CHAPTER II.

SAARBRÜCK AND SPICHEREN.

On the morning of the 2nd of August, when the Hohenzollerns were

lounging in their sunshiny bivouac, the French Emperor, with his boy,

was travelling by train from Metz to Forbach. The German videttes

down in the valley heard the gusts of cheering with which Frossard’s

soldiers welcomed the Head of the State and his heir. Ignorant of the

cause, some put the cheering down as a response to the announcement of

a French success somewhere; others ascribed it to an extra issue of

beer. How could the honest Uhlans discern that the father had come to

the frontier to make a military promenade to tickle wherewithal the

Parisians, and that “Lulu,” as they irreverently called the heir to the

imperial diadem, was with his father that he might obtain his baptism

of fire?

The night had passed in extreme quiet all along the frontier, and

in the morning it seemed as if the 2nd was to be as monotonous as

had been the 1st. General von Klepsal and another brigadier went on

reconnoitring expeditions, and came back again to a placid breakfast.

A couple of guns with their detachments, part of the batteries that had

arrived the previous night, went up the Saar to St. Arnual, and finding

nothing threatening there, the officer brought them back. Two more, on

their return, went out in the same direction, their functions appearing

purely those of patrol. Two guns were leisurely got up on the height

above the town at the Bellevue, and there remained. The soldiers in

the barrack-yards, and in the several posts around the environs of the

town, slept and smoked and gossiped, their arms stacked as usual; the

officers sat under the trees drinking their Rhine wine, and the whole

place seemed oppressed by the drowsy effect of a fervently hot day.

A little after ten, having crossed over the Saarbrück valley from the

night’s bivouac, I leisurely climbed the slope of the Bellevue height.

There was no bustle on the road, and I saw nothing out of the common

on our side as I reached the Exercise Platz at the top. But across the

valley on the French side there was a sight to see. I use the terms

“right” and “left” with reference to my position, looking across at the

French, whether in speaking of their attack or of the German defence.

On the left, then, of the bastion-like plateau, already mentioned

more than once, there runs tortuously a fine road leading up out of

the valley intervening between the German and the French frontier

positions. It conducts over the brow of the hill, skirting the right

of a wood, and behind this wood and hill it had long been known that

the French were located in force. Near the top this road throws out two

branch roads, which both also lead down into the valley. One is a rough

country road that skirts the right edge of the plateau; the other is a

mere green track, of, however, some breadth, which crests the plateau,

and tumbles off its edge down the abrupt poplar-clad slope that parts

the upland from the valley.

Down all these three roads were streaming dense and glittering currents

of French troops; the stream on the great road flowing swiftest and

farthest. The sun struck on the bright bayonets, and threw out from the

grey and green background the scarlet-legged infantrymen. Those came on

in the true careless irregular French style, about six abreast, with

hardly a pretence at formation, but with a speed that was remarkable.

The moment that the head of the column touched the valley it broke like

spray. As file after file reached a certain point it became dissipated;

the men composing it extended at a run farther and farther, till by

the time that the heads of all three columns were in the valley, an

unbroken line of skirmishers was drawn several hundred yards to the

front. Then began the steady deployment of company after company,

battalion after battalion; and almost before one had realised the

position, a long dense line had been ruled along the bottom of the

valley behind the fainter line of the skirmishers. Squadrons of cavalry

streamed down, and, forming line at a gallop, rapidly overtook the

infantry. Passing through the intervals, they re-formed and pushed on

to occupy and cover the flanks of the advance.

While this was going on in the valley the stream from behind the wood

and the hill seemed to flow from a source that never would run dry. It

was hardly a gap that was caused in it by the two batteries of field

artillery that came down and wheeled off the road on to the verge of

the plateau, the gunners unlimbering and standing ready by the venomous

pieces that looked across at us with their wicked black mouths. Higher

up on the crest there was visible another field battery, apparently of

larger guns. In all, before I had to quit the heights, I am satisfied

that from 6,000 to 7,000 French troops were in sight. The peculiarity

of the movements I have just described was their perfect quietness

and uninterruption. The French tirailleurs were already breasting the

slope that led up to the positions held by the Germans; their main

advance was more than half across the valley, and yet not a Chassepot

gave tongue. The range must have been within 300 yards, and still the

Frenchmen pressed on with lissom agility, but without a single shot.

On the German side there existed as profound quietness; either side

seemed reluctant to begin the ball.

The German position demands a short explanation to aid in the

comprehension of what took place. The height known indifferently as

the Bellevue Height and the Exercise Platz is a natural rampart thrown

up between Saarbrück and the frontier. It is depressed a little to the

left of its centre, and the southern eminence is in its turn slightly

cleft, the _coll_ to the right being surmounted by a pleasure-garden

and serrated with terraces. The lumpy hill on the left slopes more

gently on the French side than on the German, and extends eastward so

as to form a cover to the village of St. Arnual, lying about three

miles nearer Saarguemines than Saarbrück. This height, or rather

these series of heights, present tempting opportunities for taking

up a strong defensive position. But they have two fatal defects. The

frontier valley circumvents them both to the right near Schönecken

and to the left a little beyond St. Arnual. Thus from either hand

the heights may be turned, the valley of the Saar penetrated, and

Saarbrück taken. Of this formation the French were evidently aware.

They presently began to echelon their advance, and to bring up their

left shoulders as if they meant sweeping round the height to the left,

and pouring into the Saar valley _viâ_ St. Arnual. And it seemed as

if the German disposition had anticipated this intention. The German

force was indeed so weak that it was hopeless to attempt keeping the

whole line; and, so far as it had been made available at all, the

concentrations tended towards the defence of the St. Arnual gap. On

the heights, then, when and for some time after the French made their

appearance in the valley, there was hardly anything but the ordinary

outposts and supporting detachments. I question, indeed, if there

came any reinforcements at all on to the berg. What force there was

extended itself in a thin line along the crest, taking advantage of a

scooped-out road that traversed that direction. It was policy on its

part to delay firing as long as possible, since the paucity of its fire

would betray its weakness. And it was evident that the French did not

half like the berg, with what secrets there might be concealed behind

it, but inclined rather to the St. Arnual direction, although cautious

not to offer their flank towards the berg.

But the long silence of the Germans appeared to give rise to the

impression on the part of the French that after all there could be

nothing formidable in that position, since opportunities so tempting

were not taken advantage of. So with one impulse the French echelons

brought forward their right shoulders, re-formed a continuous line, and

confronted now the swell of the height directly in front of Saarbrück.

Their tirailleurs opened a spattering fire, and then the Germans

replied. This was the moment of the bursting of our little Saarbrück

bubble. The French opened fire all along their line, sweeping the

height with a storm of Chassepot bullets. Their artillery took up the

sombre music from the plateau over against the valley, and the height

was at once untenable. I was behind a tree in front of the Exercise

Platz when it began. What of German defence there was lay entirely to

the left of me, and there was nothing between the Frenchmen and the

trees but a Uhlan’s horse careering wildly, riderless. This isolation

might have been of service as not calculated to draw the French fire,

had the gentlemen who plied that fire only been aware of it; but to

make sure they blazed away at the height all along its length. Bullets

had struck the tree behind which I stood, and a shell had ploughed

a spiteful furrow athwart the Exercise Platz in my rear. Evacuation

seemed eminently advisable, and so I started at a run and got into the

dip of the road without any casualty. The fusiliers were making a short

rally on the bank above it, and the ping of the bullets flew over the

road high above my head. As I stopped to take breath, a fusilier on

the edge of the bank was shot through the back and came crashing down

the shrubs on to the road at my feet. His back was broken, I think;

anyhow, he could not move the upper part of his body, but he took

a grateful pull at the flask which I held to his lips. As I passed

downward towards the town I found the Uhlans drawn up in the shelter

formed by the bend of the road as it winds up to the Bellevue. The

whizz of the bullets coming over the bank above them, and the sight

of the beaten-back fusiliers, convinced them of the inadvisability of

proceeding further. They went about and retreated through Saarbrück,

over the bridge through the suburb of St. Johann, and having passed the

railway station took post on a road leading into the interior. Just as

I turned the corner which brought me in sight of the Uhlans a shell

burst in the centre of a knot of fusiliers who were hurrying down the

road. Had the party been in the shell itself, it could not have been

more effectually shattered. A sergeant and five men were struck down by

this one shell—how many of these were killed I did not stop to look.

By this time the French had crowned the heights all along, and were

driving the German fusiliers down the inner slope towards us; and they

had been very quick with their artillery. Already they had got one

battery on to the _coll_ at the pleasure-garden, and another showed

its teeth through the trees of the Exercise Platz. One could see the

quick flashes in rapid succession. All Saarbrück and St. Johann were of

course fully commanded. The town was naturally in a state of intense

excitement, but the people in the houses lining the street that leads

to the height stuck to their homes like rabbits to their burrows, even

when the shells were crashing into the houses and sweeping down the

thoroughfare. There was partial safety in the cross streets, where they

were lined with houses on both sides, although occasionally a shell

would play old gooseberry among the tiles, and make one think of Fleet

Street chimney-pots in a gale of wind. But there was a space on the

road to the railway station, whither I was walking, where there were

no houses, and this had to be traversed before the road, turning with

a sweep towards the railway station, could be reached. The townspeople

were banked in masses at either verge of this _via dolorosa_, and

now and then a small boy ran the gauntlet. A burgher tried it, and

got a chassepot bullet through the fleshiest part of a very goodly

corporation.

