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Page 34
The position is one of great strategic importance. But such were the
military conditions at the end of August, 1870, that to occupy Metz
with one of the greatest armies of modern times was the most serious
disaster that could befall the French cause. Bazaine's army was
needed, not in a fortified town, but _in the field_. It was a
tremendous force. The army that Prince Frederick Charles locked up in
Metz could have marched from Parthia to Spain against the resistance
of the whole Roman Empire, at the high noon of that imperial power! It
could have marched from end to end of the Southern Confederacy in the
palmiest day of that Confederacy, and could not have been seriously
impeded! And yet this tremendous force was pent up and shut in, as if
under seal, while King William and the Crown Prince and Bismarck and
Von Moltke hunted down the French Emperor and his remaining forces,
brought them to bay, and compelled a surrender.
This was accomplished by the first of September. The Empire of
Napoleon went to pieces. The Third Republic was instituted. The
Empress fled with the Prince Imperial to England, while her humbled
lord was established by his captors at the castle of Wilhelmshohe.
Republican France found herself in possession of a political chaos
which could hardly be stilled. She also found herself in possession of
a splendid army of more than one hundred and seventy thousand men shut
up helplessly in Metz. The situation was highly dramatic. The Republic
said that Bazaine should break out, but the Marshal said that he could
not. What he said was true. The Germans held him fast. But the
Republic believed, as it still believes, that Bazaine, loyal to the
fallen Emperor rather than to his country, wished to handle his army
in such a manner as should compel the restoration of the Empire, under
the auspices of the German conquerors.
This idea was hateful above all things to the French Republicans.
September wore away, and more than half of October; but still the
siege of Metz was not concluded. Vainly did the new Republic of France
strive to extricate herself. Vainly did she raise new armies. Vainly
did she look for the escape of Bazaine. Finally, on the twenty-seventh
of October, that commander surrendered Metz and his army to the
Germans. It was the most tremendous capitulation known in history.
Never before was so powerful an army surrendered to an enemy. The
actual number of French soldiers covered by the capitulation was
fully one hundred and seventy thousand! The prostration of France was
complete, and her humiliation extreme.
Bazaine became the Black Beast of the public imagination. A tribunal
was organized at Paris, under the presidency of the Duc d'Aumale, son
of Louis Philippe--the same who with the Prince de Joinville had been
on McClellan's staff during the peninsular campaign in our Civil War.
Before this court Bazaine was haled as a traitor to his country. He
was tried, convicted and condemned to degradation and death. It was
only by the most strenuous efforts in his behalf that a commutation of
the sentence to imprisonment for twenty years was obtained.
The Marshal was accordingly incarcerated in a prison at Cannes,
whither he was sent in December of 1873, and from which he effected
his escape in the following August. He succeeded in making his way to
Madrid, and took up his residence there. He sought assiduously by
writings and argument and appeal to reverse the judgment of his
countrymen and of the world with regard to the justice of his
sentence; but he could not succeed. It is probably true that the
greatest surrender of military forces known in the history of the
world was brought about by the preference of the commanding general of
the conquered army for an Emperor who was already dethroned, as
against a true devotion to his country. There was also in the case a
measure of incapacity. Bazaine was no match as a military commander
for the powerful genius of Von Moltke and the persistency of Frederick
Charles and the more than two hundred thousand resolute Germans who
surrounded him, and brought him and his army to irretrievable ruin.
Astronomical Vistas.
THE CENTURY OF ASTEROIDS.
The nineteenth century may be called the Age of the Asteroids. It was
on _the first night_ of this century that the first asteroid was
discovered! Through all the former ages, no man on the earth had had
definite knowledge of the existence of such a body. It was reserved
for Guiseppe Piazzi, an Italian astronomer at Palermo, to make known
by actual observation the first member of the planetoid group. If
human history had the slightest regard for the calendars of
mankind--if the eternal verities depended in any measure on the
almanac or the division of time into this age or that--we might look
with wonder on the remarkable coincidence which made the discovery of
the first asteroid to happen in the first evening twilight of the
first day of the nineteenth century!
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