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The crown prince, on the extreme left, struck the first blow at Weissenburg, on the 4th of August; and on the 6th he assaulted McMahon at Worth, and drove back his scattered forces, partly on Chalons, and partly on Strasburg; while Steinmetz, commanding the right wing, nearly annihilated Frossard's corps at Spicheren.
He has some pluck, some physical courage at least." But in vain did we wait for our revenge upon the Prussians. After Weissenburg came Spicheren, then Wörth. Everywhere the German force was stronger than the French, and it turned out that their artillery was better than ours.
By nightfall we were all reunited, except one unfortunate fellow who had been slightly wounded and whom a Saarbruecken doctor had kindly received into his house. On the 6th August came the Prussian repossession of Saarbruecken and the desperate storm of the Spicheren. The 40th was the regiment to which was assigned the place of honour in the preliminary recapture of the Exercise Platz height.
Every name connected with it thrilled his memory: Saarbrücken, a skirmish still scarcely imbued with the gravity of war, and assuming rather the character of playful bantering provocation; Weissenburgh and Wörth, where Bavarians and North Germans met as comrades in arms; Spicheren, where a slight encounter with the rear-guard grew into a serious conflict; Metz, which cost the enemy one of his two armies in the field, and was the cause of weeping to countless German mothers; Beaumont, the prelude to the huge tragedy of Sedan; and lastly, Paris, and the grim tussle of the seasoned fighters with the young enthusiasm of the republican army of relief at Orleans, Beaune la Rolande, Le Mans, St.
The sinister face of a police-spy peered into the conservatory at intervals, where a slender, pale-faced boy sat, clothed in a colonel's uniform, writing on a carved table. It was the Prince Imperial, back from Saarbrück and his "baptism of fire," back also from the Spicheren and the disaster of Wörth.
So confident indeed was he that before he crossed the French frontier on the second day after the twin victories of Woerth and Spicheren, he had already resolved on annexing to the Fatherland the old German province of Alsace which had been part of France for a couple of centuries.
On the right was the First Army, under command of General Von Steinmetz, the victors, August 6, of Spicheren, near Saar, and, eight days later, of Colombey, to the east of Metz; while the centre and left were composed of the several corps of the Second Army, commanded by Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, a part of whose troops had just been engaged in the sanguinary battle of Mars-la-Tour, by which Bazaine was cut off from the Verdun road, and forced back toward Metz.
To keep up, if possible, the spirits of his partisans, he wired on the evening of the 7th to Paris, with the news of the defeat, the words, "tout se peut retablir." He was mistaken. While the crown prince was crushing MacMahon at Woerth, the imperial troops were being beaten at Spicheren as well.
Bazaine, for instance, was left on the 5th in ignorance of the emperor's intentions with respect to MacMahon; on the 6th none of the subordinate generals knew that the flank march was contemplated. Frossard, who had fallen back to Spicheren, considered his position so insecure that he suggested to Leboeuf that he should be allowed to retire from the Saarbruecken ridge.
"Yes, Prussians and a few others Würtembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, men from Baden, from Hesse, from the Schwarzwald from Hamburg to the Tyrol they are coming in three armies. I saw the Spicheren, I saw Wissembourg I have seen and I know."
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