ‘violent crisis’ could rescue the virtues of self-negation and patriotism in a religiously confused and decadent society.6
Always insistent on the superiority of his own strategic ideas, when hostilities broke out Ducrot wanted to throw bridgeheads across the Rhine opposite Strasbourg. MacMahon restrained him, pointing out that there were not yet enough troops at hand, and that the move played no part in the Emperor’s plan. Yet, for all Ducrot’s pre-war prophecies about Prussian preparedness, he was contemptuous of civilian reports from Wissembourg of a German threat. He assured MacMahon on 3 August that ‘The Bavarian threat appears to me to be pure bluff,’ and that, having studied the area around Wissembourg through a telescope, ‘I am convinced that nowhere in the vicinity is the enemy in force.’7 The orders Ducrot gave 2nd Division were typical of French commanders at this period: precise instructions for placing battalions, leaving no discretion to his subordinate, but without reference to the enemy or guidance as to whether to accept combat. Ducrot was more concerned with finding bread in Wissembourg to feed the men than with an enemy attack.
The commander of 2nd Division was Abel Douay, brother of Félix: a third Douay brother had been killed at Solferino. On 3 August Abel Douay marched his men up to Wissembourg where they arrived in darkness and pouring rain. Next morning, on Ducrot’s orders, he sent one regiment back, leaving himself 6,500 men.8 A telegram came from MacMahon passing on intelligence from army headquarters that the Germans might be about to launch a general offensive. Douay was not alarmed. He had sent out a reconnaissance at dawn but it had seen nothing – unsurprisingly as it had hardly ventured beyond the frontier. The first inkling he had that the Germans were in force north of the Lauter came at about 8.15 a.m. when shells started raining down on Wissembourg.
On the afternoon of 3 August the German Third Army had been ordered to begin the invasion of Alsace next morning, the twentieth day of mobilization. At dawn heavy columns headed for the River Lauter with orders to cross it and drive back the enemy wherever found. The leading units of three army corps were within supporting distance of each other as they descended on Wissembourg, a historic town which had seen fighting between French and Prussians during the Revolutionary Wars but which had been declassified as a fortress in 1867. General von Bothmer’s division of the Bavarian II Corps dashed through hop fields and vineyards to try to seize the town, but soon found itself in a stiff fire-fight with Douay’s men, who fired from the ramparts and took cover in the meadows bordering the Lauter, in roadside ditches and gardens, and around the railway station.
With his men fighting doggedly around the town, it became apparent to Douay by mid-morning that he was being attacked in overwhelming force. While the Bavarians, distinctive in their light blue uniforms and crested helmets, were being held at bay in his front, the Prussian V Corps was forcing his right flank and the arrival of XI Corps threatened to overlap it altogether. Douay ordered a retreat. He had ridden over to a battery of mitrailleuses on a hill above Wissembourg marked by three poplars, when a shell-burst knocked him dying from his horse. Below, his troops managed to extricate themselves and headed south for the hill that dominated the town, the Geissberg.
One battalion under Major Liaud was left stranded in Wissembourg, having received the order to evacuate too late. Liaud led a desperate defence of the town gates, leading men from one side of town to the other as the Germans bludgeoned their way in with hatchets and cannon fire. Finally it came to close-quarter fighting in the winding, smoke-filled streets, Liaud went down with a leg wound and his successor, at the urging of the town’s mayor, had to acknowledge his hopeless position and to capitulate soon after 1 p.m.
Meanwhile, on the Geissberg above the town several hundred French troops held out in a solidly built chateau, from which they shot down waves of German infantry who proved too eager to take it by storm and paid the price of their bravery. But the French were running low on ammunition, and once artillery was dragged up the steep, rain-sodden slopes of the Geissberg to pound them they were forced to surrender at about 2 p.m. Their stand had at least enabled what was left of Douay’s Division to retreat southwards. The Germans were too winded to mount an effective pursuit.
