Forest of Orleans, the IX. corps away to the right rear at Angerville, and the X. equally distant to the south-east, as well as separated in three self-contained columns a day’s march apart. It seemed as if another Vionville was at hand, but this time Alvensleben and Voigts-Rhetz did not attack an obscure objective coûte que coûte. They stood fast, by the prince’s order, to close up for battle and to wait on events in front of the Detachment.
The Germans had now discovered their target, and their strategical system, uncomplicated by past nightmares, should have worked smoothly to a decisive result. But there was nearly as much confusion between the various high officers as before. Prince Frederick Charles, in possession of the facts and almost in contact with the enemy, wrote to the grand duke to say that the II. Army was about to attack the enemy, and to suggest that the Detachment, which he knew to be heading for Le Mans, should make a “diversion” in his favour towards Tours, reserving to himself and his own army, as on the 2nd of July 1866 before Königgrätz, the perils and the honours of the battle. The grand duke meanwhile, whose temper was now roused, was making a last attempt to bring the phantom “Army of the West” to action. Rejecting Blumenthal’s somewhat timidly worded advice to go slowly, the grand duke spread out his forces for the last time for an enveloping advance on Le Mans.
He had not gone far when, on the 23rd, he received a peremptory
order from the king, through the III. Army headquarters, to bring
back his forces to Beauce and to be on the middle Loire
at latest by the 26th. In vain he pleaded for a day to
close up; the king replied that the march must go on,
for much depended on it. Moltke, in fact, had seized
The Detach-
ment ordered towards Orleans.
reins more firmly at the critical moment, and given
directions to the army commanders that the II. Army and
the Detachment were to make a combined and concerted attack
as soon as possible after the 26th. By that date the last brigades
of the II. Army would have come up, and the Detachment was to
time its own march accordingly. Yet even at this step Blumenthal,
the original author of the Western expedition, in transmitting the
king’s order to the grand duke, assigned not Orleans but Beaugency,
some miles down the river, as the objective of the Detachment.
D’Aurelle meanwhile had resolutely maintained his policy of inaction, confirmed in that course by the miserable and ill-equipped condition of the troops that came from the east and the west to double the numbers of the relatively well-disciplined army of Coulmiers. In the grand duke’s move to the west, d’Aurelle saw only a trap to lure him into the plains andFrench plans. to offer him up as a victim to the approaching II. Army, the force of which he at first greatly exaggerated. All this time Gambetta and de Freycinet were receiving messages from Paris that spoke of desperate sorties being planned, and assigned December 15th as the last day of resistance. On the 19th of November de Freycinet wrote to d’Aurelle urging him to form a plan of active operations without delay, and even suggesting one (which was, in fact, vicious), but in reply the general merely promised to study the civilian’s scheme. A severe letter from Gambetta, which followed this, had no better effect. D’Aurelle had, in fact, become a pessimist, and the Delegation, instead of removing him, merely suggested fresh plans.
On the 24th, however, the French at last took the offensive, in the direction of Fontainebleau Forest, to co-operate with the great sortie from Paris which was now (definitely arranged. But owing to d’Aurelle’s objections, the first orders were modified so far that on attaining the points ordered, Chilleurs (15th corps) Boiscommun-Bellegarde (20th), the troops were to await the order to advance. Shortly afterwards the 18th corps from Gien was ordered to advance on the line Montargis-Ladon. The rest of d’Aurelle’s huge army was scarcely affected by these movements. Meanwhile Prince Frederick Charles, to clear up the situation, had pushed out strong reconnaissances of all arms from the front of the II. Army, and these naturally developed strong forces of the defenders. The advanced troops of the X. corps had severe engagements with fractions of the 20th corps at Ladon and Maizieres, and those of the III. corps were sharply repulsed at Neuville and drew the fire of several battalions and batteries at Artenay. The French offensive slowly developed on the 25th and 26th, for the Germans were not ready to advance, and in addition greatly puzzled. The erratic movements of the grand duke towards Le Mans before he was recalled to the Loire had seriously disquieted both the Delegation and d’Aurelle, and the 17th corps, under a young and energetic leader, de Sonis, was moved restlessly hither and thither in the country south and west of Chateaudun. A fight at Brou (10 m. W. of Bonneval) provoked the grand duke into another false move. This time the Detachment, then near Droué (12 m. W. of Chateaudun) and Authon (22 m. W. of Bonneval), swung round north-east in defiance of the order to go to Beaugency, and had to be brought back by the drastic method of placing it under the orders of Prince Frederick Charles. General von Stosch of the headquarters staff was at the same time sent to act as Moltke’s representative with the duke’s headquarters, and Lieut.-Colonel von Waldersee to Prince Frederick Charles’s to report thence direct to the king, who was dissatisfied with the diluted information with which the various staff offices furnished him. Still, the upshot was that Prince Prince Frederick Charles in general command. Frederick Charles was entrusted with affairs on the Loire, and all superior control was voluntarily surrendered. The prince had very clear ideas, at the outset, of the task before him. If the French advanced towards Fontainebleau or elsewhere, he expected to be able to repeat Napoleon’s strategy of 1814, fighting containing actions with the IX. and X. corps and delivering blow after blow at different points on d’Aurelle’s line of march with the III. If the French, as seemed more likely, stood fast, he thought his task more formidable, and therefore, abandoning the idea of a strategic envelopment, he ordered the Detachment inwards with the intention of directly attacking the Orleans position from the north-west.
