Wawro G. The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871
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Map 5. The Battle of Spicheren
113
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114 The Franco-Prussian War
position and awaited reinforcements, Frossard wondered just exactly how
many men he was facing. Every French counter-attack that formed above
Francois’s huddled companies was blown back by Kameke’s vigilant artillery.
Resourceful French gun teams that ventured down the height to shorten
their ranges and obviate the Krupp’s advantage were instantly brought un-
der counter-battery fire and chased away. By early afternoon five abandoned
French guns languished in no-man’s-land. They would be First Army’s first
trophies of the war if only Kameke could scale the Rote Berg.
Help was on the way. By mid-afternoon, Kameke’s 28th Brigade, com-
manded by General Wilhelm von Woyna, had relieved the exhausted remains
of Francois’s 74th Regiment at Stiring and fanned out along the wooded ridge
above the ironworks, taking the single brigade that Frossard had posted there
in a cross fire. As the battle of Spicheren sputtered back to the life with the
arrival of these fresh troops, Francois rose on the Rote Berg, drew his sword,
and led his men on to the bare red slope. Within seconds the general was dead,
ripped by five bullets. Many of his men met the same fate, the rest fell back
into the Gifert Wood. By 3:00 p.m., Kameke’s 14th Division was reeling; to
deal the knockout blow, General Laveaucoupet ordered his 40th Regiment
to counter-attack into Gifert Wood. They drove in with bayonets, pushing
Francois’s demoralized survivors before them. On Spicheren height, Frossard
permitted General Charles Verg
´
e to launch his second brigade at Woyna’s
troops in Stiring, knocking the freshly arrived Prussians almost all the way
back to Saarbr
¨
ucken. Had Frossard only strengthened these counter-attacks
and continued them, he might have dealt a stinging defeat to the Prussians.
But Frossard fully shared the French penchant for defensive tactics intro-
duced after K
¨
oniggr
¨
atz. Just as Laveaucoupet refused to leave the shelter of
Gifert Wood and pursue Francois’s survivors across the open ground toward
Saarbr
¨
ucken, so Frossard refused to leave Spicheren and the safety of his
position magnifique. Having expelled the Prussians, he sat down to wait.
“Battle is slaughter,” Clausewitz had written forty years earlier. If you
shy from it, “someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off your
arms.”
70
This was a warning that Frossard should have heeded. As he reined
in his counter-attacks, the Prussians were sharpening their sword. Having
reached the outskirts of Saarbr
¨
ucken on the 6 August, Prince Friedrich Karl
and his leading units, Konstantin von Alvensleben’s III Corps and August
von Goeben’s VIII Corps, heard the sounds of battle from Spicheren and
immediately began shifting troops to the front. Battalions were sent by rail
along the Forbach line at half hour intervals; other units were sent on foot
along the arrow-straight Route Imp
´
eriale; Goeben’s 9th Hussars galloped
forward with two batteries of guns to help stem the rout below Stiring and
70 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, orig. 1832, Princeton, 1976,p.260.
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115Wissembourg and Spicheren
the Gifert Wood. The contrast between the French and Prussian styles was
remarkable; whereas French generals exercised little initiative and seldom
strayed from fixed positions and lines of communication, Prussian generals
joined a battle at a moment’s notice, even if this meant moving with only
a fraction of their total strength and none of their supplies. Odd battalions
could be brigaded together, supplies and ammunition shared out. The main
thing was to increase numbers at the point of attack and put pressure on the
enemy.
General Alvensleben himself rode the rails to Saarbr
¨
ucken with a battalion
of the Prussian 12th Regiment. No sooner were his horses taken off than he
galloped forward to the battlefield and relieved Kameke of his blundering
command. Surveying the human wreckage of the day – lines of dead and
wounded in Prussian blue on the Rote Berg, the Gifert Wood and along the
Forbach railway – Alvensleben understood that the battle would have to be
begun all over again. He would have to work efficiently, for Bazaine had finally
agreed to lend Frossard Jean-Baptiste Montaudon’s division. If Montaudon
marched all out, he could still make Spicheren in time to intervene in the
battle.
71
While a brigade of the Prussian 5th Division retook the Gifert Wood,
nine more battalions, tumbling off their trains and march routes in no kind of
order from Alvensleben’s III Corps and Goeben’s VIII Corps, stretched the
attack along the entire edge of the height. Charles Verg
´
e’s division in Stiring
was finally dislodged and forced back on Forbach with heavy losses: 1,300
killed and wounded.
