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Updated: May 29, 2025
The first of these gross faults was the fight at Worth, where MacMahon, before his army was mobilized, accepted battle with the Crown Prince, pitting 50,000 men against 175,000; the next was Bazaine's fixing upon Metz as his base, and stupidly putting himself in position to be driven back to it, when there was no possible obstacle to his joining forces with MacMahon at Chalons; while the third and greatest blunder of all was MacMahon's move to relieve Metz, trying to slip 140,000 men along the Belgian frontier.
With the hemming in of Bazaine at Metz and the capture of MacMahon's army at Sedan the crisis of the war was passed, and the Germans practically the victors.
Waking, she was astonished to find herself on the floor, and for an instant could not remember what had happened. But in a flash it all came back. Quickly she got up and quietly undressed, putting on Mrs. MacMahon's immense nightgown before she dropped thankfully upon the cot bed. Clo did not sleep again, but lay until eight o'clock, when her neighbours began to stir.
When he had left his cousin, the Emperor was resolved to fall back on Paris according to MacMahon's plan, but the ministers and the Empress Regent forced him to his doom. On the 2nd of September Sédan was lost; on the 4th the Empire fell. 'And to think, exclaimed Victor Emmanuel when he heard the news, 'that this good man was always wanting to give me advice!
MacMahon's leading brigade crossed the short intervening space without a shot being fired. The enemy's working parties and gunners who were repairing damages fought bravely with picks, shovels, and hand-spikes, but were eventually driven back.
I still remember the excitement we all felt over Marshal MacMahon's rather half-hearted efforts to play the part of a General Monk. We had, further, the excitement of seeing a famous General immured close to us in a fortress prison for the crime of treason. The Ile de Ste.
The rest of the hospital is made up of certain old men, crack-brained and weak-bodied, some young men, rickety or bandy-legged, and a great number of soldiers wrecks from MacMahon's army who, after being floated on from one military hospital to another, had come to be stranded on this bank.
In fact, MacMahon had undertaken a task of terrible difficulty. On taking over the command at Châlons, where Napoleon III. arrived from Metz on the 16th, he found hopeless disorder not only among his own beaten troops, but among many of the newcomers; the worst were the Garde Mobile, many regiments of whom greeted the Emperor with shouts of À Paris. To meet the Germans in the open plains of Champagne with forces so incoherent and dispirited was sheer madness; and a council of war on the 17th came to the conclusion to fall back on the capital and operate within its outer forts a step which might enable the army to regain confidence, repress any rising in the capital, and perhaps inflict checks on the Germans, until the provinces rose en masse against the invaders. But at this very time the Empress-Regent and the Palikao Ministry at Paris came to an exactly contrary decision, on the ground that the return of the Emperor with MacMahon's army would look like personal cowardice and a mean desertion of Bazaine at Metz. The Empress was for fighting
M. Guizot had associated young Decazes known to all the world in later days as Marshal MacMahon's Foreign Minister with M. de Nion, our decharge d'affaires at Tangier. And then, behind the diplomatic curtain, there was the British Minister in Spain, Mr.
Their ubiquitous horsemen captured French despatches which showed them the intended moves in MacMahon's desperate game; Moltke hurried up every available division; and the elder of the two Alvenslebens had the honour of surprising de Failly's corps amidst the woods of the Ardennes near Beaumont, as they were in the midst of a meal.
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