THE WAR IN EUROPE.

Grey River Argus, Volume X, Issue 814, 7 March 1871, Page 2

THE WAR IN EUROPE.

NOTES AND INCIDENTS. The following extracts are from the letters of the Times special correspondents : — It is time to stop, and the real soldiera know it, although ftambetta and other military amateurs are indignant if told so. There are many officers, who are now doing their duty bravely, risking their lives daily, obeying the orders of a Government incompetent in such matters, who know frll well how the thing must end. Officers who have returned wounded from some of the various battles, combats, anJ skirmishes which have been fought, with scarcely a day's interval since the 24th of November, have spoken to me with grief of the unquestionable inferiority of the present young French armies to their veteran opponents. "The Prussians," an officer who has seen much service lately, said to me, "are thorough gnod soldiers, and stand fire well. Our men, on the contrary, will not long endure a heavy fire ; they get unsteady and break and run, and no efforts of the officers, and no words of encouragement or reproaches or threats, even with the sword's point, will get them forward to confront the terrible Prussian fire." And this is no doubt the truth in the long run, although there have been frequent instances of dash and gallantry in the recent part of the campaign, but . the army is not homogeneous, nor does it comprise enough old soldiers sufficiently to leaven the mass of recruits. Villages on a battle-field are questionable coverts. While it is pleasant to get behind walls and feel you are safe from rifle bullets, and to climb towers and be able to see the whole country, there is always the horrible uncertainty that some of the enemy are still lingering, or that some desperado may bo sitting at a window waiting for a pot shot, and reckless as to the consequences. The villages dotted all over the plain do, indeed, impart quite a peculiar character to these battles, for they consist chiefly in running fights from one to the other. The first thing either side does is to loophole all the houses in the required direction, and turn the village for the time into a petty fortress. Most of them are within easy rifle shot of each other, with nothing but open plain between them. The usual course is for the artillery to shell a village, while the infantry fire on it from another side, or from behind some naturally favorable position of ground, and then at a propitious moment to rush at it with a l^ud hurrah. This invariably results in the capture of a numher of prisoners and the retreat of the French into the next village, which they hold until the same process is repeated. Sometimes a whole family ia valiant enough to brave the horrors of a bombardment or a hot infantry fight in the streets — hiding in the cellars while it lnsts, and emerging the moment the dropping shots, fewer and farther between, indicate the close of the struggle. There may I be seen little children gazing wonderingly at the dead and dying men lying at the thresholds of the familiar doorways, , poking their little fingers into the bullet i holes in the walls, and their heads through the breaches made by the shot and shell. Then oIJ woman and girls run to and fro with niiilliMssus and coverlets, and find their houses turned into temporary hospitals aud themselves into the street to seek shelter as best they may, until the wounded luve been attended to. In the cottage in which I find myself at present are only two women, and they are at this ,