French facility with the rifle was demonstrated by Verg
´
e’s prodigious con-
sumption of ammunition that day, 146,000 cartridges. That this expenditure
by a single division represented one-third of the entire French war indus-
try’s daily production was at least as unsettling as the fact that fewer than
one round in seventy-five actually struck a Prussian. Clearly the problem of
fire control had still to be worked out.
72
Lieutenant Prosp
`
ere Coudriet of the
French 24th Regiment admired the discipline and cohesion of the Prussian
attacks under this withering if not always accurate French fire. Though the
Prussians ascending toward Spicheren were attacking into a semi-circle of
converging fire from two entire French regiments and a Chasseur battalion,
the Prussians plowed grimly ahead, their company columns preceded by long
lines of skirmishers, which used the ground well to evade French defensive
fire and pour in salvos of their own. Coudriet particularly admired the skill
with which the Prussian skirmish line – the only shield against the Chassepot –
was maintained. As Prussian fusiliers fell, they were swiftly replaced by or-
dinary infantry; 250-man companies would widen their intervals and sprint
71 J. B. Montaudon, Souvenirs Militaires, 2 vols., Paris, 1898–1900, vol. 2, pp. 4–7.
72 SHAT, Lb6, Metz, 10 Aug. 1870, Gen. Verg
´
e to Gen. Frossard. Lb4, Paris, 1 Aug. 1870, Gen.
Dejean to Marshal Leboeuf.
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116 The Franco-Prussian War
forward to replace the casualties. By this rolling, firing advance, the Prussians
ground inexorably uphill, first through woods, then potato fields, then the
rusty gravel of the Rote Berg.
On the iron mountain, the ground was so steep that soil and grass would
not hold on the gravel slopes, and most of the Prussian wounds were to the
head, hands, or feet, the only body parts exposed to an entrenched enemy firing
straight down the vertical.
73
Against defensive fire like that, the Krupp guns
were an essential strut. At Spicheren, Prussian gun teams pushed to within
1,200 yards of the French trenches – a considerable feat on the steep slope –
and demolished them with explosive shells and shrapnel. Prussian shells burst
in twenty or thirty jagged shards; Prussian shrapnel scattered forty zinc balls
at bullet speed. This was hard to take in large doses. French senior officers
rushed in where the fighting was hottest, one remarking “wavering among the
troops”–“hesitation chez les soldats”–wherever the Prussian guns concen-
trated.
74
Coudriet of the 24th recalled seeing his regimental colonel torn apart
by shell fragments as he directed fire from behind a breastwork on the Rote
Berg. At last the French line began to give, pulled by the roughly one-third
of French effectives who were reservists, none of whom had been with their
regiments for more than a week when the Prussians struck.
75
By 6 o’clock –
when many of the Prussian units had been on their feet for thirteen hours –
Alvensleben had accumulated a substantial reserve of seven battalions, all from
his own corps. Although he had no idea where Montaudon’s division was, he
had to assume that French supports were in the vicinity.
To shatter what remained of Frossard’s corps before the arrival of re-
inforcements, General Alvensleben thrust this improvised reserve into the
flank of the French position, sending the troops up the Forbach Berg, a hump
of the Rote Berg that ran west toward Stiring. This brigade-strength for-
mation, steadily augmented by new arrivals, crested the ridge and staggered
into Laveaucoupet’s left flank. This combination of overlapping infantry at-
tacks and massed artillery barrages finally broke the French, who backed
off the Rote Berg toward Spicheren and then, as darkness fell at 9 o’clock,
yielded the entire plateau, flooding in opposite directions down the roads
to Sarreguemines and Forbach. The colonel of the French 63rd Regiment
voiced what would become a common complaint in the war: “Our men fired
their rifles all day to no apparent effect against an enemy who constantly in-
creased his numbers and turned our flanks.”
76
This, of course, was the Prussian
73 Shand, p. 22.
74 SHAT, Lb6, no date, no name, “Notes sur la part qu’a prise la 63 d’Infanterie
`
al’affaire de 6
Ao
ˆ
ut 1870.”
75 SHAT, Lb6, Bernay, 28 Nov. 1877, Lt. Coudriet., “24e Regt. De Ligne: Participation du
Regiment
`
a la journ
´
ee de Spickeren.”
