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Updated: June 7, 2025
The line of railway between Strassburg and Bitsch touches Reichshofen; but, for some reason that has never been satisfactorily explained, MacMahon was able to draw up only one division from the side of Strassburg and Belfort, and not one from Bitsch, which was within an easy march.
You have only to look on a map to know how important the position is at Verdun, the supposed-to-be-strongest of the four great fortresses Verdun, Toul, Epinay, and Belfort which protect the only frontier by which the Kaiser has a military right to try to enter France, and which he avoided on account of its strength. Verdun itself is only one day's march from Metz.
Nevertheless, on January 9, Bourbaki fought Werder at Villersexel, in the vicinity of Vesoul, Montbeliard, and Belfort. In this engagement there appear to have been serious mistakes on both sides, and though Bourbaki claimed a success, his losses were numerically double those of the Germans. Meantime Chanzy, at Le Mans, was urging all sorts of plans on Gambetta and Freyeinet.
Belfort Bax, the well-known English socialist writer, makes a very clever argument against the determinist position by comparing it with the attempts of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to reduce nature to one element. His remarks are so pertinent that a brief abstract of his argument is here quoted in his own language.
The hills beyond Spincourt were dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the thin lash of the French skirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and unfinished rifle-pits in coils that wrapped about the heads of the German columns, thence along the Vosges watershed and out across the frontier near Belfort nearly to the Rhine. . . .
For this town of Belfort is famous for one of the most typical and powerful of the public monuments of France. From the café table at which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town on which hangs the high and flat-faced citadel, pierced with many windows, and warmed in the evening light. On the steep hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself as large as a hill.
A quick-spoken man this, with a little square mouth, a soft heart, a keen sense of humour. "Why have you got me from my bed, malcontent?" he asked. "Because there are some out there that want your prayers," replied Belfort, jerking his head towards the sea. He was an unbeliever, this maimed sailor, who read the Petit Journal, and talked too loudly in the Cafe de la Marine of an evening.
In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water has run away.
The latest German papers announce that Mézières has fallen, and it seems to occur to no one that Gambetta's last pigeon despatch informed us that the siege of this place had been raised. La Liberté thus sums up the situation: "Nancy menaced; Belfort freed; Baden invaded; Hamburg about to be bombarded. This is the reply of France to the bombardment of Paris.
The utmost that Bismarck would do was not to insist upon securing the still unconquered Belfort. Despairing of moving him further, Thiers and Favre gave way on the 24th of February, and signed the preliminaries of peace.
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