moment engaged in rurnaging the straw of the mattra33 upon which I have beep^w sleeping for the most valuable articles of clothing and the few trinkets they pcmsessed, which they had stowed away itrft for safety. The other day I saw an old man tottering down the path of his garden with furtive step and something evidently concealed under his blouse. Watching him closely, I perceived -binr-^draw . stealthily from beneath it an old sabre, which he carefully buried, and then returned with a light heart and step. I sappose I ought to have reported him, but the man and the sabre seemed both so very antiquated that I felt the safety of the German army would not be compromised by my silence. There is something awful in getting up every morning aud going to a battle as regularly and calmly as if one was going out partridge shooting. Yet for the last three days I have been driving to the scene of slaughter and back again to the same quarters in the evening until the plain has been invested in my eyes, with a frightful familiarity, and my landmarks are the same stiffened corpses, which have not yet been removed, and which are scattered for miles over the fields. Day after day to pass the same ditch and see the same contorted features and glassy eyes which thrilled one with horror the first time still staring at one, to try new roads in order to avoid the ghastly sights of the . old ones, but to obtain fresh evidenced of the great area over whiok the fight has been extended, and after passing across the battle fields of three successive days to find on the fourth a new battle going on at the point where the last one left off— all this ia calculated to produce a sense of distress difficult to describe. In no places do the dead lie very thick together, here and there 20 or 30 may be counted in a group, but as a general rule they are sparsely but widely dotted over the plains. Now and\jtlien, where a shell has burst in the middle of a battery of artillery, may be seen men and horses together, but the French fire had not been sufficiently good to render such sights common. A like folly of organisation, though not in the same intensity, "and : is still to pursue the French army, which is clogged with rules binding . to destruction. One of the* reasons given for the retreat of Ducrot's army from the positions which it had conquered on the line of heights from Brie to Champigny was the sudden access of ; cold, and the want of-; warm clothing. This is neither a pretext inor a joke. The simple fact is that in the plan of operations undertaken by Generals Trochu and Ducrot do account was taken of possible changes of weather; all the warm rugs and sheepskins of the troops were left in Paris ; and when night came on, with a bitter frost, it was impossible to recover these rugs, although 'they were all ready no more than five miles off. The army fought well by all reports ; but first, there was a day, lost through the failure of the bridges ; time was given to the enemy to bring up reinforcements ; the advantage of a surprise was thrown away ; and the troops, after two days of severe fighting, were enfeebled by an exposure to cold, from which, by the most ordinary prudence, they might have been spared. It was impossible to go on .fighting under those conditions. Better to withdraw the troops and save them for another day. It is the old story of mismanagement, by which so many first-rate armies fail. The army was up to its work, and succeeded;. the Intendance, as it is called here, was insufficient, and gave way. It failed to adjust the sluices of the Marne in time, and it failed to protect from the -sudden severity of the weather the inexperienced troops, who had quite enough to try them with hard fighting on their hands. ; i. Entered the park of St. Cloud. The sentries in the avenue are carefully hidden behind the huge trees. Turn sharp into a side walk just as the vision of an earfnwork, surmounted by a portion of a fort, and the houses of Paris coraes'in sight at the end of the avenue ;, ride in single file ; get a view of what was the Lantern of Diogenes — it is now a heap of whitei-rub-bish. The French must have had exciting practice at the lantern, as it was rather a small object, but the avenue made it a kind of white bull's eye, bounded by-dark green. And there lies the architectural toy of Napoleon I. a pyramidical mass of shattered stones. Turn to the left, down a quiet glade. There are horses neighing under the trees ; the tents— the; fir*t Prussian tents I have seen — of a strong infa ltry guard and a cavalry picket gleam through the dark trunks of the forest. It is all so quiet that we might be going to a pic-uic. Past the little camp in the wood, out on the grand avenue. Here are deep scores in the ground, holes/a».d furrows in the grass. There lies a conical tipped piece of iron, deftly ornamented with brass knobs on the sides, and a neat tip to the sharp' end. It is only a 100-lb. shell which has not burst. See, there is another, and there I This must be a hot corner, right in the line of fire. The. little, gquaji of horsemen insensibly quicken their pace. A shell— a hundred pourider^-rburstinat here would be so unpleasant. Another moment and there are fountains which do not play, garnished by statues; gardens! and terraces, walks lined with vases, pieces of water girt with trees— the Prince Imperial's playground. And then a basin with flights of steps surrounded by statuary groups. Beyond such a ruin ! I could not believe it. All that remained of "forty-five suites of rooms for guests, 600 other rooms, stabling for 237 holies, and barracks for 2000 men," as the guidebook says, was a tall; gaunt, white stone wall — white except in the places where the fire and smoke, rushed outside and licked the masonry in black lines. I never saw such a complete destruqtion. Bare walls and chimneys alone stood ;jthe fire still smouldered, and a dancing haze rose up from the heated mass inside ; but so clean is the work that I could look right through the palace and. see . Paris beyond in the opposite window place. Here was all that was left of the favorite retreat of the great Emperor— a palace inferior to none in France for historical interest, the scene of the 18th Brumaire, of the Imperial act of the J.Boh of May, 1804, of the receipt of the Benaius Consultum of the 7th of November, 1852— where Henry 111. was murdered, and Henrietta of Orleans died, where Peter the Great was received by the Regent, where Charles K. signed the Ordinances, where capitulation of Paris was signed in 1815, where Napoleon 111. received Queen Victoria in 1846, where the declaration of war against Prussia was signed in 1870^-decorated by the hands and work of Mignard, Le Moyne, Coypel, Bouchard, David, rich in

