The Sun.
London, England, 1870-10-17 00:00:00

BAZAINE'S LATE MOVEMENTS.

The correspondent of the Daily Hem writes as follows
from Retonfay on the 9th inst. :—lt is not difficult, I
think, to form a tolerably correct opinion as to the plan of
Bazaine's tactics of yesterday. At the lowest estimate he
must have 65,000 troops, which, so tar as the defence of
Metz is concerned, are superfluous, and, therefore,
detrimental. This element is the lever which the
Prussians are using for the reduction of the
fortress. They are ploughing their enemy's ground
with their enemy's heifer. A hundred thousand
men will sooner consume a given quantity of provisions
than will twenty thousand; and when the larger number
reach s/arvation point, the surrender of everything—field
troops, ka.rrison, fortress, and town—must occur. But
for theih appreciation of this eventuality, nothing would
please the Prussians better than to open a fair passage
to Bazaine any hour in the twenty-four. He might
come dutside the cordon and welcome, with 60,000
men, and in the course of the following day, when

he was holding a council of war, and debating
more Gall/co, whether to march on Sedan or strike south-
ward and cut the Prussian communications, a hundred
thousand Prussians would fall upon him from all points
of the compass and smite him hip and thigh. But if his
army were chopped into fragments to-morrow, the fort-
ress of Metz, with its garrison left inside, would still con-
front the besiegers, and its reduction would be postponed
in proportion to the procrastination of the starva-
tion point effected by the fewer mouths to feed.
Of all this Bazaine, a capable man, whose energy and
merits the Prussians acknowledge frankly, cannot fail to
be aware. He objects to capitulation simpliciter in the
fortress, or to the alternative of capitulation or annihila-
tion in the open field. But there lies the Moselle,
beckoning him on to the half-way house of Thionville,
and beyond Thionville, at the distance of a single
forced march, lies the frontier. Oh !if he could only
dash out through that vexatious cordon. Across the
beautiful plain lie the divisions of the Landwehr. A
regular soldier himself, Bazaine has probably learned to
despise the Garde Mobile with all the contempt of a
veteran used to command veteran troops ; and nothiug
is more natural than for a Frenchman to reason from a
false analogy that, as the Garde Mobile, so are
the Landwehr. To-day he has to digest his miscon-
ception as best he may. But the conception of Bazaine's
effort was creditable to his knowledge of the .military
art. While he made his grand effort against the Land-
wehr in the valley, he did his best to keep the other
sections of the environing circle from finding leisure to
concentrate in support of the Landwehr. The attack
on Vany, L'Orme, and Chieulles was well calculated to
engross the 10th Army Corps ; that from Mey on
Noisseville and Servigny might well perform the same
office with regard to the Ist Army Corps; the 7th Army
Corps might be supposed to have their hands pretty
well full with the sortie against Peltre, Mercy-le-
Haut, and Ars-Laquenexy ; and with luck this sortie,
too, might get through as far as the depot at Cour-
celles, and bring back of its abundance to the Gardes
Nationales who were plying the big guns on
the ramparts, and to the hungry citizens. The well-
conceived feint against Ladonchamps was intended to
keep the 3rd Army Corps in play, occupying as it does
the slopes between the valley and the fort of Plappeville.
And then—there was but the Landwehr to cope with,
and surely 40,000 veteran French troops might crash
through the lines of these citizen soldiers, wea-
kened as those lines were by elongation across the whole
plateau. Then, hey for Thionville ! only ten miles off, where
a secure lair might be had under the guns of that fortress,
while the columns caught their wind ; and then, picking up
by the way what superfluous troops there might be in its
garrison, one long march to the frontier, and it gained a
surrender to the Dutch troops instead of the detested
Prussians. This I. state to have been Bazaine's pro-
gramme. Had it succeeded Metz would have been a
tougher nut for the Prussians to crack than ever ; their
policy, of starvation would have been seriously compro-
misedi and Bazaine's field army would only have antici
pated the inevitable capitulation. The two grand blunders
which; defeated the scheme were the misconception on
Bazaine's part of the strength, prowess, and effective dis-
positions of the Landwehr, and the mistaken idea that
his feints to the right and left would so engross the
10th and 3rd -Army Corps as to prevent them from
aiding the Landwehr to give him check on the plateau.
His error on the former point must have come home to
him when he saw his regulars recoiling pell-mell from the
bayonet points of the Llandwehr men in the villages ;
the salvoes of artillery sent by the 10th Army Corps
from Malroy, Olgy, and other heights on the east side
of the Moselle, and by the 3rd Army Corps
from Frenecourt, Sennecourt, and the heights above St.
Remy, all coigns of vantage on the bluffs on the western
fringe of the valley, must have made him comprehend
that a feigned attack, even if considerable, was not
capable of engrossing the full attention of a Prussian
Army Corpg. The batteries on the positions I
have named enfiladed him ruinously. Down
the valley there tore a fierce direct fire from
the batteries at Amelange and those in front
of Brieux, which advanced by alternate batteries with as
much coolness and precision as I have seen the troops of
a cavalry regiment working in the Phcenix Park; while
from the heights on either side came such a cross-fire that
I am filled with respect for the troops of Bazaine, when I
realise the fact that they waited for the bayonet to dis-
lodge them from their position. Add to Bazaines disad-
vantages that he was miserably short of field artillery, and
the conclusion is obvious that he could not but have failed
under the circumstances, while the deduction is no less
patent that the frustration of any future attempt is equally
inevitable.