My companion and myself got through in safety, and then were in a kind

of triangle, off which goes the road to the station on a little rising

ground, another road parallel to the frontier, and yet another across

the bridge. The base of this triangle is formed by the Hotel Hagen, in

which we sought refuge on finding that the railway station had been

selected as the spot where the Germans were to make a final stand with

the artillery which they had brought up from the bivouac. In the lee

of this Hotel Hagen were collected several detachments of infantry.

Others held the bridge over the Saar, that is to say, they occupied the

houses commanding it. A bee-line, drawn from the cannon on the Exercise

Platz to the cannon on the esplanade in front of the railway station

would pass over the Hotel Hagen, and also over the bridge. The French

were shelling the houses on the bridge; they were shelling the troops

in the triangle in front of the hotel; they were replying with shells

to the German shells from the railway station. Thus the Hotel Hagen

was rather warm quarters. There was this additional complication,—that

exit in any direction whatever seemed to involve more risk than staying

still; so we stayed still, my companion and I. We found three or four

more Englishmen there, some ladies, and a heterogeneous collection of

_Zimmermädchen_ and _Stallknechts_. The landlord of the Hagen was the

coolest customer I have ever met. His house was being knocked about his

ears, glass and crockery smashing in all directions. This exemplary

Boniface asked me coolly, under these circumstances, for four groschen,

the price of a bottle of seltzer-water that I had forgotten to pay for

the night before. He gave me change for a thaler with the profoundest

phlegm, and then grumbled that his _table d’hôte_ had been bedevilled

for the day. Bedevilled it certainly was,—at least that was the fate of

the dinner. A shell had burst right in the big square stove on which

is done all the cooking of a German hotel. Potatoes bespattered the

roof, and gravy flowed on the floor. Some of the pans yet simmered on

fragments left of the stove; others were made pancakes of against the

walls. The landlady and her maidens went off into hysterics, and we

had to carry them into the cellar under the back yard, a shell bursting

in that enclosure as we carried them down. The staircase leading to the

first floor was shattered, and communication cut off. The fronts of the

houses on the opposite side of the triangle were riddled, as indeed was

the Hotel Hagen. We here heard for the first time the mitrailleuses

at work. They plied from the Exercise Platz down on the bridge, and

the bullets spattered very closely together along the narrow track.

The report was very curious and distinctive. It sounded more like the

tearing sound of one of those diabolical contrivances which silly

people were wont to use at Greenwich Fair, and which gave one a lively

sensation of his coat being torn down the back. Any one who is too

young to remember this pleasing noise may form some conception of the

report of the mitrailleuse by listening to a police-rattle. It is

unquestionable that the mitrailleuse fire swept the bridge thoroughly;

nothing could live where its hail fell. Then the smoke began to rise

where the shells had set fire to the wood-work. A building in front,

one on the flank, and another in the rear of us, were all blazing. The

troops under our lee scuttled off under the shelter of a wall to the

railway station, and so out into the open country beyond, several of

them falling in the movement. Others took their places, coming in from

St. Arnual, and later those evacuating the town and falling back from

the bridges; and they, too, took the same course, and also suffered

more or less. All the while the German artillery from the station were

firing directly over our heads, replying to the French fire on the

heights, while the French continued to pour shells back in return.

Then the cry arose that the French had descended the slope and were

actually in Saarbrück. This was confirmed from the fact that the

German guns ceased firing, and it seemed that they were drawing off.

Clearly we were left behind. We were, it is true, in the rear of

the force to which we were attached; a safe position—but only in an

advance. It appeared certain that all St. Johann, including the railway

station, would be in the hands of the French in an hour or two. Four

Englishmen in the Hotel Hagen, acting under the advice of a German

correspondent of remarkable equanimity, concluded to wait the course

of events, in the hope that if St. Johann were taken by the French

to-day, it would be retaken by the Prussians to-morrow. The certainty

of this was not quite apparent, and I thought it my duty, looking to

the enjoyment of postal facilities, therefore, to get out of the place

with all convenient speed. We left the Englishmen playing whist in the

breakfast-room, and we—that is, an Austrian friend and myself—quitted

the rickety shelter of the hotel, and made a run direct for the sheds

near the railway station. To do this we had to cross the line of fire,

and that, too, where the shells were bursting thickest. There was no

help for it, for there was no other road. We ran—I own it. I think I

ran faster than ever I did in my life. My friend was hit on the calf

of the leg by a stone thrown up by a bursting shell, but not lamed; I

was not touched. Once at the sheds, we were safe. Traversing a deep

rocky cutting, across which the shells still flew, we emerged into the

back country, and followed first the railway and then the high road to

a village named Duttweiler, about five English miles behind Saarbrück.

On our way we saw numerous straggling soldiers, who did not know what

had happened to their regiment. They were all making for the rear. We

also passed a squadron of Uhlans drawn up on the road, and commanded

by a reserve officer, who gave me his card, from which I learned that

he was a Heidelberg professor. After our arrival at Duttweiler most

of the Uhlans and a large proportion of the infantry passed through

the village on their way to the rear. They reported that Lebach was

the rendezvous, a place some fifteen English miles back from Saarbrück

in the Trèves direction. Small detachments had been left to watch

the French and keep up the communications. The French foreposts had

occupied Saarbrück and held the bridges, but no force had crossed into

St. Johann.

It has been the fashion on all sides to make very merry over this

“military promenade” of the 2nd August. No doubt, in the light shed

upon the affair by our after-knowledge, we are entitled to set it down

as something between a spectacle and a farce. But, at the time, nobody

had either daring or data for suspecting that France had neither armies

nor generals; and, given belongings that one is entitled to assume

when a reputedly sane nation deliberately declares war, this affair of

Saarbrück was undoubtedly the winning of the first trick of the game.

German strategists have, naturally enough, made their own uses of a

fiasco which was solely due to French unpreparedness and irresolution.

It has been the fashion to argue that Saarbrück was designedly left

as it was, to delude the French leaders into a belief of German

unpreparedness, and to induce them to concentrate their forces, with

the design of incursion, at an obviously weak point, upon what seemed

an eligible track into the heart of Prussia; while in reality, had they

obeyed the lure, and ventured inland from Saarbrück, they would have

found the road barred, and the forests swarming with legions in spiked

helmets. But this _ex post facto_ special pleading would have been

swept to the winds, if the French army had been but reasonably fit,

and its commanders reasonably competent and enterprising. The fact is,

that neither on the 2nd of August, nor for several days after, were the

Germans ready to defend their frontier, much less to invade France,

had they been attacked or resisted in the manner the precedents of

France gave one the title to count on. Saarbrück was held for days “on

the bounce,” with a sublime audacity that could only have succeeded so

long, first, because the French were not ready for offensive action,

and, secondly, because their means of obtaining information were so

contemptible that they did not earlier come at the knowledge of the

weakness of the force opposed to them. No doubt the German commanders

had means whereby they ascertained the existence of both of these

conditions, and possibly presumed on this knowledge to make their

concentrations more leisurely and confidently than they would otherwise

have done; but that a grave risk was actually encountered was obvious

to any one on the spot. It has been stated that the woods in the rear

of Saarbrück swarmed with troops, which could have successfully met

an attempt of the French to penetrate further into the interior. The

truth is that on the night of the action there was no force nearer

Saarbrück than Neunkirchen, save scattered detachments of the infantry

and cavalry which had evacuated Saarbrück, and a couple of squadrons of

cuirassiers holding the roads as éclaireurs. Supports did exist further

in the rear, but scattered abroad over the face of the country, as

they pursued different lines of march, with Saarbrück as the point of

convergence. Had a French army of invasion pushed on through Saarbrück

on the 2nd, and marched rapidly into the interior, it would not have

been possible to concentrate those scattered regiments at any given

point across the hostile line of march; and my firm conviction is that

a Napoleon would have seen the Rhine without having had to fight a

pitched battle.