rf no aster pieces of painting, tapestry, sculpture, art— a amokiug Karnak of to-day. A,U is gone except a few books, some fur"iliture, clocks, a fine bust of Napoleon, and the like, which were saved, at the hazard of their lives, by the Prussians. Count Seckendorf was sent off to ascertain if the picture of the Queen's arrival at the Palace wa3 saved. It is gone, and so are all the pictures. I am sorry to say the departure of the gentlemen who will take this letter prevents my finishing it ; for I am writing out my dairy from the notes I took in my book, and I thought it would bo interesting to describe the last state of St. Cloud. The books are stored in a gardener's house. They bear fleur-de-lys, kingly crowns, Imperial eagles, and bees and N.s indifferently. I took up one. It was Vol. 2of Eecuel des Adliesionsde V AcUdu2Decemhre ; Chaix, Paris. Another near it was Pichot, Voyage autonr dv Monde. Most interesting of all, a copy of the Moniteur Universel, with the despatches of Napoleon before Waterloo ; his account of the defeat of the Prussians at Fleurus, and the despatch after Waterloo. The failure of French organisation has reached its lowest depth in the ambulance. English officers who have been in many fierce engagements, have said to me, speaking of the two great battles of Nov. 30th and Dec. 2nd — " We have nevev seen better or harder fighting in our lives; and never in our lives have we seen such confusion and muddle as there was in the rear. The very worst day of Balaklava was nothing to it." Here is a great and luxurious city which has prepared 40,000 beds for the wounded, and which at its gates is not more than three or four miles distant from the scene of conflict. One would suppose that everything could be admirably arranged for the benefit of the wounded, that they would be quickly lifted from the battle-field, and that they would be quickly conveyed to their beds. Quite the contrary. In the first place there are about a dozen ambulance societies who have no concert one with another, and, indeed, work in rivalry of each other. These sent out more than 600 conveyances, the International Society sent out about 150, the Ambulance of the Press sent out about 130, and the smaller ambulances sent out in proportion. Along •with their conveyances they despatched an immense number of attendants, mixed up with an idle crowd of sightseers, who put the Ked Cross of the Geneva Society on their arms, in order that they might be present at the principal battles. These amateur nurses did net know what to do, stood still or got into confusion. Instead of spreading themselves about to carry in the wounded, they became spectators of the surgeons at work, and hindered them in their operations by crowding round. Then, when they set to work for themselves, they selected their wounded with a nice discrimination. They pushed and fought for their prizes. A wounded Prussian was a prize — a wounded officer a great prize. They worried the poor fellows ■who were wounded with their delays ; and -when, after long waiting, the ambulance carts were duly filled, there was a still longer delay in the block of carriages, carts, and cabs at the gates of Paris and in the avenues leading up to them. The gates are few, and no order was given as to the avenues of approach and of departure. The block was frightful. It took about two hours to go a mile. A sharp frost with a cold bitiug wind, came on, and froze the wounded as they lay in the carriages unable to advance, and. as they lay on the ground without attendance. Half the men and half the carriages sent out could have done the work in half the time, had there been any proper organisation. But here, within gunshot of a great, city, with every creatuie comfort and scientific appliance close at hand, the case of the wounded could scarcely Lave been more deplorable if the battle had raged far away in the open country. There was something theatrical in the whole manner of pur entry into Chateaudun — the utter silence, the lofty chateau standing on a bluff overhanging the Loire, its highest tower 240 ft above the street, and looming in the darkness so gigantic- as we wound beneath it as to seem scarcely real ; the occasional glimmer at a window as the curtain was tbrust aside, and a frightened face peered out to look at the men and horses that were tramping and clanking past ; here and there a solitary figure fitting round a . corner and soon lost in the shadows of some dark by-street ; then past the gaunt ; walls of houses that had been destroyed during the recent bombardment, across a bridge, with the river, scarcely visible, gurgling beneath us, and up a steep zigzag road that leads from the lower to the npper town, and which debouches upon the grande place, where the troops were formed, and the words of command were followed by a moment of dead silence, . which was suddenly broken by the solemn and magnificent strains of the German Hymn of Thauksgiving, when there was a general salute, and as the inhabitants listened behind their closed and darkened windows they knew that the enemies of their country were once more in possession of their town, and were thanking God because He had again delivered it t.ver into their hands. As the glorious swell of the. music rose in one last grand climax of praise, and then died gently away into silence, I pondered over the varied nature of the prayers which mu3t ascend on an occasion like this from the devout of both nations, most deeply interested in slaying each other, and found myself as I did so wandering in a maze of charred and blackened ruins. In the midst of them stood the remains of an hotel ; little indeed seemed left to mine host but his white paper cap and coat, and as he stood in his kitchen, with a big phothole over his chimney and a Boup ladle in his hand, I begged of him, in my character of conqueror and fellow-Chris-tian, to give me food and lodging. As I look from the window of the room in which he has placed me 1 see nothing but blackened ruius, stables and outhouses all gone, and one corner of the table at which I write and the window-sill adjoining it charred to a cinder. Upon asking mine host how it happened that a considerable part of the inside of the room should be * burnt when the outside part of the window bore no traces of fire, he informed me that many of the bouses were set on fire by hand, and that, from one cause or other, near 300 houses have altogether been destroyed ; and, to j'idge from the scene of desolation in one quarter of the town, this number seems rather under than over the mark. I#the street leading to Chartres, which was most strongly barricaded, and where the most persistent

resistance was offered, there are only two or three houses left standing, the streets connecting it with the entrance from Orleans aie all a heap of ruins, and remind one of a quarter of Canton after our bombardment of that city. 1 suppose it can hardly be expected that soldiery, exasperated by street fighting, should be very considerate in their mode of attack and defence, but it was a terrible satire upon the civilisation of the age to walk over those mounds of rubbish and to listen to the heartrending tales of those whose entire worldly property they now represented ; worse still to hear of women and children who had taken refuge in the cellars being smothered by the falling houses. Happily these were few in number, but relatively to its size Chateau dun seemed to me to have suffered more than Strasburg.