The Sun.
London, England, 1870-08-09 00:00:00

'HE SCENE OF CONFLICT.

had all been killed after the horses had been shot
down and the wheels of the gun carriage smashed to pieces
by a shot. This gun thus abandoned to the enemy
was retaken almost immediatelyafterwards by our soldiers,
and by them rendered unserviceable, but could not be
removed because the wheels were broken. We hear, also,
unhappily, that some prisoners were made by the Prus-
sians. The moral condition of the troops who were en-
gaged in the action is, nevertheless, excellent. They are
burning to engage in a real fight, which cannot long be
deferred, and to make the Prussians pay dearly for this
trifling advantage, which they owe entirely to their greater
numerical strength. Let us hope that Marshal MacMahon
wl obtain a brilliant revenge, and that we shall speedily
re-enter Wissembourg."
Azamat Batuk, of the Pall Mall Gazette, says :
Weissenburg seems to be not only a reprisal, but a simple
continuation of the Saarbriick affair. It would appear
that the easy victory which the Prussians, on the 2nd
instant, allowed to the division of General Bataille was
merely a bit of stratagem. A little behind the forests sur-
rounding Saarbriick, somewhere on the road from Lebach
to Neukirchen, perhaps near the railway junction of
Neukirchen itself, a corps of 25,000 awaited the French.
If they had taken Saarbruck at once and followed the
enemy they would have fallen into an ambuscade from
which not a single man would have escaped. And if you
take your map while reading these lines, and will remem-
ber that the Emperor and the Prince Imperial were
present and would necessarily have followed the troops,
you will be able to form a tolerably precise idea of what
might. have been the result of the further entry of
General Frossard's corps upon the soil of the Rhenish
provinces. A movement froin Saarlouis and from
Zweibriicken would have taken the French in rear, while
the 25,000 were confronted by the. Crown Prince. When
it became obvious that the French were aware of the sur-
prise prepared for them, and that its chances were over,
the whole of these hidden forces were at once sent to the
frontier of the Palatinate to support a strong corps
already assembled there, and to attack the isolated
division of Abel Douay. That the manoeuvre
was a suocessful one, • and , that the defeat of
the French division was complete, no one doubts or
denies even here, although no one cares to say or to print
much about it. I wrote to you that the number of Prus-
sian troops amounted to something like 30,000 ; but I am
assured by very reasonable men that 50,000 is not too high
'an estimate of the troops against which 8,000 Frenchmen
had to fight for seven hours without the slightest hope of
having a reinforcement. Besides General Douay, who
died almost instantaneously from a shell wound,
General Montmarie was was also severely wounded. The
Zouaves appeared to have suffered not so much as the
Turcos (er more correctly the Tirailleurs Alg6riens), of
whom some 500 were taken captives. They had to meet
the enemy first, and were taken quite by surprise ; the
majority of them were even unarmed at the moment of
the first attack, being busy with some domestic or
culinary works. French papers report that they
were fishing ; but the accuracy of this state-
ment will be duly appreciated if we keep in
view that there is no river south of the
town of Wissembourg, and that the Arabs are
not accustomed to eat fish and do not understand.angling.
The loss of the Turcos is very heavy, but certainly not so
heavy as a similar loss of the Zouaves would have been ;
for while the latter are formed in Europe and
trained in Algeria, the former can be got in any number
desired; it is merely a question of pay. The defeated
division consisted of the following regiments :-16me
Chassurs h Pied, 50me and 78me de Ligne, ier Zouaves,
and I' Tiraillenrs Alg4riens. The loss on the French
side is admitted to exceed 2,500 men. A great
number of the wounded could not have been carried
away from the field at all. One gun is lost, of -which all
the horses and men were killed and the carriage broken to
pieces. The. Prussians must have lost just as much,
if not more, although none of them have been made
prisoners. • The fight on the part of the Zouaves and the
Turcos seems to have been something indescribably wild.
The great majority of the Prussian killed are reported to
have died from the bayonet, while the greatest losses of
the French were caused by grape fire and shells.

'FURTHER DETAILS OF WEISSENBURG.
The special correspondent of the Standard, writing from
Luxemburg on Sunday, gives a description of the Weis-
senburg affair, which, it is important to remember, was
the first serious action of the war, and was fought on
Thursday last. The writer says :—" The position of
Weissenburg was held by a single division of the first
French corps d'armee, supported by a light cavalry brigade,
which acted in aid of the skirmishers from the infantry as
videttes on the frontier. At the risk of being tiresome, I
must repeat a French division consists of four regiment's