By now MacMahon and Ducrot had arrived at the natural observatory of the Col du Pigeonnier four kilometres to the south. Watching smoke rising from fires in Wissembourg through field glasses, they concluded that it was too late to send any troops to the rescue. MacMahon could only declare, ‘The Germans have taken the first trick; we shall take the second.’9
The first major encounter of the war was of limited strategic influence. In disabling one dangerously exposed French infantry division out of the twenty-six then forming the Army of the Rhine, the Germans had taken the first pawn. In terms of morale, however, they had the fillip of a first victory, with laurels shared between Prussians and Bavarians – even if the performance of the latter had confirmed Prussian prejudices about their fighting quality. Conversely, the defeat and Douay’s death sent shockwaves through France. In tactics, the battle prefigured the pattern of the war. German units had shown the ability to support each other and to find and turn the enemy’s flank. On their side they had initiative, numbers, and powerful artillery, but the boldness of officers in launching frontal assaults had proved costly. On the French side, the quality of their infantry could not compensate for lack of numbers, faulty dispositions, careless reconnaissance and inferior artillery – and the mitrailleuse proved vulnerable to accurate German shelling.
Wissembourg cost 274 German dead and 1,186 wounded, for French losses of over 2,000, nearly half of them prisoners. Some French civilians, including women and children, had been killed in the shelling. About forty men of the town, many of them ex-soldiers, had fought in its defence, and when the Germans entered the town they made arrests and imposed draconian requisitions, setting a grim pattern for the invasion. They considered Alsace to be rightfully ‘German’, but this was to be no liberation.
The Germans were also infuriated by the French use against them of Algerian troops, the ‘Turcos’, who had borne the brunt of the combat. The Crown Prince claimed that they ‘proved themselves veritable savages, for they shot wounded men and shammed dead, to open fire again from behind; so the German soldiers will give them no quarter henceforth.’ The Bavarians reportedly bayoneted some wounded Turcos being treated in the town.10
On the evening of the battle, a white officer of Turcos, Lieutenant Louis de Narcy, was haunted by the horrible images of the day: the deafening noise and blinding smoke of combat, the sight of grass streaked with blood and a bloody foot lying in the roadway, the demonic dying grin of one of his men pierced by a bullet. Most of all, he bitterly mourned his comrades: ‘Poor friends, so cheery and full of smiles this morning, you have been annihilated at the will of a man with a “light heart”! … And for what result?’11
Frœschwiller
In Lorraine Napoleon III had been shuffling around his divisions in the hope of covering ev
ery possible avenue of invasion, issuing orders and counter-orders but achieving little more than wearing out his heavily laden men. The impression among the troops that the high command did not know what it was doing was reinforced when their generals kept whole divisions on the alert all night at the least alarm, or ordered them to march off just as their meal was cooking, causing the food to be thrown away. Marches were so poorly organized that men at the rear of columns were kept standing in ranks all day until the head of the column had cleared the road. Nor were marching and posting pickets the only military skills to have decayed in the French army since the Napoleonic Wars. At the astounding news of Wissembourg, the Emperor decided at last to launch an offensive beyond the River Saar, only to abandon the idea when General Wolf, the Intendant General of the Army, advised him that there were insufficient supplies to maintain an army in Germany for more than forty-eight hours.12
Napoleon had come to realize that managing the whole army from one headquarters was cumbersome. He reverted to the idea of two wings, one under Bazaine in Lorraine and one under MacMahon in Alsace, though without authorizing army staffs for them. Thus MacMahon had 5 Corps to the north and 7 Corps to his south put under his orders, and immediately used this authority to order General de Failly of 5 Corps to send his divisions down from Bitche to join him. With three corps combined, MacMahon thought it would be possible to go over to the offensive. Yet, despite the urgency of MacMahon’s instructions to join him, Failly hesitated and delayed. Like most of his fellow generals, he was obsessed with the dangers of abandoning his own sector of frontier – as if Napoleon I had never lived and the French army had reverted to eighteenth-century notions of positional warfare. Failly sent only one of his divisions to MacMahon. It would arrive too late.
