The Sun.
London, England, 1870-11-21 00:00:00

TEE EXPECTED SORTIE.

In a letter dated from the Royal Headquarters at Ver-
sailles, November 14th, the special correspondent of the
Telegraph says:—What can Trochu be about with his six
hundred and fifty thousand men ? We are all fairly
puzzled by his utter inaction, for since the 11th the forts,
formerly so noisy, have been dumb, and the firing on out-
posts has dwindled down to an occasional shot, discharged,
as it were, merely to save appearances. Since
the threatening movement of the Loire Army
compelled Von der Tann's Bavarians to retire upon their
supports, and obliged the Allied Army to weaken one of
its positions before Paris in order to avert a possible
catastrophe in the rear, there has been a chance
—not even yet entirely at an end—for Trochu
to strike a terrible blow at his enemies;
and yet he has dons nothing. If the French,
in Paris as well as in the field, will give us only until
Thursday without attempting a combined operation in
the meanwhile, you may set down Paris as irretrievably
lost, and the Loire Army as in imminent peril of annihi-
lation or capture. Prince Frederick Charles's advanced
guard arrived at Fontainebleau this morning, and a
brigade of Manteuffel's army at Gonesse. The prepa-
rations to repel a sortie, ,in whatever direction it
may be made, are so complete that, within two hours
of the alarm—which will of course be given so soon as the
first indications of an offensive movement on the part of
the besieged shall be notified by the outposts—seventy
thousand men can be brought to bear upon any individual
spot selected by the French for their attack, without
leaving unguarded any' other point of the German
positions. Supposing the combined attack to be
made to-morrow, the Army of the Loire• can be
encountered by sixty thousand men, and that of Paris
by seventy thousand. These are short odds, you will
say, against more than a hundred thousand on one side
and perhaps as many on the other ; but, remember, the
Germans have the advantage of position in both cases,
and, besides, they are on the defensive—so we may await
the sequel with confidence. Supposing, on the other
hand, a delay of some sixty or seventy hours to take
place in the French attack, the Loire Army will certainly
find itself assailed on either flank by forces greatly
superior, and composed of what, according to the vocabu-
lary of war now-a-days, may fairly be styled veteran
troops—soldiers who have been four months in the field,
and have won as many victories as, in former times,
would have been spread over a year or more. The Army
of the Loire, in short, has no time to lose; if it
remain stationary, it will be surrounded and forced to
surrender. It must either attack without further delay,
in the hope of breaking up the Prussian lines and enabling
Paris to loosen her chains, if not to cast them off alto-
gether ; or it must retreat across the Loire as rapidly as
it may. All we ask is, that it shall stay where it is until
Thursday morning. In that event, I believe we shall
be in Paris by the end of the month. Nobody here credits
the possibility of Paris holding out a week after the
Loire army shall have been finally disposed of, and the
second line, north and south, of the German posts invest-
ing the capital, shall have been firmly established—as it
will be, in all human probability, ten days hence. My
I own opinion is, and has been for some time past, that
Paris will capitulate before a single gun is discharged
from our batteries against the southern forts.
The correspondent of the Daily News at Versailles
says :—Ever since the news came that Orleans was
recaptured we have expected a great sortie from
every quarter of Paris. The evident policy of
assisting the struggle from without by a strug-
gle from within has led to this expectation more
than any definite movement of the garrison.
But there are also vague rumours from the French side
that the " supreme effort." as they call it, is to be made
between the 10th and 20th of the present month. Mean-
while there is only the ordinary amount of firing from
the forts and skirmishing at the outposts.