There, in stifling heat, a regiment of Zouaves belonging to MacMahon’s army had just arrived and was about to start for the camp. They had been defeated at [Frœschwiller], and an exhausting retreat, accomplished first on foot and then by rail, had brought them to Châlons. The men of this regiment, already ensconced in the carriages, filled the station with their shouting and obscene songs. A dozen of them, stark naked and some clasping bottles, performed dances of revolting indecency on the roofs of the carriages, jumping from one to another! Beside myself with indignation, I rushed onto the platform, interrogating these rascals, seeking their officers and calling on them to suppress this shameful disorder, until the sudden start of the train removed the sickening spectacle.11
That evening Trochu’s train pulled into Mourmelon, the station that served Châlons Camp, where 1 Corps troops were being disembarked at the end of their retreat. In a train alongside his, Trochu saw the Emperor, seated in a third-class carriage. Having left Gravelotte that morning, Napoleon had reached the railway at Verdun by early afternoon and taken the train. His arrival at the camp could hardly have been more different from Augusts past, when he had come to preside over brilliant military ceremonial.
Next morning Trochu and his chief of staff joined the Emperor in conference to decide strategy, and pressed their views. Trochu had a champion in Prince Napoleon Jerome, a wayward cousin of the Emperor’s who strikingly resembled Napoleon I. The Prince was an inveterate opponent of the Empress, sympathetic to Liberalism and nationalism, and had opposed this war as a folly of the political Right. He dominated the meeting, urging that Trochu be made Military Governor of Paris. When Trochu’s chief of staff broached the Emperor’s need to ‘remount the throne’, the sovereign sadly conceded, ‘Yes, it’s true, I seem to have abdicated.’12
At this the Prince interjected vehemently: ‘At Paris you abdicated the government. At Metz you have just abdicated command of the army. Barring crossing into Belgium, you must take hold of one of them again. Command of the army is impossible. Taking up the government is difficult and dangerous, because it means returning to Paris. But damn it! If we are to fall, let us fall like men!’13
These arguments held sway. MacMahon had joined the meeting and contributed little, but vouched to the Emperor for Trochu’s reliability. It was agreed that the undisciplined and poorly armed Paris Garde Mobile would return from Châlons to Paris. Trochu, armed with a letter from the Emperor, would return as Military Governor of Paris, with command over its defence forces. He would issue a proclamation preparing the capital for the return of the Emperor, who would follow within hours. MacMahon, appointed to command all troops at Châlons, would bring them back to cover Paris, but would be under the orders of Bazaine as commander-in-chief.
This new strategy was nullified within hours. Trochu, having drafted his proclamation as he travelled back, insisted on seeing the Empress in the small hours of 18 August. She met him with a sarcastic sally at his political sympathies for the previous regime: ‘Don’t you think that, in our extreme peril, the Orléans princes should be recalled to France?’ She was having none of what she saw as an attempted Liberal coup against her authority, and ended the interview with a frosty pronouncement: ‘Those who have advised the Emperor on the resolutions you have reported are enemies. The Emperor will not return to Paris.’ According to Trochu, she added, ‘He will not come back alive. The Army of Châlons will go to join with the Army of Metz.’14
Palikao too gave Trochu a hostile reception. He had already telegraphed the Emperor:
The Empress has communicated to me the letter in which the Emperor announces that he wishes to bring the Army of Châlons back to Paris. I beg the Emperor to give up this idea, which would look like the abandonment of the Army of Metz … Within three days the Army of Châlons will be 85,000 men strong, not counting Douay’s Corps, which will come up in three days with 18,000 men. Can a powerful diversion not be made against Prussian forces already exhausted by several battles? The Empress shares my opinion …15
Napoleon, conceding that to retreat to Paris would be more dangerous than going to fight the enemy, abandoned the idea of returning there.16 Prince Napoleon Jerome was sent away on a forlorn-hope diplomatic mission to his father-in-law, the King of Italy. As Governor of Paris, Trochu was ignored by the Empress and Palikao. Doubtless they had reason to be wary of his dangerous popularity and unctuous professions of loyalty, but by treating him as a rival and enemy they confirmed him as one, and there would be a price to pay.