76 SHAT, Lb6, no date, no name, “Notes sur la part qu’a prise la 63 d’Infanterie
`
al’affaire de 6
Ao
ˆ
ut 1870.”
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117Wissembourg and Spicheren
Fig. 5. Prussian infantry struggle on the Rote Berg
operational art in a nutshell: initiative, superior numbers at the chosen point,
flanking attacks, and encirclement. Driven from Stiring and the Rote Berg,
General Frossard briefly attempted to reform his position in Spicheren and
Forbach, but soon learned that the entire Prussian 13th Division, which had
crossed the Saar downstream at V
¨
olklingen, was marching into his unguarded
left flank and rear. The pocket or Kessel was closing, yet Frossard had no
reserves left to keep it open.
Giving up on the Saar, Frossard ordered a general retreat back to the line
of the Moselle. On both roads away from the plateau Frossard’s men collided
with General Montaudon’s march columns, which, having received no orders
from Bazaine until 3:30 p.m. and no information from Frossard until 4:00 p.m.,
were only now wearily arriving at the front after forced marches of eight to fif-
teen miles. General Armand de Castagny’s division, which, like Montaudon’s,
had belatedly “marched to the guns,” halted several kilometers south of For-
bach in darkness. The road was a bedlam of panicked troops and overturned
wagons. Frossard’s men –“starved, thirsty, dropping with fatigue”–were in
no mood to continue the fight.
77
Castagny, still striving to reach Spicheren,
recalled stopping one of Frossard’s generals and asking him “how long did it
77 SHAT, Lb6, Paris, 25 June 1872, Col. Gabrielle to War Minister.
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118 The Franco-Prussian War
take your brigade to pass this road?” The general stared wildly at him: “Mais je
suis seul; j’ai perdu ma brigade”–“But I am alone; I have lost my brigade.”
78
Bazaine later called Spicheren a “sad, useless battle,” but he bore a large
measure of responsibility for the defeat. All four of his divisions could have
intervened to snatch victory from defeat; none of them did. Bazaine’s adver-
saries – Alvensleben and Goeben – exhibited the opposite tendency, feeding
battalions, squadrons, and batteries into the fight as quickly as they could be
made available. Bazaine, of course, needed to be more cautious.
79
His divisions
were spread forty miles from St. Avold to Bitche and he could not have known
that Spicheren was a major battle until very late in the day. To have reacted
earlier and sent large numbers of troops to Spicheren would have narrowed
his position and perhaps enabled the Prussians to sweep around Frossard
and him. He rebuffed Frossard’s first call for assistance at nine o’clock in the
morning, writing, “Our line is unfortunately very thin, and if this Prussian
movement is serious, it would be wiser to [withdraw].”
80
That rebuff was hard
to justify, for Frossard – himself in doubt as to the severity of the Prussian
attack – requested just two brigades, one of Montaudon’s for Spicheren and
one of Decaen’s for Forbach. Two brigades from two different corps would
hardly have compromised Bazaine’s position. Probably Bazaine’s failure had
more to do with a lack of acuity or just plain spite; the marshal did not like
Frossard, who was the imperial family’s favorite general.
Spicheren and Frossard’s efforts to excuse the defeat after the war led to
the creation of a “Dossier Frossard” in the French army archive, where senior
officers involved that day were invited to answer Frossard’s charges that he
had been abandoned by his colleagues. The gist of all the reports submitted is
that Frossard himself wavered too long between believing the Prussian attack
to be a minor affair and a serious battle. As late as 5:15 p.m. – as Alvensleben
was preparing his final push up to Spicheren and Zastrow’s 13th Division
was descending on Forbach – Frossard, deceived by yet another pause in
the action, wired Bazaine: “The fighting, which has been lively, has calmed
down . . . . I expect that I will remain master of this ground and will return
the Montaudon Division to you.” Bazaine, greatly relieved, was shocked to
receive the following telegram just two hours later: “Nous sommes tourn
´
ees”–
“we have been outflanked.”
81
The irresolution that Frossard displayed at
Spicheren simply could not be remedied under the conditions of nineteenth-
century warfare. A French division in the field needed two hours to prepare
itself for a march and many more hours to execute the march. Time was the
78 SHAT, Lb6, “Dossier Frossard,” Paris, 29 Nov. 1870, Gen. Castagny, “Reponse
`
a la brochure
du General Frossard en ce qui concerne la Division de Castagny pendant la journ
´
ee de
Forbach.” Montaudon, pp. 4–7.
