Franco-Prussian War: Marching in and out of Metz

Meet General Carl Blumenthal. He was with the Prussian's 3rd Army on the left, separated from the rest of the armies by 50 miles of mountains. On Aug. 4, Blumenthal crossed into the Alsatian frontier. The French under General MacMahon decided not to defend this frontier, but led his 48,000 soldiers to a good position at Froeschwiller. (1)

So Blumenthal fell like a ton of bricks on a town called Wissembourg: 50,000 Germans against 8,600 French troops. The French division's commander was killed, the town fell, the French ran and the whole battle lasted from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Then Blumenthal went and found MacMahon, who was still sitting on his ridge at Froeschwiller.

By 3 p.m., MacMahon was in serious trouble. He tried to send out the cavalry -- but the attack was hopeless. Cavalry couldn't charge against infantry with breech-loading rifles, a lesson, Howard says, that was to be forgotten long before 1914. The German guns were pulverizing the French. By 4:30 p.m. it was all over. The Germans paid heavily, but MacMahon lost half his strength.

It would take the armies of Europe 50 years to learn the significance of Aug. 6, 1870, said Howard: "The collapse of the cavalry, the transformation of the infantry and the triumph of the gun."

The defeats also left the French terribly depressed. Possible allies like the Austrians and Italians just sneaked away. Paris was outraged. But the French managed to regroup and assemble nearly 180,000 men at Metz. Napoleon III planned to go to Chalons and raise a new army, so he appointed a new commander-in-chief named Francois Achille Bazaine.

Apparently Bazaine has a very bad reputation in military history, but Howard begs us to ignore that and judge him fairly. (Easy for me to do — I'd never heard of the guy.) We're also told to overlook the fact that Bazaine was a weird-looking dude with "tiny, malevolent eyes set in a suety, undistinguished face." (2)

On Aug. 13, Bazaine started pulling everyone out of Metz at 4:30 a.m. It was a mess. Heavy rains had swept away or damaged all the extra bridges the French had built across the Moselle river nearby. Baggage trains blocked the streets of Metz. Twelve hours later., the troops were finally starting to cross the Moselle when they heard Prussian cannons.

The Germans were pretty surprised to see the French still around, but that didn't stop them from attacking. It was unclear on the morning of Aug. 15 what the battle achieved. Both sides claimed victory and "Bazaine lost 12 vital hours making his escape from Metz."

Bazaine went to bed early after the battle and about 10 a.m. the next morning, he sent off his 160,000-man army along one steep road west to Verdun. This guaranteed that the Germans would reach the Meuse river — the next river on the way to Paris — long before the French.

For the Germans were still lurking around out there. When the French realized that, they stopped moving again. Great, said Moltke, and he told Frederick Charles to advance straight north and attack them on the road to Verdun. But Fred couldn't believe the French would dink around like that ("Surely they must be close to the Meuse by now!") and he marched northwest to head Bazaine off. Only Fred's extreme right wing was heading north the way Moltke wanted.

The result? Fred's two right flank corps had to fight the entire French army on the 16th. By 11:30 a.m. the German position looked desperate, and at 2 p.m. they sent out the cavalry. "It was, perhaps, the last successful cavalry charge in Western European warfare," Howard said. Military historians pointed to it for the next 40 years that sending out cavalry against guns was just dandy. By the time the fighting died down at night, both sides, once again, felt they were the victors.

Bazaine had no such illusion. Since the Germans had cut the road to Verdun, he had to return to Metz to reorganize.

Understandably, this put a a little hitch in the French victory party. It took the French eight hours to cover 3-4 miles on the road back to Metz and form a single line north to south. Moltke saw new possibilities in this. Forget the Meuse, he said, let's push the French army away from Paris.

On Aug. 18 the two armies clashed. This time both full armies were engaged (the Germans had 188,000 men and the French had 112,000) and this battle was actually on purpose. Things came to a head at 7 p.m. when the Germans sent in the last reserves. It was routed and the Germans panicked, but the French didn't follow up. They saw no need to pursue their enemy.

"Such an army does not deserve victory," said Howard, disgusted.

This time, neither side felt victorious. The Germans had lost too many men and the French just ended up in Metz again.

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1) I can't wait till this war gets further into France and I can pronounce these names.

2) Howard really isn't helping Bazaine's cause with comments like this.