As regards the method of the offensive, there is herein no material advance on the prince’s first scheme; the detachment is simply added to the forces making the attack, and the diversion on Tours is abandoned. But the prince was at any rate a leader who enjoyed the responsibilities of director of operations—he even said that he would find the shuttle-play of the III. corps alluded to above “an interesting novelty in his experience of Army command”—while at the same time the unfortunate d’Aurelle was asking the Delegation to give orders direct to his generals.
It was now November 27th. The Versailles headquarters were in a state of intense nervous exaltation waiting for the sortie of 70,000 men that was daily expected to be launched at the investing line, and the king’s parting words to von Waldersee indicate sufficiently the gravity of the decision that was now entrusted to the most resolute troop-leader in the service: “We are on the eve of a decisive moment. I know well that my troops are better than the French, but that does not deceive me into supposing that we have not a crisis before us. . . . If Prince Frederick Charles is beaten, we must give up the investment of Paris. . . .” The II. Army was waiting events on a dangerously extended front from Toury on the Paris-Orleans road (which the prince still thought it his duty to cover) to Beaune-la-Rolande. The Detachment, which never yet had concentrated save to deliver blows in the air, was approaching Chateaudun and Bonneval when von Stosch arrived and gave it the encouragement, the reforms in the staff work and the rest-day it needed. The French, who themselves had suffered from over-extension, had by now condensed on the extreme right. In these general conditions the battle of Beaune-la-Rolande took place—an engagement almost as honourable to Voigts-Rhetz and the X. corps as Vionville to Alvensleben and the III. The French attack began early on the morning of the 28th, under command of General Crouzat. It was directed on Beaune-la-Rolande from three sides, and only the want of combination between the various units of the FrenchBeaune-la-Rolande. and the arrival in the afternoon of part of the III. corps saved the X. from annihilation. As it was, the Germans engaged were utterly exhausted, and the X. corps had but three rounds of ammunition per man left. But the magnificent resistance of the men of Vionville prolonged the fight until night had fallen and Crouzat, thinking the battle lost, ordered his troops to evacuate the battlefield. As at Coulmiers, and with even more deplorable results, the French commander saw only the confusion in his own lines, and feared to hazard the issue of the campaign on the mere supposition that the enemy was even more exhausted. There was another resemblance, too, between Coulmiers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in that the French forces on the outer flank towards Artenay stood idle without attempting to influence the decision.
Prince Frederick Charles himself took only a cursory survey of the battlefield, and failed to realize that the whole of the enemy’s right wing had been engaged, in spite of what Waldersee, who had been in Beaune, told him of events there. So far, therefore, from considering the battle as a great victory to be followed up by an energetic pursuit, he still feared a move round his left flank from Gien and Montargis towards Fontainebleau. The II. Army orders issued on the night of the battle actually had in view a farther extension eastward. Beaune-la-Rolande was a French defeat without being a German victory, and for the fact that it was a defeat, not a mere check, there was no cause but Crouzat’s impressions of the state of the 20th corps, which, composed as it was of the newest levies in his army, was the most susceptible of unreasoning bravery and unreasoning depression.
In view of this, d’Aurelle and de Freycinet decided that the offensive was to be continued not towards Beaune-Nemours, but from the front of the steadier 15th and 16th corps towards Pithiviers, and with that object, on the 29th—a day of inaction for the Germans—the 18th and 20th corps began to close on the centre. There was sharp fighting on the 30th at various points along the north-eastern and eastern fringes of the Forest of Orleans, in which for the most part the French were successful. On the 29th the II. Army was inactive in spite of almost frantic appeals from Versailles to go forward (the great sortie from Paris had begun), and the Detachment, in accordance with the prince’s orders and not with the views held by von Stosch, headed eastward to prolong the right of the II. Army, halting on the 29th in the area Orgères-Toury. The prince’s message to the grand duke contained the significant phrase, “my plans to drive the enemy out of Orleans”—he no longer thought of a strategical envelopment of the Army of the Loire in Orleans. Disillusioned during the 30th as to the supposed danger on the side of Montargis, he closed from both wings towards the centre, but
still defensively and well clear of the edge of the dangerous forest.