It is needless to multiply evidence that it was not for strategical

purposes that the Germans permitted this occupation of Saarbrück, the

barrenness of which must surely have surprised themselves. There was

not an officer within ten miles of Saarbrück who, for at least two

days after the affair, did not expect to hear from hour to hour that

the heads of the French columns were showing on the roads leading

into the interior. Inside that radius, during those two days, hardly

a reinforcement was pushed forward, simply because reinforcements

were not as yet available. On the 3rd, a working party of engineers

cut the railway below Duttweiler, that the enemy, in his expected

advance, might not be able to avail himself of the iron road. Strange

strategy, truly, to allow, if it could be prevented, the shelling of

a German town, to expose a couple of battalions to the onslaught of

a _corps d’armée_ as the gallant fellows, construing their orders to

“retire fighting” after their own hot and angry fashion, contested with

reckless fury every inch of the ground! Strange strategy, truly, to

involve that town in the all but certainty of a second shelling before

it could be retaken, and of set purpose to let the enemy get foothold

on a position of such dominance as the Bellevue height, commanding all

the area that must be traversed by a force aiming at its recapture! No,

the French had a chance, and a great chance, on this 2nd of August; and

that they did not take advantage of it is not to be ascribed to any

acts of their adversaries, but to their own inconceivable unreadiness,

and to the imbecile inaction of their leaders, assignable to ignorance,

treachery, divided councils, an organisation that was chaos, and an

Intendance that was rotten to its remotest ramification.

Criticism of the actual defence made would be absurd. The men fought

with desperate valour, and were as cool under fire as if they had been

at their dinner. One company of the Hohenzollerns bore the full fire

of two French regiments for twenty minutes, and then only retired on

receiving an order to do so. They were severely cut up, as a matter of

course. Their captain was killed and a lieutenant wounded. It is hardly

to the discredit of the little force that they allowed themselves to be

surprised, as they unquestionably were. There were hardly men enough

for sentries all along the line, to say nothing of actual defence. A

field telegraph wire along the height from Ottenhausen to St. Arnual,

and extending down into the town and the railway station, would have

been an important aid.

Consequent upon the German evacuation of Saarbrück, Duttweiler became

a curious menagerie. The Hôtel Till, the only hostelrie in the little

place, is a curious, rambling erection, rather unpromising looked at

from the street, but improving on more intimate acquaintance, and

of the most indiarubber-like capacity. There is wing after wing of

bedrooms, great bare rooms with benches, tables, and old pictures,

devoted to what use it is impossible to guess, long cavernous passages,

and a staircase you might drive a coach and six up and down. How a

place of the size comes to be located in such a village I cannot tell,

but it was found a very ark of refuge for the foreign waifs and strays

that had been driven out of Saarbrück. My friend and myself were the

first arrivals. Then came a professor in a German university, an

Englishman, whom I had last seen coolly sauntering through the fire

in rear of a company of German infantry, and who, when he had tired

of this amusement, had struck out for himself in search of a bed,

and instinctively made tracks hither. He was followed by a waggon

containing a miscellaneous load. It contained the four Englishmen whom

we had left over their game of whist, a German correspondent, and two

ladies, one of whom had been a Sister of Mercy in the campaign of 1866,

and the other had come to Saarbrück from Bohemia, on purpose to be

married to a Prussian feldwebel. He was on active duty, but a special

dispensation had been obtained, and the fräulein was to have been

wedded on the Tuesday forenoon. The ceremony was to have taken place

in the Hôtel Hagen, but the French shells postponed its performance.

The officer went one way with his regiment, the lady came the other to

be out of reach of the French. They were hardly seated when there came

in an officer of the American army, who had seen the fun out and had

then strolled out here. Presently arrived a couple of British officers

in mufti, an English student from Bonn, an undergraduate of Oxford

who had broken off a reading tour to come and see a bit of fighting,

and a real live swell, with a fearful and wonderful coat, adorned

with a girdle and several dozen pockets, with an eye-glass and long

whiskers, a dog that seemed dearer to him than life, and a drawl that

had not been perceptibly quickened by the French cannon. He—aw—had

been going eastward somewhere to—aw—Constantinople or St. Petersburg,

or—aw—somewhere, when he heard of something likely to be stirring at

Saarbrück—and had come down to view its aspect through his eye-glass.

The big hotel swallowed us all up somehow, and we assimilated into

quite a happy family, feeding together, and looked upon with eyes of

good-humoured wonderment by the honest villagers of Duttweiler.

With the only information at our command, to the effect that Lebach—far

in the rear—was head-quarters for an army of advance as well as the

little army of retreat, the position in Duttweiler seemed as good as

any, and we accordingly did not quit it. Little worthy of chronicling

occurred. In the forenoon of the 3rd a French soldier, who had been

brought in a prisoner, took it into his head to make a frantic effort

to escape. He got his hand cut off to begin with, and still this did

not conquer his repugnance to being a prisoner of war; but a couple

of pistol-shots did this very effectually. A little later there was a

grand chevy after spies. One was shot down in the rear of the Hôtel

Till, and two more were captured in a wood above the town. A villager

was torn from his home and his weeping wife. He was a Frenchman born,

but a naturalised Prussian; he had, however, been playing the traitor

to his adopted country by sending the French information.

In the evening of the 3rd a few of us bombarded-out vagrants walked

down till we gained a prominent eminence almost overhanging the valley

of the Saar, and from this we had an excellent view of the French

dispositions. The sight which we saw surprised us. Away on our right

front, on the shoulder of the slope by Stiring, was a large camp with

artillery parked close to it. There were tents on the Exercise Platz on

the Bellevue heights, with a battery of guns looking out to the right.

Far away over the Bellevue, on the crown of the height from which I

have described the French as streaming down into the valley lying

between it and the Bellevue height, was a great camp of infantry,

occupied obviously by several brigades. What lay in the valley we could

not tell, but it was hardly likely that it did not serve to conceal

a large force. On the slope above St. Arnual was another camp, but

comparatively a small one. For all this we were not unprepared, but

we were certainly not prepared for what we saw far away to the left

in the direction of Saarguemines. A good field-glass clearly made out

that on a broad plateau that must have been beyond Saarguemines, for

it was certainly distant fifteen miles, there lay extended a vast camp

that could not have been occupied by less than a division. Setting this

aside, it may be taken as a fair estimate that not less than 15,000

French troops were within the range of our vision. As I have said, what

the valley concealed we had no means of knowing. It might have been

empty; it might have held other 15,000 men.

From this coign of vantage it was more apparent than ever what

defensive advantages the vicinity of Saarbrück might have afforded had

they been utilised. The semicircular piece of table-land at our feet

almost suggested itself as a platform for heavy guns, the fire of which

might have altered the issue by playing on the heights by gaining which

the French gained the town. All that was wanted as the complement was

the cutting down of the belts of trees which encircle the Exercise

Platz. Had the fire from guns placed here not succeeded in its object,

and had the French, having occupied Saarbrück and St. Johann, made

longer maintenance of the table-land position untenable, both by the

road and by the railway were admirable facilities for withdrawal, while

the wooded slopes in rear of the table-land might have been held for

ever by a few regiments of riflemen well supplied with ammunition. Of

course the absence alike of artillery and of riflemen rendered any such

disposition an impossibility, and the observation forced from us was

that if the Prussians should have to exert themselves vigorously to

retake Saarbrück, they might easily have saved themselves the trouble

and the cost by never having allowed the French to take the place at

all.

One important effect the capture, even if temporary, should have

had. The railway from Trèves to Neunkirchen, and thence either to

Bingerbrück or through the Pfalz by Homburg and Kaiserslautern, forming

a connection with the Baden system, passes through Saarbrück, or rather

through St. Johann. As a line skirting the frontier, it was of much

the same value to Germany as was to France the Saarguemines-Hagenau

line, which Lieutenant von Voight had cut a few days previously. It

seemed incomprehensible that if the French were to be driven out of

Saarbrück, they should go without cutting this communication. Yet not

only did they do so, but they left intact the great viaduct by which

the line leading from Saarbrück to Metz crosses the Saar, and so did

the Germans a better turn than if they had evacuated the Spicheren

without a fight.

On the 4th there was a strange pause in the military operations, and

some of us dwellers in the Hôtel Till took advantage of the lull to

pay a visit to Saarbrück. The wise man who said in his heart that all

men are liars might have lived in our neighbourhood. One hour the

story was that the French had evacuated Saarbrück and were in retreat,

the next that they were in full march inland, and that we should do

well to pack up our kits and be off. Great formalities were reported

as requisite to enable us so much as to essay the task of reaching

Saarbrück. We had to leave behind our cards, our authorisations and our

money, in case of falling into the hands of the French, and being both

made prisoners of war and robbed. All that we were to take were our

passports. Then we had to visit the burgomaster and obtain from him his

written sanction—with the official seal, of course—vouching for us as

being harmless and “unsuspicious” individuals. The worthy burgomaster

granted this readily, and we left him with thanks, fighting our way out

from his door through a bevy of women whose husbands had been drawn for

the Landwehr, and who were clamouring for some means of earning their

bread. We had not gone a quarter of a mile when we came on a halted

detachment of cuirassiers, whose commanding officer gave us a voucher

to carry me through his outposts, and told us he supposed we should

have to enter St. Johann under a flag of truce. To our surprise we

found not a Frenchman in all St. Johann. I went to my old hotel, where

I found interim repairs already executed, and everything in its usual

condition. Occasionally there were little squalls of firing between the

French from above Saarbrück and the Germans, who, in scattered parties,

were in St. Johann; but the townsfolk had become familiarised to the

sound of the shots, and never so much as troubled to turn their heads.