With Trochu’s plan ruled out, what should the Army of Châlons do? Napoleon told MacMahon that he would no longer attempt to direct military operations: the Marshal should consult Bazaine and Palikao. MacMahon’s request to Bazaine for instructions elicited the unhelpful response that the latter could give none, as he considered MacMahon’s operations ‘entirely outside my sphere of action for the moment’.17 General Palikao, at least, was not afraid to take a decision. On 19 August, with the support of the Cabinet, he set MacMahon the objective of rejoining Bazaine. MacMahon dutifully replied, ‘Please tell the Cabinet that it can count on me and that I shall do everything to rejoin Bazaine.’18 Yet he harboured doubts. He was reluctant to leave Paris uncovered in face of the rapidly advancing Crown Prince, or rashly to imperil his army, on which so much now depended. Moreover, he was perplexed as to what Bazaine was doing.
The Beleaguered Army
Anxiety mounted at Châlons on 17 August at reports of a great battle fought the previous day. A cryptic wire from Bazaine to the Emperor announced that the enemy had been repelled, but that Bazaine had been forced to draw back towards Metz, alleging a lack of food and munitions. He expected to resume his march in two days’ time, heading northwards via Briey. On the afternoon of 18 August came a telegram reporting that the Germans were attacking heavily all along the French line. Finally, at 8.20 p.m., Bazaine announced that firing had ceased. ‘Our troops, remaining steadily in their positions …’.19 Then the telegraph went dead. The Germans had cut the wire, and their army was firmly across the road from Metz to Châlons.
In fact, the two biggest and bloodiest battles of the war had been fought on the great rolling plateau that extends westwards from Metz. Within hours of Napoleon’s departure from Gravelotte on 16 August, leading units of the German Second Army had opened fire on French cavalry who had been heedlessly cooking breakfast in the morning sun by the Verdun road. Believing they were cutting off the French rearguard, the Germans had actually struck the head of the slow-moving French columns. All day long the outnumbered Germans, hurrying up from the south, fought desperately to keep hold of the highway leading west. By the end of the day they had 64,000 infantry in action, while the French eventually massed some 137,000 troops on the field. Yet the French fought defensively and with little coordination. Bazaine showed that he was as out of his depth as the Emperor when it came to controlling and directing a large modern army. The battle raged back and forth across the Verdun road and the fields and hollows either side of it, swirling round the solidly built Lorraine hamlets of Vionville and Rezonville. The Germans brought up nearly 250 guns to bolster their lines and bought precious time with desperate cavalry charges. At nightfall Bazaine did not press westwards, as he might have done, but abandoned the field to the Germans and swung his army back like a door, with its back to Metz.
His 11-kilometre line, centred on Amanvillers, was a superb defensive position. When the German First and Second Armies attacked it on the afternoon of 18 August with 179,000 infantry and 726 guns, their frontal attacks almost brought them to disaster in the largest battle fought on French soil until that date. On the southern flank, efforts to storm the quarries and farmsteads held by Frossard’s riflemen on the hills overlooking Gravelotte reduced the Germans to a state bordering rout by nightfall. At the northern end of the French line, a massed assault over open slopes by the Prussian Guard allowed the French, posted around the village of Saint-Privat, to demonstrate the lethal power of the Chassepot. Only at twi
light were Canrobert’s men, outflanked and outgunned, without reinforcements and low on ammunition, forced out of the blazing village – though the Imperial Guard stood unused and four million rounds of Chassepot ammunition sat in freight wagons in the marshalling yards of Metz only a few kilometres away.20 The French position finally unravelled from the north, the troops falling back on Metz after dark.