On 5 August MacMahon took up a ‘fine position’ on the imposing Frœschwiller ridge, a line recommended by General Frossard before the war. Here, 40 kilometres north of Strasbourg, he believed that he could either defend himself or strike the Germans in flank if they attempted to pass him. All four infantry divisions of his 1 Corps plus his cavalry gathered there during the day. One division of 7 Corps arrived too, though without its artillery. Squads of disoriented, ill-trained reservists were still reaching the army that evening. Carl Klein, the Protestant pastor of the village of Frœschwiller, was struck by the indiscipline produced by hunger, for there was not enough bread to go round:
The soldiers were no longer civilized men but famished hordes who pillaged and robbed without restraint. Woe to our potato patches, our gardens, our fruit trees, our bee-hives, our hens, our geese, our farmyards and our cellars. Woe betide anything else not protected by stout bolts! They arrived and got into everything, seizing whatever came to hand with laughter, swearing or threats. But how could we begrudge it to them? The poor fellows were perishing of hunger.13
The troops’ temper was not improved by a heavy overnight thunderstorm, with torrential rain that prevented them getting much sleep. Yet they were supremely confident and, according to Ducrot, MacMahon ‘trusting in his lucky star and in the excellent troops which composed 1 Corps, was rather too contemptuous of our enemies and believed them incapable of taking a vigorous offensive immediately’.14 Ducrot claimed that he suggested that the men should entrench their position, but that other generals opposed tiring the troops.
The Marshal expected no battle on Saturday, 6 August. His orders for that day were for his troops to rest and be issued with double rations. However, two of his division commanders, Ducrot and Raoult, were uneasy and early that morning urged him to withdraw into the Vosges passes. They were joined by Count Paul de Leusse, a Deputy who had been among the most eager for war and was also mayor of nearby Reichshoffen. They urged that one corps was insufficient to hold the Frœschwiller position. MacMahon had about 48,000 troops with him,15 whereas his own estimate put the German strength at 80,000, and they appeared to be nearby in force. Moreover, despite its steep northern and eastern faces, the Frœschwiller ridge fell away in gentler slopes to the south.
MacMahon seemed persuaded of the need to withdraw when increased firing to the front signalled serious fighting. He broke off the discussion on the grounds that it was too late. He expected a division of Failly’s men to reach him soon. He may have reasoned that it made no sense to abandon Strasbourg to the enemy without a fight. At any rate, acting on the motto that legend attributed to him in the assault on the Malakoff Redoubt at Sebastopol, ‘Here I am and here I stay’, MacMahon decided to accept battle at Frœschwiller. That decision would cost France Alsace.
The German Third Army had lost contact with the French after Wissembourg, but as it moved south into Alsace on 5 August, unhampered by any French cavalry screen, it soon picked up the trail. By evening German scouts saw large numbers of French tents to their west, on the Frœschwiller ridge beyond the little River Sauer that flowed past the large village of Wœrth at its foot. The Crown Prince determined to concentrate his forces next day with a view to attacking on 7 August. He thought MacMahon’s position too strong to take by frontal assault, so planned a flanking manoeuvre, but ‘I am in constant apprehension lest, considering the fighting spirit of the Vth Army Corps, the smallest accident may bring on a pitched battle, so upsetting my well-laid plans.’16 That is just what happened.