Nevertheless, in these occasional trivial affairs lives were being lost

and plucky things were being done. Just as we came in two of the Black

Hussars made a dash to cross the old bridge into Saarbrück, not knowing

whether there were Frenchmen over the way or not. A French piquet was

in the Schloss Platz, and a few of the men under a sous-officier, ran

down the slope to the bridge head to have a crack at the hussars.

When these saw the red legs coming, they went about and rode back,

chased on to the bridge by the latter. One of the hussars’ horses fell

and threw its rider. As he lay prostrate the French sous-officier

sprang forward, his sword upraised to strike the hussar as he rose.

The gallant horseman, however, was on his legs with one bound, with

another quick movement he levelled his slung carbine, drew the trigger,

and the sous-officier was a dead man. A couple of Frenchmen sprang

forward to avenge the fate of their officer; but meanwhile from the

St. Johann side a couple of German infantrymen had covered them, and

as these two fired one Frenchman fell. This affair angered the French,

who maintained for some twenty minutes a spattering fire at everything

living that showed, but without effect.

We were again led to believe in St. Johann that if we wished to get

across into Saarbrück it would be necessary to appear with a flag of

truce, and forward to the French officer in command there a written

request for permission. As we walked on one of us had a walking-stick

and pockethandkerchief all ready. But we got on the new bridge, and no

French sentry was visible; we crossed it, and never a Frenchman was to

be seen. We reached the Platz and the post-office, and there was no

more appearance of French troops than there is in the neighbourhood

of the Horse Guards at guard mounting. I had been told that General

Frossard was living at the Post Hotel. The people there laughed in my

face when I asked the question. We traversed several streets before

encountering any Frenchmen, but at length in a back street, we came

upon a batch of the red-legged, blue-coated gentry. Harmless enough

they looked, as they came out of a baker’s shop with the long loaves

under their arms, grinning from ear to ear. A _gasthaus_ was full of

them, sitting drinking Rhine-wine and water. I went in and sat down

as a listener. The men by their dialect were chiefly from Alsace and

Lorraine, districts in which there is a very large German admixture.

Their conversation was _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_, save and

except politics, national or international. The townspeople confidently

alleged that these Alsace and Lorraine men were with Germany at heart,

but they were not so sanguine as to this after Spicheren.

After keeping the Frenchmen company for a while we paid a visit to the

Saarbrück hospitals. There were very few men desperately wounded. The

horsemen had been chiefly hurt about the legs, the infantry soldiers

about the arms or through the shoulder-parts which would be likely

to be exposed by a man taking a tree as his cover. The hospital

arrangements were on the whole very good, with one exception. The

windows were all shut, and the rooms in consequence smelt close and

stuffy, and the atmosphere was impregnated with sour tobacco smoke. Why

a free circulation of air should not have been insisted on was the more

remarkable, since the treatment in almost every case was the use of

ice. With few men in a ward and clean recent wounds, ventilation is not

so great an essential; but it struck me, were the wards crowded in hot

weather by men with sloughing wounds hospital gangrene would inevitably

arise. The long corridor in Scutari hospital would have been a

pestilential place, but for Miss Nightingale’s insistance on the freest

ventilation. I did not observe that any disinfecting fluid was used in

the Saarbrück hospitals. It was here that I first saw men wounded by

the chassepot, and one could not fail to remark what a beautiful wound

that firearm makes. It was reported after Mentana that a chassepot

bullet made but a small orifice on entering, but that from its gyration

it scooped at its exit a trumpet-like mouth. But here I saw stripped

the wound of a man who had been shot through the shoulder, and it was

impossible for a non-scientific man to tell whether the bullet had

struck in front or rear. The people of Saarbrück were behaving to

the wounded with great devotion. Several of the citizens had wounded

soldiers in their houses, whom they preferred keeping there to sending

them to the hospitals.

“Rümschöttel,” mayor of St. Johann, was a good German, and a wise and

sagacious man. We found placarded at every street-corner the following

intimation from him:—

“Looking to the interests of our town, I feel called upon to request my

fellow-citizens to avoid laying violent hands upon any French soldiers,

but to leave such duty to our troops. It is also the duty of every

well-behaved citizen to endeavour by all means in his power to prevent

any such occurrence.” Placards of a similar tenor, but uniformly

couched in less simple and plain language, one got familiar enough

afterwards in the course of this war; but never more was there occasion

for the mayor of a German town to sign such a document. The unpleasant

but necessary duty ever fell by the force of events to the lot of a

French functionary. I am not without suspicions that Rümschöttel’s sage

counsels were not taken in all cases, for the townspeople had their

backs considerably up, especially the women, who fiercely resented the

somewhat free manners of the French soldiers. But if the civilians were

commanded to hold their hands, the troops to whom the mayor grimly

alluded were displaying remarkable sagacity and alertness in “cutting

out” any straggling Frenchmen. As we came into the town, we had met

several prisoners being escorted into the country. General Frossard,

on the evening of the attack, had sent for the mayor, and told him

that his orders were very strict against straggling and marauding,

and that if any cases occurred the citizens were to take the numbers

displayed on the caps of the men so committing themselves, and report

the same, when the fellows would be severely punished. On the whole,

the Frenchmen were reported as behaving themselves pretty well, and

paying honestly enough in most cases. A brewery had, however, been laid

violent hands on, and between what was drunk and what was let run, the

brewer had lost beer to the value of some 3,000 thalers. It must not be

imagined that although the French were not in occupation of St. Johann,

it was not quite as much at their disposal as if they had.

In the early morning of the 5th, there was a considerable cannonading

from the heights held by the French above Grosbliffersdorff, and

simultaneously came a sudden alarm at Duttweiler, that the French

cavalry were advancing in force from St. Johann, driving in the German

cuirassier piquets as they came. A dropping fire of small arms in

the distance was audible, and the road became alive with additional

patrols, but in an hour all was silent again, and we never got to know

whether there really was anything in the demonstration.

On Friday morning, anxious to obtain a general authorisation from

General von Stülpnagel, of the 5th Division, who was reported to

be in command at Neunkirchen and the vicinity, I went by waggon to

Neunkirchen for this purpose. Along the route there was no great number

of troops visible; indeed, with the exception of stray patrols, we

might have been miles distant from the war. But Neunkirchen

“Showed another sight.”

All around were battalions of foot regiments and

regiments of cavalry, batteries of foot and of horse artillery, fields

full of cattle waiting for the military butcher, parks of forage

waggons, lanes of bread carts, masses of ambulance waggons, and all the

_impedimenta_ of a great army contemplating a sustained and prolonged

advance. Troops were streaming into the place from all directions,

notably horse artillery. I watched the entrance of three batteries of

this arm of the service, and I confess I was disappointed by their

appearance, remembering the dash and carriage of our English horse

artillery. The men seemed to want vivacity, their uniforms were plain,

the horses were inclined to be soporific, and altogether there appeared

to be a want of smartness about them compared with our own Royal Horse

Artillery. It remained to be proved, as it was the next day, how truly

serviceable were the plain-looking men and horses.

Having obtained my authorisation with a courtesy on the part of the

Prussian staff such as I have almost invariably met with from that

body, I retired quietly to my quarters, with the intention of enjoying

a good night’s rest, from which, for two or three nights before, I had

been debarred. A staff officer occupying the same quarters was good

enough to furnish me with some details of the positions occupied by

the first and second Armies, which sufficed to indicate very clearly

that an invasion of France was imminent. The 1st Army, consisting of

the 7th and 8th Corps, was advancing on the Saar, through the southern

extremity of the Lower Rhine Province, mainly in a section of country

having for its western boundary a line drawn northward from Saarlouis,

for its eastern the frontier of the Pfalz. The 7th Corps (Zastrow)

had the right wing, the left consisted of von Göben’s 8th Corps. The

1st Corps (Manteuffel), which was also to form part of the 1st Army,

had not yet caught up with the advance. He had not particulars as to

the dispositions of the 1st Army during the night between the 5th and

6th of August, but those I afterwards obtained as follows:—Zastrow

had his head-quarters in Lebach, and was to march next morning (the

7th) to Dilsburg. The right division of the 7th Corps, the 13th

(Glümer) bivouacked in and around Puttlingen, feeling away further

right toward Derlen and Knausholz. This was the right flank of the

1st Army. Glümer’s orders were to advance on the 6th to the Saar at

Völklingen and Rockerkausen. Kamecke, with his division (the 14th),

spent the night in the vicinity of Guchenbach, with his advanced troops

close up on Saarbrück. The bulk of the division was not timed to

reach the frontier before the 7th. The 8th Corps stood still further

back. The halting place on the 6th for its leading division, the 16th

(Barneckow), had been fixed at Fischbach, and the 15th (Weltzien),

still further in the rear, had its billet for Holz. Thus far as regards

the 1st Army. The 2nd Army, starting from its rendezvous at Mayence,

was swarming down all over the Pfalz. Lieutenant-General Alvensleben

had the right flank of it with the 3rd Corps,[1] and it with the 5th

Cavalry Division (Rheinbaben), which was employed in covering the right

flank and the front, was the only part of Prince Frederick Charles’

command engaged in the fight of Spicheren. As regards its dispositions,

my staff officer, since he belonged to one of its divisions, could

naturally speak with greater exactitude. He believed Rheinbaben’s

horsemen were already in Saarbrück, and they were permeating all the

country intervening between that town and Alvensleben’s infantry,

while they were also covering the left front of the 1st Army. This

disposition brought Rheinbaben _en rapport_ with Kamecke, and it will

presently appear to what effect the dashing cavalry officer availed

himself of his knowledge of that general’s relative proximity. For the

rest, the 5th Division, now lying in Neunkirchen, had for its morrow’s

itinerary a route that would bring it to Duttweiler and Rentrisch,

both villages, about five miles to the north of Saarbrück, and it was

to be temporarily succeeded in its occupation of Neunkirchen by the

6th Division (Buddenbrock)—the next link in the great chain cable that

was to be warped out of the Pfalz over the frontier into Frankreich.