Moltke had limited success in trying to control the battle, while Bazaine hardly tried to do so. The fighting was directed by unit commanders throughout, and the losses were frightful. Men fell so thick and fast under the intense fire that ‘pitching down like at Gravelotte’ became a French expression for torrential rain or hail. Including Borny, the three battles around Metz, fought on 14, 16 and 18 August, cost the Germans 10,848 dead, 28,440 wounded and 1,630 missing or captured: a total of 40,918 casualties.21 The French lost 2,719 dead, 17,667 wounded and 9,258 missing or captured: a total of 29,644.22 On the German side, everyone from king to private was awed by the extent of the sacrifice and the loss of comrades or kinsmen. On the night of Gravelotte Fritz Hönig heard regimental bands playing ‘Hail to Thee in the Victor’s Crown’ – the Prussian national anthem – and ‘Now Thank We All Our God’, and brooded that amid such terrible scenes, ‘one might have felt inclined to regard this as a parody’. Next day Hönig was sickened as he viewed farms burnt out by German artillery:
At these points hardly any French were found killed or wounded by infantry bullets; almost all had been destroyed by the fire of the guns … The ground was changed by the German artillery fire into a desert covered with many corpses. The interiors of Point du Jour and Moscou [farms] were not passable after the battle until they had been cleared.23
Among the sad relics in the Gravelotte museum, one perhaps speaks more eloquently of the horror of the fighting than all the monuments and burial plots that dot these fateful battlefields: three Chassepot bayonets fused together by the intense heat of the fire that destroyed Moscou farm and its French defenders.
Although the Germans had paid a terrible price, Bazaine’s lack of strategic sense had allowed them to trap his army in Metz. On 19 August they completed a ring around it. A junction between the two halves of the French army, relatively easy only a week before, must now involve a battle with the Germans holding the central position.
Meanwhile, France waited expectantly, starved of reliable military news by censorship. Palikao sought to keep up morale, hinting that victory was imminent and spreading tales worthy of Baron Munchausen of Prussians slaughtered in hecatombs. Such was popular faith in Bazaine that it was believed that his withdrawal into Metz must be part of a clever plan. Howls of treason were raised against journalist Edmond About when he described the drunkenness and disorder of MacMahon’s retreating army rather too frankly.24
Yet invasion was becoming a reality in eastern France. Fear of it was borne westwards by hordes of refugees fleeing before German cavalry patrols which boldly demanded the surrender of village after village. In the fevered wartime atmosphere wild rumours ran: spy mania was everywhere and sparked ugly incidents. Palikao had one German shot in Paris for passing information to the enemy, and plans were discussed to expel 70,000 German citizens from the capital. Foreigners and minorities came under suspicion. Many an English tourist or newspaper correspondent seen making sketches, consulting a map or asking directions had nasty brushes with mobs and suffered brief imprisonment. In Strasbourg on 7 August a telegraphist saw a man accused of spying beaten to death by a mob, and narrowly escaped the same fate himself, being abused as a ‘dirty Jew’.25
In Alsace and the south Protestants were accused of being in league with the enemy. In the south-west priests and nobles were eyed suspiciously as conspirators and isolated acts of violence swept the countryside. Deep in rural France on 16 August, at an agricultural fair outside the hamlet of Hautfaye in the Dordogne, a peasant mob shouting ‘Long Live the Emperor!’ battered, tortured and burned to death a young nobleman whom they mistook for both a ‘Prussian’ and a hated ‘republican’.
By contrast, in large towns where the Empire had never been popular, principally Paris, Marseilles and Lyon, republican activists became restless at news of the first defeats, sensing their opportunity as the regime foundered, but the authorities quickly restored order. An insurrectionary attempt by the extreme Left in Paris on 14 August failed utterly. Wielding pistols and daggers, hard-line followers of the arch-revolutionary Auguste Blanqui attempted to seize rifles at the La Villette firemen’s barracks, but were captured after a fight with gendarmes. Bystanders were so out of sympathy with the insurgents that they beat some up, shouting ‘They’re Prussians!’26 When it came to suppressing the Commune the following year, the army would remember that the revolutionaries had been fomenting civil strife while it was fighting Germans.
Republican leaders, while keeping up pressure on the government in the Chamber, wanted to give it no pretext for repression, and hastened to distance themselves from the actions of a few violent extremists. For the moment, politics waited on military events. Yet it was evident that the fate of the dynasty, as well as that of France itself, was at stake in the coming campaign.
