The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-11-29

and from here, at my leeSe, have been able
to look round myself. AT leisure he found
that the German surgeons were carefully for
warding every man struck by dysentery to
hospitals within the border; but this
plan, though it saved the nation from
severe loss, tended to reduce the 6esieging
army. Nevertheless, through seventy days of
these horrors, discipline, wariness, and even
cheerfulness never failed; the officers were
always ready, the men snatched what little dis
traction they could from tribes, from letters
from searching boxes of home gifts, and when
the hour of action came turned out, with un-
wetted rifles, firm as on parade, ready, If
need be- to die rather than move without supe-
rior order. The Red Prince, hard man, but
sound soldier, was everywhere; the officers
did their best for their men, venturing
even to forbid useless exposure; and it is
moral certainty that had duty required
that army to lie there, wasting slowly away,
the last battalion would have met the enemy as
coolly as the fret Ii was very triumph of
morale, lar more conclusive proof than any
victory of the strength of the weapon Germany
now wields. Sedan was triumph of tactics.
In the next war, Won Moltle may be replaced
by Won Wrangel; but if the men are there, of
that temper, aud in that discipline, to defeat
them will overtask the best troops in the world.
Beside such constancy, che story told this week
of the Bavafian artillerymen who, when their
ammunition was exhausted formed in line in
front of their guns and sang the "Wacht am
Rhein" at the stretch of their lungs under hail
of shot, reads TO us like piece of puere
bTavado. Doubtless daring is the necessity of
armies but men may be daring without pos
sessing that cool, Northern endurance against
which mere valor skaters itself in vain. Such
men to be defeated must be Killed.
Precisely the same scene, in milder form, is
being witnessed before Paris The beseging
army strikes all observers as being stretche1 out
in line dangerously weak. 1t is acknowledged
that If any one corps were attacked in great
force, it would be "hours' before the corps to
right and left of it could lend it efficient aid
yet Won Moltke is not afraid. he
knows to certainty the corps attacked
will die there before it will yield, and
the investment being a necessity, he
runs the needful risk The winter is coming,
the communications are long, the Germans are
beginning to suffer heavily from sickness,
tedium, and homesickness all German letters
refer to this latter evil-but there are no COM
plants noshrinkings, none of those "murmurs
which In camp Of Southern soldiers would
compel their leaders to rash attack to keep
up the spirits of their men," They have to en-
dure, and they endure with a cool constaucy,
| to which the only drawback seems to be that ii
solidifies sometimes into a callouSness which is
as near cruelty as the Northern temperament
will admit, and though ii has not the Vleness oi
| cruelty, has many of its effects, There is
something almost Scotch in the way in
which the German officers seem to regret
| the waste of gunpowder and shells from, the
| forts, as if it were ''siuful wasting of the
maircies" rather than o source of danger to
themselves. An army wholly of Lowland
Scotchmen would be amazingly like them in
everything except the recklessness with which
| they seem to order executions No Southern
| army would ever show this peculiar temper
this quiet endurance of the inevitable as if, foi
eXample, Won Moltke had ordered supply o
hail in furtherance of his plans; and no army Of
! any kind, unless discipline had become at once
a conviction and a habit. Whatever the result
of this war; one thing, at least, is certain, tha
| the most efficient army which ever yet ap
| peared in the world has been formed by State
| in which no officer soldier under fifty eve
n cIntG trad in iS Of Enrr
lish navvies educated and disciplined into ute
| self-control.