But Stülpnagel, although himself spending the night in Neunkirchen,

had already projected his antennæ on the road he was to travel on the

morrow—not alone such feelers as the stout squadrons of Rheinbaben,

but also the 9th Infantry Brigade, commanded by the gallant Döring.

That brigade had its bivouac for the night on the slopes to the south

of Duttweiler, while at least one regiment of the 10th Brigade (the

52nd) was forward also on the southern road, with its night halt in

St. Ingbert. Every disposition indicated the proximity of a grand and

methodical concentration in the Saar valley, with Saarbrück for its

centre; but there was an absence of urgency in the arrangements that

certainly gave no earnest of belief in the imminence of a battle.

I make no apology for interpolating here the following description of

the battle of Spicheren furnished to me by a Prussian gentleman who

enjoyed exceptional advantages both for seeing the incidents of the

fight and for obtaining accurate information as to its details. He

had been educated as a staff officer, and had served in that capacity

in the war of ’66; and having temporarily quitted the military

profession, had hurried down to Saarbrück with intent to join, at his

own charges, some cavalry regiment in which there might be a vacancy

for an officer. When Spicheren was fought he had not yet been posted

to any appointment, and was therefore free to devote himself wholly

to observation, while he could ask questions and go unchallenged to

positions not to be thought of by persons without his advantages. I

have taken pains to test his facts, and being fully impressed with

their accuracy, have used no freedom with them, although I have

ventured to take some little liberty in rendering his language.

“In the early morning of the 6th, about four o’clock, I was aroused by

the bugle blast, and an hour after came the quick march of soldiers

on their way to the front. A couple of regiments passed towards the

railway station; another regiment started along the high road. Among

the troops there was no confusion, but certainly no want of alacrity.

A visit to the railway station showed me that, with a couple of

battalions in waiting, and no train expected other than indefinitely,

the railway afforded a very precarious means of transit, so I returned

and got a place in a waggon, in which, after breakfast, I started for

Saarbrück by the southern road. Presently we passed the infantry,

striding along manfully, and I had not gone six miles when I heard in

the distance the rattling sound in the still morning air, which no man

who has ever heard it can mistake for anything else than the noise

of moving artillery. By this time I was through St. Ingbert, where

the 52nd were halting with stacked arms, and soon after, at a turn

of the road, our waggon was overtaken by two batteries of artillery,

coming along at a swinging canter. The driving boy entered into the

spirit of the thing, and I offered him double fare if he would only

keep up with the horse artillery. He tried it right manfully, but the

waggon was clumsy, and so was the harness; and in the ascent, at the

slope leading to Scheidt, he brought his team to a standstill and

struck. Spite of his remonstrances, I got the off horse out of his

harness, and, mounting the animal bare-backed, set off in pursuit of

the artillery. I overtook them a little beyond Scheidt, where they had

halted for a few minutes to give the horses their wind, and found that

they belonged to Stülpnagel’s division, and that they had been making

haste to overtake infantry that was in their front. Hurrying on (for by

this time it was nearly eleven o’clock) I overtook, just as the Saar

valley at St. Arnual opened up, the tail of a part of Döring’s brigade,

which that officer had brought forward on a reconnaissance. The head

of the column was already engaged. Looking over the meadow toward St.

Arnual, I could see how the ditches and hedges athwart it were lined

sparsely with very energetic skirmishers. The French had a battery

outside the village, sweeping the crossing of the stream, and the guns

were playing on the road by which Döring’s men were debouching into the

open. His skirmishers, by the heady way they pressed forward, seemed

eager by themselves to carry St. Arnual, and turn by the manœuvre what

was evidently the point on which rested the left flank of the French.

Away on the right, Saarbrück seemed the centre of a pandemonium. On

the Exercise Platz shells were bursting, and it seemed as if batteries

were in action on the height; but this, as it turned out, was not the

case. All up the slope leading from the town towards the Exercise Platz

were heard the crack and seen the smoke-puff of the needle-gun, as the

German infantrymen pressed on to the summit. But in our own immediate

front we had quite enough to engage our attention. Stülpnagel’s

artillerymen had unlimbered, and were blazing into St. Arnual and the

French. Suddenly the latter gave ground. Their guns limbered up, and

their infantry melted away backward into the wood. Certainly it was not

wholly the German fire that caused this sudden retreat; some order must

have come from head-quarters. No matter what was the cause of it, the

German horse artillery were in motion again like a flash of lightning.

Through the river dashed the guns, sending up the spray in jets, on to

the turf with a strain and a bound, and then with a loosened rein into

St. Arnual! Here there was another brief stand, then another limber

up, and the horse artillery at a sweeping gallop passed round the St.

Arnual bluff out of my sight, whether into the valley beyond or to

climb the ‘Winterberg’ I could not tell.

“For my part, I rode into Saarbrück on my bare-backed steed, which I

handed over to the ‘stallknecht’ of the Reinischer Hof, in St. Johann,

to be claimed by his owner. Upon the railway-station esplanade I found,

in the persons of one or two dead soldiers, the evidence that the

battle had extended thus far. On the bridges joining St. Johann and

Saarbrück lay others, and the townsfolk were attending to the wounded.

At the head of the old bridge stood a French gun, a trophy, so far,

of conquest. The steep slope up to the Exercise Platz had evidently

not been taken without some fighting, although it had been held only

by some straggling outposts of Frossard’s rear-guard belonging to the

Division Vergé. The French had obviously not been idle during the

days in which they had occupied the heights overlooking Saarbrück. A

continuous line of entrenchment had been thrown up across the crest,

with earthworks of more importance for stronger infantry detachments

at intervals. But it was evident that no serious attempt had been

made to hold this hither line. Indeed, as I learned in Saarbrück, the

brigade or division (whichever it was) that had held the heights and

plateau behind it had fallen back everywhere on the previous night

but one. On the 5th Rheinbaben’s patrols, pushing forward after their

manner, had discovered how feebly the Exercise Platz was held, and

early on the morning of the fight their explorations had not only

satisfied their leader that it had been almost wholly deserted under

cover of the darkness, but had impressed him with the conviction that

Frossard was beginning a retrograde movement, which should include the

abandonment of the yet more advantageous position on the Spicheren Berg

and the elevated ground about Stiring with the entrenched position

across the valley, stretching like a curtain between the two strong

flank-positions.” Whether Rheinbaben was not too sanguine, or at all

events premature in this conclusion, is a question that doubtless

would have occasioned more controversy if the issue of the fight

that ensued mainly upon it had been different. “He lost no time in

dispatching the intelligence to General Kamecke, who, as commanding

the division nearest to the scene of action, at once took upon himself

the responsibility of ordering an attack on what it appears certain

he considered was but the enemy’s rear-guard. He sent back notice

of his intention to Zastrow, altering by the tidings the leisurely

character of that general’s advance on Dilsburg. Kamecke himself, with

characteristic impetuosity, galloped on to overtake his leading brigade

(the 28th), which had got close to Saarbrück, when he caught up with

it. Without losing a moment, Kamecke pushed Rheinbaben’s horsemen up

the slopes to the Exercise Platz, covering the intervals between the

roads with skirmishers, thrown out from the heads of his infantry

columns, while some of his artillery unlimbered on the St. Johann

side of the stream, and plied the plateau of the Exercise Platz with

shell-fire until the advance of the cavalry and infantry compelled a

cessation. It was while this was going on that Döring’s reconnaissance

reached the valley opposite to St. Arnual. I afterwards learnt that he

sent the battalions composing it down the river to support Kamecke’s

direct attack.

