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Updated: July 19, 2025
On the night of August 31st, accompanied by the emperor who, having transferred his authority to the Empress Eugenie and his command to Bazaine, followed the army as mere spectator MacMahon reached Sedan, and there ranged his troops so as to meet an attack which he foresaw inevitable, and fatal too. Placing his strongest force to the east, his right wing was at Bazeilles and the left at Illy.
From time to time in History, Divine logic makes an onslaught. Sedan is one of those onslaughts. Thus on the 1st of September, at five o'clock in the morning the world awoke under the sun, and the French army under the thunderbolt. Bazeilles takes fire, Givonne takes fire, Floing takes fire; the battle begins with a furnace. The whole horizon is aflame.
As Henriette was looking at them absently, her thoughts doubtless far away with her husband, who, amid the blood and ashes of Bazeilles, was also sleeping his last sleep, a bullet whistled close to her head and struck a tree that stood behind her. Jean sprang forward. "Madame, don't stay there. Go inside the house, quick, quick!"
It was nearly dark, but there was sufficient light yet remaining in the sky to enable them to distinguish the black huddle of roofs above the city, and further in the distance Balan and Bazeilles, lying in the broad meadows that stretch away to the range of hills between Remilly and Frenois, while to the right was the dusky wood of la Garenne, and to the left the broad bosom of the Meuse had the dull gleam of frosted silver in the dying daylight.
Finally the general determined to go down to the bridge in person, and the men saw him on the bank, bestirring himself and others and hurrying the passage of the troops. Maurice, seated with Jean against a wall, pointed to the north, as he had done before. "There is Sedan in the distance. And look! Bazeilles is over yonder and then comes Douzy, and then Carignan, more to the right.
Down below them in the thick sea of fog the guns at Bazeilles were still pounding away, and he extended his arms with a broad, sweeping gesture: "Hein! this is the time that we've got them! We'll see them back home, and kick them every step of the way!"
In Bazeilles houses were already burning, and the dark cloud of war hung heavy over the pretty village.
Raising his eyes he saw that the Pont-Maugis battery was not the only one that was playing on Bazeilles; two others, posted half way up the hill of Liry, had opened fire, and their projectiles not only reached the village, but swept the naked plain of la Moncelle beyond, where the reserves of the 12th corps were, and even the wooded slopes of Daigny, held by a division of the 1st corps, were not beyond their range.
It was a mad attempt, anyway; the desperate effort of a commander who could not bring himself to acknowledge that he was defeated. And it ended by General de Wimpffen finding himself and General Lebrun alone together on the Bazeilles road, which they had to make up their mind to abandon to the enemy, for good and all.
This was about half-past three o'clock, and it was shortly afterward that occurred the gallant, but mad attempt, the last serious effort of the day, to pierce the Bavarian lines and regain possession of Bazeilles. In order to put heart into the troops a ruse was resorted to: in the streets of Sedan and in the fields outside the walls the shout was raised: "Bazaine is coming up!
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