colonel on the staff, if he would undertake "the service of the flags of truce," and was then sent to M. ARNOUS-RIVIÈRE, who engaged him to remain for that purpose, desiring him to have his carriage and horses always ready.

He was engaged about the 25th of September until the capitulation, and believed that he had, during thirty-six days of service, conducted about a dozen flags of truce to head-quarters.* When asked if he had

ever conducted the same person more than once, he replied:

"A. On the contrary, it was almost always the same person; a tall, handsome man, speaking French very well; it was generally he who arrived. I could not have conducted more than four or five others."

The description he thus gives accords with that given by M. DE MALHERBE of one of the envoys from the enemy's camp who particularly attracted his attention, and apparently applies to the person spoken of by General BOYER as M. DE DISKAN, who was sent to Marshal BAZAINE by Prince FREDERIC-CHARLES, about the 17th or 18th of September, as he adds: "An officer who was always employed subsequently to communicate with the French head-quarters."

It was on the 19th of September that M. DE BISMARCK said to M. JULES FAVRE at Ferrières: "As I am speaking of Metz, it will not be out of place to inform you that BAZAINE does not belong to you. I have strong reasons to suppose that he has remained faithful to the Emperor, and that he will even refuse to obey you."

We now come to the REGNIER incident, which is sufficiently well-known to make it unnecessary for us to mention it except in a summary manner. This man, a regular adventurer, who had dabbled in medicine and magnetism, who was mixed up with the revolution in 1848, and then took to writing political pamphlets, presented himself with a German flag of truce, and as an envoy at once from the Empress and M. DE BISMARCK; he professed to be charged by the former to propose either to Marshal CANROBERT or General BOURBAKI to go to England, and place himself at her disposition, and that the latter had agreed to such a step. Without going so far as to say that he was employed by M. DE BISMARCK to propose terms of peace, he spoke as a person acquainted with the views of the Prussian Minister, whom he had seen at Ferrières, and then proposed a scheme of settlement to Marshal BAZAINE, as if from himself, but which he was to go to Ferrières and propose to M. DE BISMARCK, if Marshal BAZAINE accepted it. This was to unite in some part of France, neutralised for that purpose, the Regent, the Senate, and the Legislative body, together with BAZAINE'S army. Peace was then to be arranged between them and the Prussians, and the terms of it imposed upon the rest of France; what these terms were to be, was not indicated.

The Marshal, while affecting to deny the accuracy of REGNIER's deposition, in fact corroborates it by his replies. It throws a most important light on the character of the Marshal to see what conditions he was avowedly ready to accept. On the 29th of September, he received a t elgram from Ferrières thus worded: Will Marshal BAZAINE accept for the capitulation of the army before Metz, the conditions which M. REG

In his deposition he used these words: "Four days never passed without my having to conduct German officers to the Marshal. Twice it has happened to me to have to conduct two flags of truce the same day."

Read before the Court Martial; as he left France and never presented himself as a witness, and was then ordered to be prosecuted as guilty of communicating intelligence to the enemy.

NIER will stipulate, if they are within the instructions which he will receive from Marshal BAZAINE ?"

This telegram was answered by a letter, dated the same day, addressed to General STIEHLE at the Prussian Camp, to say that he could not reply in a manner "positively affirmative" to the question, that he had told M. REGNIER that the only thing he could accept was a capitulation with the honours of war, and in which Metz should not be included, and in which he offered to send his aide-de-camp, General BoYER, to Prince FREDERIC CHARLES, "in case he should desire fuller information upon what has passed between myself and M. REGNIER."

This offer was left unnoticed, the Marshal heard nothing more of either REGNIER or General BOURBAKI.

To take the full value of this incident we must again turn to the Marshal's own explanations. The first question put to him by the Duke D'AUMALE was what he meant by the honours of war. To which he "To march out with arms and baggage, and fully formed and equipped." 66 Q. March out-but afterwards?

replied:

"A. Afterwards, we should evidently have placed ourselves at the disposal of the country."

The President then remarks that such is not the meaning usually given to the expression "honours of war;" to which the Marshal first replies with his favourite expression; "I did not place myself in that order of ideas," and when it was objected that M. DE BISMARCK could only have understood the words according to their usual acceptation, he said :—

"I laid a trap for him, as he had charged REGNIER to lay a trap for me. Once outside, it is evident that we might have rendered great assistance towards the defence of the country."

Q. How! once you were outside?

"A. Yes; the army being organised, if we had been outside, we would have put a stop to this disastrous War."

The President points out to him that unless a number of German troops equal to that of his army, had also been "neutralised," the object which he had proposed to himself of keeping a large force of the enemy before the walls of Metz, would have been sacrificed, and 200,000 Germans would have been set free to march into the heart of the country. He replies : "This (the withdrawal of so many Germans) is probably what would have happened;" and again: "Nothing was said about this; but we would have probably acted for the best interests of the country."