Chapter 8
The Army of Châlons
An Improvised Army
Arriving at the vast plain covered with white conical tents that was Châlons Camp, MacMahon’s men had the look of defeat about them. ‘Gaunt, black with dirt, bowed by extreme exhaustion, dull-eyed and dazed looking’, they moved one onlooker to exclaim, ‘Why, it’s the retreat from Russia without the snow!’1
They needed time to recuperate, reorganize and re-equip, but the rate of the German advance allowed only a pause. The few days the men spent at Châlons at least allowed them to clean their equipment, eat and rest a little. Some of their losses in clothing, camping gear and equipment were made good, though there were still shortages: in 1 Corps there were only enough haversacks for every other man. Promotions had to be made to fill officer vacancies, which grew more acute when Palikao ordered MacMahon to send forty-two senior officers to Paris to command new formations. Gaps in the ranks were only partially filled, using reservists with little or no experience in handling the Chassepot. Thus 1, 5 and 7 Corps combined demoralized with inexperienced troops, many led by unfamiliar officers.
As MacMahon would command the army, General Ducrot was appointed to lead 1 Corps. Lieutenant de Narcy wrote, ‘he passed for a general of energetic bearing, steadfast, educated, and capable of leading a large body of troops skilfully, and there was almost universal confidence in him.’2 Félix Douay, a competent organizer with Mexican experience, commanded 7 Corps. As for General de Failly, his performance at the head of 5 Corps had aroused such disgust among his men and the public that, unbeknown to him, Palikao had decided on a replacement, who, however, had to travel from Algeria, so the change of command would not be immediate.
The fourth and largest component of the Army of Châlons was the newly formed 12 Corps. Trochu having returned to Paris, this command was given to General Lebrun, who had accompanied the Emperor from Metz. The intellectually gifted Lebrun might have made a better chief of staff for the new army than General Faure, who was assigned to that post. Though his men were unfamiliar to him and he to them, Lebrun took up his command with energy. His troops varied greatly in quality. He had some good regular regiments sent from the Spanish frontier. (For, despite Bismarck’s hopes, the Spanish had no intention of becoming embroiled in a war that was only nominally about their throne.) There were infantry and artillery belonging to 6 Corps which had not been forwarded to Metz in time – men and guns Canrobert had sorely missed in the fighting at Saint-Privat. Then there was the Marine Division under General de Vassoigne: the so called ‘Blue Division’ whose blue-grey trousers contrasted with army red. These marsouins (literally ‘porpoises’) had been so christened by sailors of yore who alleged that Marines hung around ships eating but doing no work. They had been sent to Châlons because they were no longer required for a Bal
tic expedition.
In contrast to these excellent units, Lebrun had one division of raw troops formed of temporary regiments amalgamated from the fourth battalions of other regiments. Typically these were commanded by lieutenant colonels, with dugout captains leading enlarged companies. These troops represented the government’s efforts to summon more manpower: men from the 1869 contingent who had just been called up, plus reluctant reservists who had largely escaped training in previous years. But, while an army might be improvised, soldiers could not. Seeing the men he was to command, General Blanchard protested that ‘he asked nothing better than to die defending his country, provided he did so honourably, but not while leading into battle troops entirely composed of recruits who were soldiers in name only.’3 He promptly got himself a posting to Paris, leaving Lebrun hastily to make another appointment. Worried by the lack of fire discipline French troops had shown so far, Lebrun encouraged efforts by his officers to train his raw men in use of the Chassepot, insisting that each man fire at least five practice rounds.
The army had two reserve cavalry divisions. Bonnemains’s heavy cavalry was severely reduced after its exploits at Frœschwiller. The other division would be commanded by General Margueritte who, in addition to his brigade of Chasseurs d’Afrique, had one composed of hussars and chasseurs.
Although the army was under-strength, by 21 August it was drawing rations for 130,566 men and 26,763 horses. Its effective infantry strength (excluding officers) was 106,000, with 12,000 cavalry. With it went 348 guns and 84 mitrailleuses.4 The army had insufficient competent administrators, wagons or field hospitals. Most of all it lacked cohesion and discipline. On 18 August Narcy witnessed an NCO refuse to obey an order from his lieutenant, swearing and turning his back. When the order was repeated the NCO had to be restrained from striking the lieutenant across the face with his sabre, but received only a mild rebuke. Narcy was appalled by how many men made excuses for the culprit: ‘A striking example of the progressive indiscipline which the absence of severe punishments encouraged and emboldened!’5
Sedan 1870- The Eclipse of France Page 16