On his own initiative, a brigadier of V Corps sent a reconnaissance across the Sauer early in the morning of the 6th, only to have to withdraw it when it discovered that the French were still there in strength. But the sound of cannonading had carried northwards, where the Bavarian II Corps took it as a signal that the French were attacking and dutifully advanced through thick forest against the French left flank. Though Ducrot’s men drove the Bavarians off, the sound of combat determined the Prussians to renew their attack. Each imagining that they were supporting the other, Prussians and Bavarians thus set rolling a great unplanned battle that raged for 7 kilometres along the banks of the Sauer. The Prussians seized Wœrth, and further downstream waded the river at fords or improvised bridges from hop-poles, planks and felled trees. They established footholds on the western bank but were unable to advance in the face of spirited French counter-attacks both around Wœrth and over meadows to the south. German troops ‘maintained their positions with great difficulty against the murderous fire and the repeated and violent onslaughts of the enemy’.17
Conversely, the French held the Germans back but, try as they might, could not dislodge them. Massing their batteries along the hills east of the Sauer, the Germans quickly established artillery dominance, outranging and overpowering French batteries. French troops well to the rear were baffled at being targeted by an unseen enemy. ‘There was firing all around,’ wrote one, ‘grape-shot, shrapnel, shells … It was a frightful thunder! We disappeared in a cloud of smoke … When it cleared I searched the horizon … Not an enemy to be seen! … Only the forest; only the great dark firs and the motionless birch trees! … Were these men we were fighting?’18
The commander of V Corps, General von Kirchbach, had his arm in a sling from a wound taken at Wissembourg, but he exemplified the Prussian offensive spirit. His will not to give up the fight matched MacMahon’s, and he persuaded both the Bavarians to his north and General von Bose’s XI Corps to his south to support his attack, arguing that the escalating fight superseded the Crown Prince’s order to break off the action. When the Crown Prince himself arrived at 1 p.m. he agreed, calling forward his other corps and ordering a general offensive. By that time Bose, at the southern end of the German line, had seen and taken the opportunity to pass part of his corps across the Sauer beyond the French right flank to turn it. While the French were fighting to hold their position in front they saw dark lines of skirmishers deploying to their south. Two infantry companies defending the village of Morsbronn at the French far right were forced to retreat before the advancing Prussians. Realizing that the situation of his division was critical, at about 1 p.m. General de Lartigue called upon the cavalry. It was the prelude to an episode which would
become a French equivalent to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
General Michel’s cavalry brigade went charging down the slope towards Morsbronn like a torrent. The ground was totally unsuited to a cavalry charge, scattered with tree trunks and hop trellises and cut by ditches. No sooner had Michel’s men set out than they were peppered with German grapeshot and rifle fire. Two squadrons galloped down the main street of Morsbronn, with its steep-roofed timbered houses. The Germans were ready for them, lining the upper windows and manning a barricade at the exit to the village. They fired point-blank, their muzzle-flashes scorching the uniforms of French riders. The sound of bullets hitting steel breastplates, said a participant, was ‘like hailstones striking windowpanes in a storm’,19 and when the smoke cleared the street was a heap of dying men and horses. Survivors were quickly taken prisoner. Another group met the same fate at the western end of the village without getting within sword’s length of an enemy, leaving a sunken lane choked with the corpses of men and their mounts. The other squadrons charging German lines outside the village fared little better. The charge cost the French 800 men, at minimal loss to their enemy. Though at a disproportionate price, it covered the exhausted infantrymen of the French right wing as they pulled back.
The Germans were not long delayed, and the battle was turning in their favour. The flanking units of XI Corps regained contact with their comrades in the centre and fought their way through a bitterly contested stretch of forest called the NiederWald. French officers, their kepis on their swords, repeatedly led their men in old-fashioned dense formations into withering fire. In the intense fighting here and around Wœrth several French regiments lost over 1,200 men each, well over half their strength.20 The impetuously led German V Corps hardly suffered less.21 Like a pair of giant nutcrackers, XI and V Corps steadily squeezed the French centre. Through his telescope MacMahon, who had been directing the battle from in front of a walnut tree on a hillock, saw the Germans pushing into the heart of his position. The valley of the Sauer below him was now thick with masses of infantry in dark blue uniforms. They looked, said an officer present, ‘like a cloud hugging the ground and moving ever forward’.22 Still there was no sign of the leading division of 5 Corps on which MacMahon had been counting.
Sedan 1870- The Eclipse of France Page 13