“As I passed through Saarbrück, and took my way up the winding road

to the Exercise Platz, it was already past eleven. Woyna’s infantry

brigade (the 28th) and Rheinbaben’s cavalry were already over the ridge

and striking steadily down into the valley intervening between it and

the Spicheren Berg and the French position. Hurried movements, executed

by large bodies of men, were visible through the glass all along the

latter. Streams of soldiers were pouring over the horizon, and rushing

down to line the entrenched edge of the bastion-like Spicheren. On

the little quarterdeck-like plateau, just behind, the batteries had

already got into position, and the shells were dropping fast among

the Woynas and Rheinbabens as they pushed forward into the valley.

Other batteries had opened fire also from a little eminence to the

French left of Stiring. These did not have it all their own way. Four

batteries Kamecke had already got into action—three aligned with the

trees on the Forbach margin of the Exercise Platz, one on the other

side of the Saarbrück-Forbach road. The fire of these was concentrated

on the Spicheren Berg, while already down in the valley one heard the

rattle of the musketry fire, and now and then came the sharp ping of a

chassepot bullet.

“At the mouth of the scooped-out cross-road where it joins the main

road opposite the Bellevue beerhouse, sat Kamecke on horseback, not

quite so cool, perhaps, as the circumstances demanded. With abrupt

gestures and jerky messages he was hurrying up his division to the

attack. The long columns strained up the steep hill in extra quick

time, the men puffing and blowing as the top was gained, and as the

battalions marched down the further slope and took ground right and

left of the main road across the valley. Here the young soldiers got

their baptism of fire, and the veterans of ’66 had recollections

freshened that might have faded into dimness as the years of peace had

rolled over their heads. For now, not alone over their heads, but into

their ranks, hurtled the angry shells, the jets of white smoke and the

temporary disruption of the formation showing ever and anon where one

had burst. The leading battalions lay down while the deployment was in

progress, but still the shells spared them not. Kamecke’s artillery

as it came up in detachments took ground right and left, some of it

on the height, some batteries rattling down the road and opening fire

on the slope at shorter range. One or two batteries were pushed out

to the right hand corner of the Exercise Platz to give reply to the

French batteries that were in so energetic action on the knoll flanking

Stiring. But artillery, infantry, and cavalry—for all were now within

range of vision from the corner of the Exercise Platz overhanging the

steep road—made up what seemed full too weak a force to cope with what

was before it; nor was there any indications of the speedy advent of

supports.

“Presently there was a move down in the valley. The Woynas (28th

Brigade) were heading away to the German right front to engage the

French left resting on Stiring. The gallant von Francois, one of a

race of soldiers, himself that day to meet a soldier’s death, led his

stout Westphalians of the 27th brigade direct on that abrupt mountain

mass that frowned out upon the plain, its summit already marked by the

fringe of white smoke from the chassepots of the Frenchmen lining the

entrenchment. There were French skirmishers in the bottom of the valley

and on the little foothold places on the precipitous incline. On the

level the Westphalians sent these back as if they too had been smoke.

But it was no fair stand-up fight man to man. From the top of the Berg

chassepot, mitrailleuse, field-gun concentrated on the on-marching

battalions their powers of destruction. With a steady, rather slow,

step they pressed onward constantly, leaving behind them on the plain

a terrible proportion of their number. The slowness of the pace was

characteristic.

“The German is a man of method and of stubborn pith. Under this

death-hail the dressing seemed as systematic as on the parade at

Düsseldorf, the touch of man to man as accurate. Ever as a shell

crashed through a company, or the mitrailleuse opened a lane and

strewed it with dead and wounded, the men flanking the gap closed in

with a grim coolness which impressed one with the conviction that men

who could act so could not be beaten. When the foot of the Berg was

reached, the pace quickened and the formation broke. It was now like

the forlorn hope of a besieging army storming a breach rashly reported

practicable. Men scrambled upwards and forwards anyhow. The officers

threw themselves from their horses, and took perforce to climbing on

foot. Now the leader on a rugged pathway would go down, and, as he

rolled backward, he would tumble his followers with him in pell-mell

confusion. Officers were seen throwing forward their swords, men their

needle-guns, and clambering up after their weapons on their hands and

knees. There were little protected liebys here and there, and under

these shelters the men packed as you may have seen sheep huddle before

a high wind with a snow-drift borne on it. Thither crept, too, the

wounded out of the fire that spared them when wounded no more than when

they had been hale fighting men. Then when the sound men had caught

their wind again, they would dash out, and make another convulsive

scramble upward, ever upward. On the brink you might see the Frenchmen

bending over the lip of the crest to get more purchase with their

downward aim. A mitrailleuse was balanced on the edge by men clinging

to the wheels and the trail, while its honeycomb-like muzzle went down,

pointing among the stragglers, its butt end high in air. Kamecke had

asked men to do an impossibility. There are parts of the Spicheren,

notably that part just on the left of the extreme bluff nearest

Saarbrück, which are not to be surmounted without scaling ladders. Von

Francois’s men were brought to a standstill. There was no alternative

but to fall back. Fortunately there was no necessity for a retreat

right athwart the valley. Out of its centre there rise several low

detached mamelons not of sufficient elevation to give any dominance as

against artillery on the Spicheren Berg, but affording better positions

for batteries than the plain itself, and furnishing cover behind which

troops might enjoy at least a partial protection. Two of these bear the

names respectively of the Galgenberg (Gallows-hill) and the Folster

Höhe, while behind the latter is some broken ground, with a house or

two and some water, the spot bearing the name of the Drathzug. On to

these two little eminences the artillery of Kamecke’s division had been

hurried forward to attempt some support and distraction for Francois’s

brigade, and when the latter had to cease its bootless efforts to carry

the Spicheren, it fell back to reorganise itself behind the knolls

on which the gunners, themselves suffering severely, were plying the

enemy with shrapnel-shells. Kamecke’s cavalry had drawn forward in

the valley, behind the shelter afforded by the Gallows-hill and the

Drathzug, strengthened by two regiments of hussars from Rheinbaben’s

cavalry division. As the 27th Brigade drew back sulkily, the French

skirmishers dashed down from the plateau, eager to hang on the skirts

of the retreating Westphalians. There are two steep country roads that

get down from the summit into the valley by a series of slants and

zigzags, and these were extensively utilised by the French skirmishers,

who pushed down even into the valley taking advantage of what cover was

available, as ever and anon Francois’s men turned savagely at bay. But

the skirmishers’ _bon quatre d’heure_ was very short. From behind the

Gallows-hill dashed out right and left the keen-sabred troopers of the

11th and 13th Hussars. Galloping through and round their friends, they

were on the Frenchmen like a thunderbolt, and the tirailleur-nimbleness

of the plucky little Frenchmen availed but little not a few of them. So

hot was the fury of the Hussars that they recklessly charged the Berg

that had broken the hearts of the infantrymen. They were not long in

discovering that their riding-school lessons did not include practice

in crag-climbing, and they went back wiser men than before; while to

some it was not vouchsafed to apply the experience in after-life. But

the sections which formed themselves on the more westerly road up the

heights saw before them a track which looked practicable. With mad

valour the blue troopers dashed on and up, strewing the road with

living débris as they advanced. How near the summit one at least of

them must have got I never knew till next day, when I saw a dead hussar

and a dead horse tumbled over into a ravine three-fourths of the way

up. I saw them ride up. I never saw any of them ride back.

“While the 27th Brigade was re-forming under cover of the guns, Woyna,

with the 28th Brigade, having struck away to the left by the Folster

Höhe, was steadily fighting his way up toward Stiring, on which the

French left flank leant apparently in considerable strength. His

troops had fair cover in the broken woodland on either side of the

railway and the mill-dams, while the railway cutting, deep as it is in

places, and not straight for a long enough distance to be raked, also

afforded opportune protection. He had, however, to fight every step of

the ground, amid a terrific shell-fire that set alight to a terrace

of workmen’s houses on the western side of the railway, that seemed

to have been temporarily occupied by the German troops. But Woyna’s

progress was terribly slow, and the French fire never slackened.” What

his losses were, the journeyer on the railway may yet form a vague

conception as he looks out upon the numerous green hillocks in the

forest glades or the little clearings. There is a little signal-house

on the railway that must have been the focus of a fearful fire. No

shells had struck it, but when I saw it the day but one after the

battle I could not find a space the size of this page which did not

show the easily-read print of the impact of a bullet.

“Von Francois’s men were not convinced by the lesson they had received

as to the inaccessibility of the Spicheren Berg. They must have one

more useless essay at the impossible. I do not know whether Kamecke

gave the order or not, but the diminished companies came out yet again

to the open, and once more breasted the lower slopes of the hill.

