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With this the battle on the right had now assumed a most serious aspect, and the indications were that the French would attack the heights of Gravelotte; but the Pomeranian corps coming on the field at this crisis, was led into action by Von Moltke, himself, and shortly after the day was decided in favor of the Germans.
We took thought too of Wieland and looked in silence at the fine statue of Herder standing before the church in which he long ministered; but the supreme personages for us were Goethe and Schiller. What became of my sympathetic young soldier I have never known. If he escaped from Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte and Sedan I am sure that he must have matured into a high-souled man.
The root-evil I felt to be the overcrowding due to the reckless intercourse of the sexes; and what had Providence to do with a law of Nature, obedience to which entailed unspeakable misery? IN the autumn following the end of the Franco-German war, Dr. Bird and I visited all the principal battlefields. In England the impression was that the bloodiest battle was fought at Gravelotte.
But the location of this vital turning-point was very uncertain, and until it was ascertained and carried, late in the afternoon, the action raged with more or less intensity along the entire line. But as it is not my purpose to describe in detail the battle of Gravelotte, nor any other, I will speak of some of its incidents merely.
The same authority supplies what may be in part an explanation of this in his comment, written shortly before Gravelotte, that he believed there might not be another battle in the whole war a remark which savours of presumption and folly. Gravelotte, therefore, cannot be considered as wholly creditable to the victors.
The Parisians crossed the Marne, and fought the Prussians so desperately that in two days they had lost more men than in the battles at Gravelotte. By the end of November cannon had been cast in the beleaguered city, paid for, not by the Government, but by individual subscription. These guns were subsequently to playa tragic part in the history of the city.
Bazaine still had more than two hundred thousand men under his command, and might have taken up a strong position on the Moselle, or retreated in safety to Chalons; but he fell back on Gravelotte, when, being defeated on the 18th, he withdrew within the defences of Metz. He was now surrounded by two hundred and fifty thousand men, and he made no effort to escape.
The Federals engaged against Jackson lost in five and a half hours 7000 officers and men. During the seven hours they were engaged at Gravelotte the Prussian Guard and the Saxon Army Corps lost 10,349; but 50,000 infantry were in action. The percentage of loss was about the same in both cases. The Confederate losses up to 10.30 A.M. were as follows:
He wore his sleeves tight and his stock high, as in the days when William the Sailor was king in England, and his long gold-topped Prince Regent cane was the very acme of dignity. The measurement done, the three studied the fashion plates mostly five years old as Von Moltke and Bismarck might have studied the field of Gravelotte.
As for the turmoil! all Gravelotte, with half a million men engaged, could not have made such a soul-quelling, overmastering sound. Every capacity of sound, every possible discordant vibration of the atmosphere was at work; and so, with bellow on bellow, crash on crash, vast multitudinous shriek on shriek, that fateful tempest went on.
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