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Updated: June 2, 2025
The best thing to do would have been to give leg-bail at the beginning, for it is no disgrace to a general to refuse to fight an army of superior numbers, but he, once we had gone in, was bound to see the thing through to the end. And see it through he did! why, I tell you that the men down in Froeschwiller were no longer human beings; they were ravening wolves devouring one another.
But the third army, that of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the army that had been victorious at Wissembourg and Froeschwiller and had driven our 1st and 5th corps, where was it now, where was it to be located amid the tangled mess of contradictory advices?
Goulden, "spoke well, but he might have kept on till to-morrow with his victories, commencing with Valmy, Hundschott, Wattignies, Fleurus, Neuwied, Ukerath, Fröeschwiller, Geisberg, to Zurich and Hohenlinden. These were also great victories, and even the most splendid of all, for they preserved liberty. He only spoke of the last ones, that was enough for the moment.
Written before the catastrophes of Froeschwiller, Metz and Sedan, the fragment seems, in a retrospective way, an implacable accusation against those who deceived themselves about the Hohenzollern country by false liberalism or a softening of the brain.
An order to stop the executions had been issued from Versailles, so it was said, but none the less the slaughter still went on; Thiers, while hailed as the savior of his country, was to bear the stigma of having been the Jack Ketch of Paris, and Marshal MacMahon, the vanquished of Froeschwiller, whose proclamation announcing the triumph of law and order was to be seen on every wall, was to receive the credit of the victory of Pere-Lachaise.
And although the terrible tidings of the disaster at Froeschwiller had been known throughout the camp since early morning, the four men laughed, joked, and went about their usual tasks with the indifference of so many machines. But there arose a murmur of pleased surprise. It was occasioned by Jean, the corporal, coming back from the commissary's, accompanied by Maurice, with a load of firewood.
It was said that the Germans were in an ecstasy of fear and rage, declaring that it was unworthy of a nation that claimed to be civilized to employ such heathen savages in its armies. Although they had been decimated at Froeschwiller, the foreign troops seemed to have a good deal of life left in them.
Cast out near Froeschwiller, on a plain surrounded with woods, he had seen the red flashes shoot by in bouquets of white smoke, and he had ducked, trembling, bewildered by the cannonading, wild with the whistling of the balls.
And now, in the shock consequent on defeat, after Wissembourg and Froeschwiller, the general, feeling himself unsupported in his exposed position at the front, had nothing left to do but fall back in haste, and the more so that what news he had received that morning made the situation look even worse than it had appeared the night before.
When, after Froeschwiller and Spickeren, the 1st corps, routed and broken into fragments, had swept away with it the 5th, the other corps stationed along the frontier en echelon from Metz to Bitche, first wavering, then retreating in their consternation at those reverses, had ultimately concentrated before the intrenched camp on the right bank of the Moselle.
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