It appears that in his replies to the Prosecution, he had answered more fully on this affair, and from them the President read the following passage: "I answered M. REGNIER, that if we could march out with arms and baggage, we should certainly maintain order, and cause the clauses of the Convention to be respected." It is then put to him, whether in transmitting such words to the Government of the country at war with his own he did not run the risk, at least in appearance, of finding himself" assisting the enemy to reduce to submission a French army." He of course repudiated this inevitable deduction and declared that he never contemplated anything but a Convention to include the whole of France. he knew at that time that the negotiations had just been broken off at Ferrières, and that his own position was perfectly well known to the Germans; for if they had spies inside Metz who informed them beforehand of any contemplated movements, so as to render any such movements abortive, evidently, by the same spies, they must have known when the army and

Yet

the town would become their own for want of food. But had they not already known this, they did know it by the visit of REGNIER. He left Metz perfectly informed as to the length of time for which the army had provisions. In his deposition he mentioned a particular day-the 18th of October; he had given the same date, in London, to an officer attached to the household of the Prince Imperial, who was one of the witnesses, and that before the arrival there of General BOYER. The Marshal denied that he gave such information to REGNIER, while the latter asserted it was from him that he had it. The date in question is the very one which had been furnished to the Marshal in the last return made to him by the Commissariat before his interview with REGNIER.

Besides, the supposition of a Convention to include all France is contradicted by his own words before the Court-Martial, already quoted: "Once outside, we would have put a stop to this disastrous war. The capitulation of the army was therefore to precede the treaty of peace, and not to be included in it. BAZAINE's army could only have put a stop to the war by joining with one side or the other. They could not have joined the other French armies without breaking their parole; what other alternative then would have remained but that indicated by the Duc D'AUMALE, of joining the Prussians?

Within a fortnight of the visit of REGNIER, the Marshal returned to the idea of negotiations. On the 7th of October he asked by circular from his lieutenants, their written opinions on the position of the army. On the 10th of October he assembled a Council of War, at which it was determined to attempt the conclusion of a military convention (not a capitulation), which should be honourable for all, and that in case the enemy sought to impose dishonourable conditions, an attempt should be made to cut through the investing lines. The result was not the opening of negotiations with the general commanding the besieging force, but the mission of General BOYER to BISMARCK at Versailles, who was allowed to pass the Prussian lines for that purpose, accompanied by two German officers. The negotiations thus partook of a political, and not a military character; several days elapsed before the return of the envoy, which also brought no definite decision, as the proposals made by BISMARCK necessitated a communication with the Empress, and General BOYER was again despatched on that mission. The result was that the last precious days during which it was possible to attempt a sortie, were consumed in waiting for news, and the army and town arrived at their last day's provisions. If such had been the intention of the Marshal he fully carried it out; and who can doubt that such was the real object of these negotiations, when it is considered to what degree they were futile and absurd, and when we see that at the Council of War which inaugurated them the Marshal concealed from his lieutenants, just as he had done at the conference of Grimont, what it was necessary for them to know. He did not communicate to them any of the negotiations which had already taken place; his correspondence with Prince FREDERIC-CHARLES, the proposals of REGNIER, the telegram of M. DE BISMARCK, and his own reply to it; the object of General BOURBAKI's mission to London, and the silence which had followed, showing that all these pretended schemes had already failed. Neither did he inform them of the large stores which had reached Thionville and Longwy, which, if anything, would have encouraged them to attempt a sortie. There can be no possible ambiguity as to Marshal BAZAINE's silence on the previous negotiations, because the object of General BOYER's mission to Versailles and London was the very same political combination which had already

failed. But besides this, that combination was in itself too absurd for us to suppose that the Marshal could, at that moment, have believed in it; he who was aware that the Prussians knew as well as himself how long he could hold out.