79 Andlau, pp. 41, 50. Howard, p. 92.
80 Montaudon, pp. 4–7.
81 SHAT, Lb6, “Dossier Frossard,” Forbach, 6 Aug. 1870, Gen. Frossard to Marshal Bazaine.
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119Wissembourg and Spicheren
critical element, yet Frossard the engineer let it slip away, perhaps, as one
colleague snidely noted, because Spicheren “was his apprenticeship in the
management of troops.”
82
Impressed by the effectiveness of French tactics on parts of the battle-
field, the Prussians marveled at the overall incompetence of their opera-
tions. On 7 August, Prince Friedrich Karl wrote Alvensleben and compared
Bazaine’s floundering at Spicheren with Benedek’sin1866: “As in 1866, the
French . . . let us prise apart several corps to strike at a soft, brittle mass,” in
this instance, General Charles Frossard’s II Corps. Writing to his mother two
days later, the Second Army commandant emphasized again the parallels with
the K
¨
oniggr
¨
atz campaign: “Everywhere this war is beginning like that of 1866,
crushing defeats of isolated corps and great demoralization. The woods about
here are full of enemy deserters. The position we took at Spicheren was in-
credibly strong.”
83
Indeed it was, and Prussia’s massive casualties at Spicheren
ought to have tempered all delighted comparisons with 1866. French marks-
manship and the Chassepot were killing Prussians at an unprecedented rate.
Whereas the Prussians had routinely killed or wounded four Austrians for
every Prussian casualty in 1866, they lost two men for every French casualty
at Spicheren. Nearly 5,000 Prussians were cut down in the battle, more than
half the number of Prussian killed and wounded at K
¨
oniggr
¨
atz, and this in a
relatively minor “encounter battle.”
Because of Steinmetz’s turn south and Kameke’s rashness, the Prussians
had absorbed brutal, wholly avoidable casualties. A witness who watched
King Wilhelm I tour the battlefield in an open carriage noted that he “ap-
peared stunned” by the unexpected carnage.
84
His only meager consolation
was the extent of French losses, surprising given the natural advantages of the
Spicheren position. Frossard lost 4,000 men, a sum that included 250 officers
and 2,500 prisoners seized in the rapid Prussian envelopment; the latter were
put to work burying the French and Prussian dead in mass graves all over the
field before being shipped across the Rhine to prison camps. When Frossard
reassembled his divisions in the following days, he found that they had lost
everything in the retreat: forty bridges, hundreds of tents, and food, clothing,
coffee, wine, and rum valued at 1 million francs.
Emperor Napoleon III’s cares were far heavier. The Prussians seemed to
be snipping off his army corps one after the other. It did seem eerily like 1866,
when the Prussians had isolated a succession of Austrian units and chewed
them up in frontier battles, draining Benedek of much needed strength in
82 SHAT, Lb6, “Dossier Frossard,” Paris, 29 Nov. 1870, Gen. Castagny, “Reponse
`
a la brochure
du General Frossard en ce qui concerne la Division de Castagny pendant la journ
´
ee de
Forbach.”
83 Foerster, vol. 2, pp. 145–7.
84 Friedrich Freudenthal, Von Stade bis Gravelotte, Bremen, 1898,p.106.
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120 The Franco-Prussian War
the days before K
¨
oniggr
¨
atz. Alarmed by the defeats at Wissembourg and
Spicheren, the emperor informed Bazaine that he would “pull in Marshal
MacMahon’s corps and concentrate the army in a more compact manner.”
85
With the Prussian armies spreading, as MacMahon worriedly put it, “like an
oil stain” between the French corps, Napoleon III and Leboeuf belatedly tried
to close the gaps. They were too late; MacMahon was about to be inundated.
85 SHAT, Lb 6, Metz, 6 August 1870, Marshal Leboeuf to Marshal Bazaine.
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5
Froeschwiller
After Wissembourg, General Abel Douay’s battered division – now com-
manded by General Jean Pell
´
e – had reeled away to the southwest in the di-
rection of Strasbourg. After pulling itself together on 5 August, Crown Prince
Friedrich Wilhelm’s Third Army moved off in Pell
´
e’s baggage-strewn wake.
Having lost contact with MacMahon, the Prussian crown prince wanted to
scour the ground east of the Vosges before turning into the mountains to join
the Prussian First and Second Armies on the other side.