By this time the fire of the division’s artillery, plied as it was

unremittingly, had made the edge of the Berg a very hot place, and the

Westphalians were hardly so much torn as they had been on their first

attempt. But the French general must have recognised how fatal to him

would be their success. They must be repulsed _coûte qui coûte_. So the

Frenchmen, standing in the shell-fire, again lined their intrenchment,

and leaning over, rained death upon the struggling bearers of the

needle-guns. Some of von Francois’s men staggered up through the storm,

till they reached the shelter of a rock which, overhanging, supports a

section of the verge of the sloping plateau above; and there, powerless

to go further, and objecting to go back, they cowered in comparative

safety, so close under their enemies that they might almost have

grasped the muzzles of the chassepots. Von Francois himself was down,

a fearful proportion of his officers had fallen, and the brigade had

to own itself foiled, and give up what it seemed to have set its heart

upon to achieve. But it went no more back behind the guns. These forced

the French to hold their hands greatly, and the German infantry men,

with a bulldog-like stubbornness, lay down among the furrows and by the

hedgerows along the foot of the Berg. If they could not carry it, at

least they would not leave it.

“It was now close on three o’clock, and Kamecke must surely, after the

example of one greater than he, have been looking often and often at

his watch, and muttering that would to God night or Zastrow would come.

But there were succours nigher at hand than any Zastrow could bring.

As it came toward its halting ground at Fischbach, the cannon-thunder

came wafted on the wind to Barneckow’s division. Von Göben was on

in advance of his corps; von Göben, to whom the _Kanonendonner_ was

ever sweet music. There was no halt for the 16th Division this long

summer day. By two the mazed people of Saarbrück saw with joy their

old friends of the 40th, as the staunch Hohenzollerns hurried over the

bridge to get on to the heights where they had already tasted blood.

Von Göben rode on to the Exercise Platz, and took in the situation at

a glance. It was truly a critical one. The 40th he sent straight out

into the plain, to support the broken left flank of the 27th Brigade,

and rode on himself to the Gallows-hill to take the command out of

Kamecke’s hands in virtue of his superior rank. The 40th Regiment

was as yet all that the 8th Army Corps had to say for itself, if we

except von Göben: but other troops than Barneckow’s division had heard

the cannon-thunder. By half-past two there was streaming round the

shoulder the mass of Döring’s brigade, the 9th, of the 5th Division

(Stülpnagel), summoned from its bivouac by Duttweiler when its general

had found that his reconnaissance was the road to a battle. It had

already done some fighting about St. Arnual, and had established the

fact that the right flank of the French was now in the forest of

Spicheren, which clothes the somewhat less abrupt slopes from the

precipitous part of the Berg eastward in the direction of Berbach.

As Döring advanced, he fell into position on the left of the 40th

Regiment, with his front looking into the dark forest that rose before

him. Other advance regiments of the 5th Division presently reached

him, and the aid, no great thing as it was, looking at the work to be

done, gave relief to the 14th Division, engaged as it had been right

up to the hilt. The attack on the Berg was renewed but in part, the

40th undertaking the less precipitous section lying next the wood of

Spicheren, while Döring’s regiments, under cover of a fire from part of

the artillery of the 3rd Corps, which had just come up, went straight

at the forest itself. The 40th had traditions of storming prowess. It

had shown the way over the fortifications of Düppel; but the Spicheren

Berg was harder than had been Düppel. What fighting it was to be sure,

all along from the nose of the bluff eastward to the right verge of the

wood! Three times did the Germans charge the hill and the wood—scarcely

less a hill; three times did the French, fighting with a stubborn fury

that was of the undegenerate days, hurl them back with a withering fire

right in their teeth almost at arm’s length. For two stricken hours

was the result dubious. But at five Alvensleben came on the ground

with fresh supports belonging to the 3rd Corps, and one more attack

was joined. Steadily climbed on the 40th up the steep green slopes.

Döring’s men were over the trench on the edge of the wood and in among

the trees. There is something horrible in the suspense of a fight in

a wood. You see little or nothing; there is an occasional flash, and

in the casual openings glimpses of troops swaying and heaving, like

sea-waves in the chasm of a cavern; then there is an interval with

nothing visible but the calm green tree-tops, which mock you when

you know that hell is raging below them; and the hell is continually

dropping its red-hot coals through the bars of the furnace, in the

shape of wounded men who come staggering out from behind the trunks,

halting often as they come. How is it to go? Are the blue-coated men

you saw go in to be vomited forth again the way they went, with the

red-breeched men hot and triumphant on their flanks, plying the devil’s

pitchfork to hoise them wherewithal outside? or has this Spicheren hell

a thoroughfare through it, and are the blue-coated men, having battled

through the furnace, to reach the grill on the further side, and draw

breaths of cooler air there? The white smoke surges up fitfully through

the dark-green boughs of the fir-trees; still the wounded men stagger

out, and still the issue is uncertain.

“But if we could not penetrate the secrets of the wood, we might, at

all events, watch the course of the Hohenzollerns on its flank. Slowly,

and evidently with arduous effort and terrible loss, they pushed on

their dogged way. At length they were over the worst in the point of

climbing, and into the worst in point of musketry fire, as they reached

a kind of natural glacis before the French entrenchment. Watching them

through the glass, one seemed to see the men straightening themselves

up and pulling themselves together; then, as it seemed, with one great

effort of their muscular loins and hips, they shot forward on to the

top of the earth-bank. For one moment it was as if they hung here,

and then fell forward, lurching down as it were on the Frenchmen who

lined the trench. They say there was no actual bayonet fighting; from

behind, it certainly looked as if for a couple of minutes there was a

hand-to-hand fight; on the near side the dogged, weighty mass of the

men in spiked helmets, leaning forward with a terrible _vis inertiæ_;

on the further, a seething, bobbing, gyrating, frantic throng of

marionnette-like men in red breeches. The spiked helmets seemed with

their sheer weight and irresistible pressure to drive back the red

breeches as a masterful wave sweeps the foam before it; and when the

berg was won, the wood was won also. Döring’s Brandenburgers were not

to be flouted by the Hohenzollerns. The wood was theirs, and cleared of

French as the latter became aligned with its edge on its western flank.

We saw little more for the time of the fight here, but the din that

came back to us proved that all was not over on the upland when the

Spicheren wood had been taken.

“As we learned afterwards, the French again and again charged the

wood with fury, and even once or twice penetrated into it. The

Hohenzollerns, dreading lest with the impetuosity of the rush they

should be swept bodily back off the plateau, had to seek something

at once of ground-anchorage and of cover among the trees. It was

impossible for infantry alone to make its way upward and onward on

the plateau. The call was for artillery, and artillery came. Two

batteries of Stülpnagel’s division, that had been firing from before

the Winterberg before the duel in the dark began in the wood, limbered

up, and made for the rough winding track by the edge of the wood. The

drivers were resolute, and the horses were strong. In ten minutes

the gunners were at “action front” in the very faces of the French

infantry, who had no alternative but to give way, for they had been

deserted by their artillery; so, fighting desperately as they went,

they fell slowly back, and the Germans pressed on, gradually making the

plateau their own. So the French right wing was turned, and the battle

of Spicheren virtually won.

“Certainly on the German right there seemed little indication that

such a result had been achieved. Zastrow, with part of the reserve

artillery of his corps, had come over by the railway bridge on to the

battle-field at half-past four, superseding in his turn Von Göben in

right of seniority. Zastrow had been trying strategical experiments

with his 13th division (Glümer), which was out of the hunt, away

by Völklingen, marching along, as we afterwards learnt, in blessed

unconsciousness of what was going on so near it, the wind setting the

other way, till an aide-de-camp from Zastrow, who reached Glümer about

five o’clock, gave him a new direction and a stimulus to speed. But

Zastrow had not at hand available troops of his own corps. The quiet

and prompt Alvensleben (who was also already in the field) had got up

nearly the whole of Stülpnagel’s division, and there were regiments

available to participate in offensive action on the right, as well as

to carry the Spicheren wood on the left. All the afternoon Woyna had

been fighting doggedly forward till he had edged the French out of

Stiring, and well across the valley from their entrenchments behind

the iron-works of Stiring Wendel, on to the Kreuzbach, which may be

called roughly a prolongation of the Spicheren-berg toward Forbach.

Zastrow sent on a brigade of infantry and some artillery to attack this

strong position; but the French, whose left had been strengthened by a

division of Bazaine’s corps, anticipated the offensive, coming down in

great force into the valley, no doubt with a design to cover Forbach at

least for a time. The German artillery, which was now in strong force

about the railway, played terrible havoc with this effort on the part

of the French, who, however, persevered with a tenacity that seemed to

partake of despair. At length Stülpnagel’s infantry were sent forward

to precipitate the action, and this they did, by driving the French up

the Kreuzbach, and storming it on their heels. This movement turned the

French left on its part, so that while they were being hustled backward

over the plateau on the right, they were being all the more shoved on

to it from the Kreuzbach toward Spicheren and Alsting from the left.

