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Updated: June 3, 2025
Bazaine had ordered three divisions to march towards the firing: one made for a wrong point and returned; the others made half-hearted efforts, and thus left Frossard to be overborne by numbers.
Bazaine had to be on the offensive because he was ordered to get away towards Verdun; Alvensleben took it because it was the only means whereby he could hinder Bazaine from accomplishing his purpose. But for the most part one side in battle is on the offensive; the other on the defensive.
And on the 18th, after their retirement to the intrenched camp, Saint-Privat was fought, the culmination of the gigantic struggle, where the line of battle extended more than eight miles in length, two hundred thousand Germans with seven hundred guns arrayed against a hundred and twenty thousand French with but five hundred guns, the Germans facing toward Germany, the French toward France, as if invaders and invaded had inverted their roles in the singular tactical movements that had been going on; after two o'clock the conflict was most sanguinary, the Prussian Guard being repulsed with tremendous slaughter and Bazaine, with a left wing that withstood the onsets of the enemy like a wall of adamant, for a long time victorious, up to the moment, at the approach of evening, when the weaker right wing was compelled by the terrific losses it had sustained to abandon Saint-Privat, involving in its rout the remainder of the army, which, defeated and driven back under the walls of Metz, was thenceforth to be imprisoned in a circle of flame and iron.
It was understood that the general's departure was to be by way of being incognito, so that it should not get wind. He had no civilian clothes and Bazaine fitted him out in his; Regnier had obtained from one of the Luxembourger surgeons a cap with the Geneva Cross which completed the costume.
Fearing that he might be cut off from Metz on the south a fear which had unaccountably haunted him all the day Bazaine continued to feed that part of his lines; and thus Alvensleben was able to hold the positions near the southern road to Verdun, which he had seized in the morning. The day closed with a great cavalry combat on the German left wing in which the French had to give way.
General Magruder, who met the American envoys in Havana, reported to them that at the date of his departure from Mexico, on November 1, Maximilian was on the eve of retiring; that he had been detained at Orizaba only by the arrival of Generals Miramon and Marquez; and that the common understanding was that the government had been handed over to Marshal Bazaine. The American consul, Mr.
They had had a hard time of it since they left Rheims, making nearly forty miles in two days' marching; if they could maintain the pace and if they kept straight on in the direction they were pursuing, there could be no doubt that they would destroy the second German army and effect a junction with Bazaine before the third, the Crown Prince of Prussia's, which was said to be at Vitry-le Francois, could get up to Verdun.
Bazaine, for his part, vehemently denied having given Regnier any such information, and it seems utterly improbable that he should have done so. It is nevertheless the fact that the 18th of October was the last day on which rations were issued to the army outside Metz.
He set forth in his scheme that the Imperial Government could not possibly allow Alsace-Lorraine and Champagne to be invaded without a trial of strength at the very outset; and Marshal Bazaine, who, at some period or other, annotated a copy of Frossard's scheme, signified his approval of that dictum, but added significantly that good tactical measures should be adopted.
Meantime we could not hear a word of Juarez, and concluded to search for him along the coast northward. When I was in Versailles, France, July, 1872, learning that General Bazaine was in arrest for the surrender of his army and post at Metz, in 1870, I wanted to call on him to thank him for his courteous invitation to me at Vera Cruz in 1866.
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