1
To do this, he made
a difficult change of front southward: the Bavarian II Corps scrambled down
the road to Lembach on the right, the Prussian V Corps and XI Corps de-
scended on Woerth and Soultz in the center, and the W
¨
urttemberg and Baden
divisions – commanded by the Prussian General August von Werder – moved
up on the left at Aschbach.
The roads were difficult with ascending ranges of wooded hills that only
occasionally opened on to fields of corn or tobacco before the woods or vine-
yards closed in again. At first, the crown prince and his staff chief, General
Albrecht von Blumenthal, assumed that MacMahon was running for cover in
the fortress of Strasbourg. Late on the 5th, however, a Totenkopf hussar rode
through Woerth, noted barricades on the road to Froeschwiller, dismounted,
swam across the Sauer, had a long look at MacMahon’s sprawling position,
and galloped back to headquarters.
2
By late evening, the crown prince and
Blumenthal were fully apprised: MacMahon was not at Strasbourg; on the
contrary, he had scarcely moved from the positions he had held during the
battle of Wissembourg. He was still at Froeschwiller, like Spicheren, one of
the French army’s positions magnifiques. Blumenthal and Crown Prince
1 Frederick III, The War Diary of the Emperor Frederick III 1870–71, New York, 1927,
pp. 29–30.
2 Johannes Priese, Als Totenkopfhusar 1870–71, Berlin, 1936, pp. 30–8.
121
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122 The Franco-Prussian War
Friedrich Wilhelm were pleasantly surprised. Froeschwiller could be encircled
by a large army. That evening they began to plot a Kesselschlacht involving
the entire Third Army for 7 August.
3
Driven from Wissembourg on the 4th, MacMahon resolved to stand at
Froeschwiller, which he considered a strong position and a hub of France’s
eastern communications. If it fell, the Prussians would be able to seize con-
trol of the Bitche-Strasbourg railway as well as the principal roads pass-
ing through the Vosges. This, in turn, would isolate the French garrison at
Strasbourg and make it easier for the Germans to supply their large armies in
France.
4
The chief defect of Froeschwiller was its vulnerability to a flanking
attack. Though redoubtable against a frontal assault, Froeschwiller was easily
turned from the south by a large army, and large numbers of troops were
something that the Germans had in abundance in 1870. Against MacMahon’s
corps of 50,000, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm had an army of 100,000 de-
scending on Froeschwiller in three great columns. MacMahon ought to have
abandoned the position and withdrawn through the Vosges, but he needed
time to collect Pell
´
e’s division and still hoped to combine with other French
troops in the area to counter-attack the Prussians and recover the ground
lost at Wissembourg. Early on 6 August he ordered General Pierre de Failly,
commander of the French V Corps, to make his 30,000 troops ready for one
of two eventualities: either an attack on the Prussian Third Army as it passed
through the Vosges defiles or a bold envelopment of the Prussian crown prince
if he dawdled at Wissembourg.
5
Given the numerical odds against MacMahon,
this was admirable pluck, but misguided. The Prussians rarely dawdled, and
were far too thorough to turn into the Vosges without first making sure of
MacMahon.
Froeschwiller was an imposing obstacle with clear fields of fire in all di-
rections. The village perched above the Sauer river and overlooked the impor-
tant road junction of Woerth, where the plain of Alsace began to rise into the
wooded Vosges. Like Spicheren, it wrung every advantage from the Chassepot
rifle, because Froeschwiller and its neighboring village of Elsasshausen sat at
the heart of a semicircular position on the right bank of the Sauer, flanked by
Eberbach on the right and Langensoultzbach on the left. The four villages were
linked by a lateral road and easily reinforced. Prussian attacks into this bowl
of fire would be impeded by the Sauer, as well as the vines and hop plantations
crowded onto the slopes below the French position. On a pre-war staff ride,
Marshal MacMahon had paused to study the position and declared: “One day
3 Munich, Bayerisches Kriegsarchiv (BKA), HS 849, Capt. Girl, “Einige Erinnerungen,”
p. 43.
4 Vincennes, Service Historique de l’Arm
´
ee de Terre (SHAT), Lb 6, Saverne, 7 Aug. 1870,
Marshal MacMahon to Napoleon III.
5 SHAT, Lb 6, Camp de Froeschwiller, 6 Aug. 1870, Marshal MacMahon to General de Failly.