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Updated: June 12, 2025
The latter, in the course of the dispute, said to the former, "If your sword were as long as your tongue, you would be a wonderful warrior indeed." Ducrot and Trochu are the literary Generals; Vinoy and Blanchard the fighting Generals. It is reported also that General Favé is to be superseded, though why I cannot learn, as his redoubt may be said to have saved the army from a greater disaster.
At the same time Ducrot was compelled to concentrate his forces in the Garenne Wood, before the Calvary of Illy; Douay, shattered, fell back; Lebrun alone stood firm on the plateau of Stenay. Our cavalry was excellent, but useless.
Captain Ducrot had come ashore in the boat, and, leaving Laborde, he accompanied Cazeneau to a house which stood not far away. It was rather larger than the average, with a row of tall poplars in front and an orchard on one side. A road ran from the landing, past this house, up the hill, to the rest of the settlement farther on. An old man was seated on a bench in the doorway.
Monsieur Paillard possessed an establishment of his own, but it was a villa in the suburbs; and so, each day at noon, for his déjeûné he left his office and crossed the street to the Café Ducrot. For five years this had been his habit.
At the last sortie Ducrot excuses himself for being late at La Malmaison because he found the road by which he had been ordered to advance occupied by a long line of artillery, also there by Trochu's orders. General Vinoy, who has replaced him, is a hale old soldier about seventy years old. He has risen from the ranks, and in the Crimea was a very intimate friend of Lord Clyde.
With Widow Ducrot he agreed that Claire was still too young to marry, and to himself kept the fact that to remarry he was in no haste. In his mind doubts still lingered. With a wife, young enough to be one of his children, disorganizing the routine of his villa, would it be any more comfortable than he now found it? Would his eldest daughter and her stepmother dwell together in harmony?
He counted on the exigencies of Lady Porthcawl's toilette stopping a too early appearance in the morning, and he was right. At ten o'clock, when Cynthia and Mrs. Devar came out, the men lounging near the porch were too interested in the girl and the car to bestow a glance on the chauffeur. Ducrot was there, bland and massive in a golf suit.
Trochu and Ducrot ride about, and, as far as I can see, the latter commands, while the former makes speeches. Yesterday afternoon we had slightly gained ground, beyond however an occasional discharge from our forts and batteries, there was no fighting. Before our lines a very large number of Prussian dead were lying.
The army, under the pushing and hauling process, pushed back to the rear by General Ducrot during the hour and a half while the command was in his hands, hauled forward to the front again by de Wimpffen, his successor, knew not where to yield obedience, and the entire lack of plan and competent leadership, the incomprehensible vacillation, the abandonment of positions only to retake them again at terrible cost of life, all these things could not fail to end in ruin and disaster.
The roads are all choked with the wagon-trains. Nobody has got any orders, nobody knows what is going to be done, no one knows where Ducrot or Trochu are. It is enough to make one tear one's hair to see such confusion and mismanagement." The night passed off quietly. The next day, to the surprise of everyone, things remained unchanged. No effort was made to pass the baggage-train over the bridges.
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