According to General BOYER, the proposals of M. DE BISMARCK were that the army should pronounce in favour of the Empress regent, that she should sign preliminaries of peace, and that then the army of Metz should be allowed to retire with arms and baggage, with its artillery, and its material. Upon which General BOYER, acting upon the instructions he had received from the Marshal, explained to M. DE BISMARCK what part the army was to play afterwards, and this is a mere reproduction of the scheme of REGNIER; the army to proceed to a "neutralised territory," where were to be assembled all the parts of the State, as they existed before the 4th of September. Such was the scheme put forward as if it had been a serious proposition which was seriously deliberated upon at Metz, in a Council held on the return of General BOYER, and to propose which to the Empress, he proceeded to London and never re-entered Metz. It was the 19th of October when he left it for London; the Empress refused to sign the proposed preliminaries of peace, no attempt was ever made to get the army at Metz to proclaim the Regency, and on the 24th of October Prince FREDERIC-CHARLES transmitted a telegram from M. DE BISMARCK to say that he had no longer any expectation of arriving at a result by "political negotiations," the nation and the army not having shown any inclination for the cause of the Emperor. But had the Empress agreed to sign, and had the army of Metz acknowledged her as regent, what would there have been in such circumstances to induce BISMARCK to allow the Marshal to march out with arms and baggage and all his material? Plainly none whatever, unless the men and the arms were to be used against the other French. The process of deception practised by the Marshal towards his subordinates, forcibly appears in respect to the news brought back by General BOYER of the state of France. He drew an entirely false picture, representing all resistance as hopeless; that there was no army of the Loire, that anarchy prevailed, that the towns of Normandy were asking for German garrisons, &c. Such was the statement laid before the Council, and on the 18th of October the Generals in command were ordered to transmit it to their subordinates to be finally communicated to the troops! It was not merely that the Marshal thus broke one of the elementary rules of military service in accepting and propagating news received from the enemy (also formally forbidden by a French decree of 1863), but that he kept back news in a contrary sense. General BOYER brought back in his pocket some French newspapers, which were not communicated to the Council, and when some of this news leaked out, a Metz paper wished to publish an article to contradict the news brought by General BOYER, it received notice not do so.*

The propagation of intelligence of a dispiriting nature, whether true or false, was part of the Marshal's system. The same day on which General BOYER'S intelligence was made known to the army, there was also communicated to it a description of the enemy's lines, accompanied by a map of the environs of Metz on which the siege works were traced, and these

"Having insisted with the Marsifal how extraordinary it was that General Boyer had not brought back any news from French sources, or any French newspaper, the Marshal sent me two numbers of the Journal Officiel of the 4th and 6th of October. Their contents agreed so little with the news reported by General Boyer, that the Marshal, who had at first intended them to be published, countermanded the order."-Deposition of General Coffinière.

indications made the works appear more formidable than they really were, as afterwards appeared. On several previous occasions the journals had been ordered to insert memorandums on the number and position of the divisions of the besieging force; while articles written in an encouraging sense as to the position of France, or protesting against a capitulation, were not allowed to appear. Surely the force of evidence can go no further.

THE CAPITULATION.

We are now approaching the end of this melancholy history; the conduct of the man who was the cause of all, will be found consistent to the very last point. We have already spoken of the immense warlike material given up to the Prussians. The Marshal was closely questioned by the Duc D'AUMALE, why he did not take measures to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy, to be used against France (as it was shortly afterwards in the siege of Thionville). His answers on this point are perhaps more contradictory than on any other. At one moment he said they had no right to destroy the material; at another, that as they might have made a last effort, they would have found themselves without arms; again, that had they not satisfied the enemy by delivering up the material intact, Metz might have been treated as a town taken by assault!

Q. As soon as you knew what the enemy required, might you not have taken measures to destroy the material?

"A. No, according to the true order of ideas, I thought I had no right to do so. "Q. Even before negotiating?

"A. But then that would have disarmed us; and if one of the conditions had not pleased us, if we had desired to cut our way out, we should have found ourselves without arms. At what moment could we have destroyed it?

66

Q. When you were going to capitulate; at the last moment.

"A. The moment you enter into negotiations, it becomes a question of good faith. It would have had to be done before.

"Q. How ? you thought yourself engaged before the negotiations were concluded? You did not think you had the right to break off negotiations, begun but not concluded?

"4. The right exists certainly breaking off negotiations; but at Metz, we were in extremity; we had no choice to do otherwise.

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Q. If you had destroyed your fortifications and material, and broken off negotiations, I ask you, what more rigorous treatment could you have suffered than what you actually had to endure?

66

4. The fate of Metz might have been more rigorous; it might have been treated as a town taken by assault.

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'Q. You think that with our modern usages, if the gates had been thrown open, the town would have been given up to pillage?

"A. I thought it very probable."

This was the course followed at Phalsberg. At the time he had met the objections or suggestions of subordinates on this matter, by the idea, that the warlike material would not be used by the Prussians, but would be kept in depôt by them until the peace, when it might possibly be restored to France! He repeated before the Court Martial: "I did really think the place and its armament would be restored at the peace, as was done in 1814 and 1815."

The task still remained to him of preserving the flags and eagles for the Prussians; and it proved a more difficult one than that of giving up Metz itself. Here individual action came into play: the commanders of corps began to take the matter into their own hands, by destroying them at the head of their soldiers. This step was provoked by an order to the generals of artillery, dated the 27th of October, to the effect that all the flags and