The confusion of the cross streams must have been immense, especially

as the roads along which retreat alone was possible were by no means

either good or plentiful. While Frossard held Forbach he had the key

to the main _chaussée_ to Metz; but Zastrow’s strategetical experiment

turned up a trump in the twilight. Glümer’s division (the 13th),

bearing round from Völklingen by Ludweiler and Rosseln, came down

upon Forbach from a due westerly direction, and frightened the French

out of it with hardly any fighting.” The other divisions had got all

the mauling; Glümer’s had had the furthest marching, and now came in

for the heaviest loot; for the French evacuated Forbach in hot haste,

and, after an absurd attempt to wreck the station and its multifarious

contents by sending an engine to run amuck down a siding and on to the

station, left everything as it stood, from scents and _bonbons_ to

flour and munitions of war.

“There was in the dusk a kind of miscellaneous fighting all across the

plateau, about the villages of Spicheren, Alsting, and Etzling. The

French seemed never to know when they were beaten. Although regimental

formation had become for the most part shattered in the mass which

acted as the rear guard, detachments and groups fought passionately.

It seemed as if the fight was to last all night. It became impossible

in the dusk to distinguish between friend and foe. The French were

reported to have sustained serious injury through a blunder of this

kind, in which countrymen slew countrymen. The Prussians adopted the

expedient of shouting “Hurrah Preussen!” and the hoarse, deep-throated

cry ever and anon came backward from out the din, the smoke, and the

fire-flashes with a strange weird effect. At length these detachments

and groups either fell back or went down till the front was tolerably

clear of Frenchmen. Then their artillery struck in for the last word.

It had been got into position about Kerbach to cover the retreat on

Puttelange, and was well and staunchly served to the last. The Germans

with some little over-confidence, pressed it rather too closely,

and then the French infantry yet once more showed how it carried a

sting in its tail.” It must have been a ragged array that resumed the

offensive thus in the darkness, but there is no doubt of the fact that

a determined front after a fashion was shown. Yet there might have been

some attempt at a pursuit, but that all the German army, with perhaps

the exception of Rheinbaben’s cavalry division, was jaded with long

marching and fighting. So beyond Kerbach, Frossard was let pursue in

peace his disorganised and disorderly retreat. They had left of their

goods and chattels in Spicheren, as well as in Forbach. “The firing had

not wholly died away till after nine o’clock. As I walked back over

the plateau, down the steep, across the valley, and on to the Exercise

Platz, I had constantly to pick my way very carefully. It is a dismal

sensation to stumble over a dead man. It is even a greater shock to

force unwittingly a groan of pain from a poor wounded wretch lying

helpless in his blood, waiting for the succour that, come how soon it

may, is ever over-tardy. How many, both of dead and of wounded, flecked

the brown surface of the heights I could then form no estimate; I only

knew this, that the number of both was very great. Spiked helmets and

red breeches blended together as closely as if they had been bosom

friends all their lives. The hospital corps with their ambulances were

swiftly picking up the wounded and carrying them off to be tended.

Their organisation seemed excellent. More than once I saw in the pale

ray of a moonbeam a female form swathed in black, with the white patch

and the cross on the breast, bending over a prostrate form, or flitting

ghostlike in the van of an ambulance party.” God bless the Sisters of

Mercy in a night like this, say I, whether they are Roman Catholic or

whether they be Protestant. Christianity on a battle-field can well

afford to sink sectarianism. There were days and nights of bloodshed

to come, when no Saarbrück convent should be close by to send out its

courageous sisterhood on to the brink of the _Schlachtfeld_.

The Germans had, in all, engaged about 40,000 men, including the

division Glümer, and probably Frossard, even with the reinforcement

from Bazaine, was not so strong by some 12,000. Deducting Glümer’s

division, which, although it came under fire, and therefore, strictly

speaking, must reckon as being in the field, took no real part in the

action, the hostile forces were about equally matched in point of

numbers. It is no exaggeration to say that its position represented to

the French army a value equivalent to another army of equal strength.

The German loss was terrible—over 4,300 men killed and wounded. Nearly

all the loss fell on the 14th division, only a portion of the 5th

division, and the 40th Regiment. Probably the whole loss falls to be

apportioned on a force under 20,000 men, and this would bring out the

loss as one in five—an exceptionally heavy per-centage. The loss in

officers was by far too heavy on the German side. The French left 2,000

unwounded prisoners in German hands.

The battle of Spicheren was won solely by the stubborn valour of the

German soldiers, and by the cannon-thunder. The record of it contains

no evidence of the influence of a master-mind over its dispositions and

results. General Kamecke was probably justified in his effort to make

a snap-shot for a victory, but certainly he had no right to engage

himself so closely and generally as he did, until he had far better

assurance than he had that he might reckon on supports when the time

should come for him to want them. He might have secured his end, at

far less expenditure of human life, by using his division discreetly

to keep the French in play on both flanks, instead of abusing it as

he did by an effort for the direct storm of such a position as the

Spicheren-berg. It does not appear that he had any cognizance of

Stülpnagel’s ability to come to his support in the opportune moment,

or, indeed, that he communicated at all with Alvensleben’s corps.

What succour he derived from this source—and how invaluable was that

succour, the preceding details have demonstrated—came to him from the

fortunate circumstance that Döring’s reconnaissance in the morning put

that officer on the _qui vive_, and from the accident that the wind set

in such a direction as to carry the sound of the cannonade into the

back country. The responsibility of the day’s work, in so far as it

was disastrous, rests with Kamecke; and there seems every probability

that had the first army—the support which was all that he appears

or, indeed, was entitled to have calculated on—constituted the whole

available force, the marker in the war-game would have had to score a

victory for the German arms between Saarbrück and Forbach on the 6th

of August. That Kamecke was not defeated before supports came up, was

owing solely to the stoutness of his Westphalians; and that victory

was ultimately achieved was owing to the fact that Stülpnagel and

Alvensleben were prompter than was Grouchy in marching on the sound of

the cannon. All’s well that ends well. The victory had an immense moral

effect. It must have been in the light of the experience furnished

them at Spicheren that the French huddled backward under the shells

of the forts of Metz, without attempting to utilise the many tempting

positions for a stand which the configuration of the ground afforded

them by the way. General Steinmetz has been erroneously blamed for the

waste of life at Spicheren. The fact is that the gallant old soldier

was responsible for nothing on the 6th of August, unless it might be

for the circumstance that he did not happen to be nearer the front. He

did not get into Saarbrück until the evening.

I walked out on the battle-field on Sunday afternoon. All up the steep

which rose out of the valley all the way from over against the Exercise

Platz to near Forbach, a distance of some four miles, the dead of the

German army lay thickly. At the bottom of the steepest place there was

quite a fringe of butchery that had rolled downward in obedience to

the law of gravitation, a grim alluvial deposit made by the torrent

of shot. On the little level shoulders of the steep graves were being

made, into which the burial-parties were huddling

“Friend and foe,

In one red burial blent.”

Some of the ravines leading on to the height, where it is indented by

the bay between the Spicheren-berg and the Kreuzberg, had been the

scenes of desperate fighting. In a little gully just at the top of one

of these I found a dozen Prussians lying dead, piled one above another

in inextricable confusion. Elsewhere they lay as thick. Inside the

intrenchments it was the turn of the Frenchmen to be found dead in the

greatest numbers. The ditch itself was full of them. For several yards

inside the intrenchments it was impossible to step without treading on

dead humanity. The fight had been equally deadly all over the plateau,

where the corn and grass were trodden into the brick-like ground that

was yet in places soft and soppy with blood.

Saarbrück, which had chafed mightily under the presence of the

Frenchmen on the heights above them and occasionally in their midst, no

sooner saw victorious Germans on the Exercise Platz than it broke out

into a spasmodic eruption of flags symbolical of victory, and generally

went half crazy with joy. But there was real work for Saarbrück to do

in manifestation of its national and indeed human sympathies, and the

flags and phlegmatic caperings were only a preliminary outburst. The

wounded were to be removed from off the battle-field, as the tide of

war surged forward and left its _débris_ behind. Right energetically

did Saarbrück rise to the occasion. I do not believe there was a man or

a woman or a boy or a girl in all the town who did not help to carry

wounded soldiers off the field. The medical arrangements were decidedly

defective. No such sudden call on the services of the department had

been anticipated, and the staff both of bearers and of surgeons was far

from strong enough, nor was there enough of hospital accommodation. The

first and the last wants Saarbrück did its best to supply. Into every

room of every house, into every shed and outbuilding, were carried

wounded men. My hotel was full of them, from the _salle à manger_

to the fortress in which Boots cleaned his knives and brushed the

clothes. Fifteen poor fellows lay all night on straw in an outhouse

without medical aid. In the morning three of them were dead. On Sunday

began the transport by railway into the interior of such as could be

moved, this being a wise provision for keeping the frontier hospitals

available for the wounded in future actions; 2,000 were so sent away

on the Sunday and Monday, both Prussian and French, their destinations

being the large towns all along the Rhine. As I left Saarbrück the

procession to the station was unbroken of litters and hand-ambulances,

of pale men with arms in slings, or limping, supported by a couple of

sympathisers. One I saw pass in a wheelbarrow.