From the instant the recapture of Verdun began, André shut himself inside his office for a full twenty-four hours and forbade anyone to disturb him. Most of that time, he sat motionless at his desk, thinking in silence and waiting. Only his intelligence aide-de-camp was allowed in—under the pretext of delivering front-line reports from the Army of the Meuse—and even then only to bring the Commander-in-Chief food and wine.
On the day after Moreau’s men took Verdun, when Davout’s rifled regiment also recovered Vaux and Douaumont, André held the dispatches in his hands and could not help laughing aloud. To say he felt no pressure would have been a lie: he had wagered everything on this, including his life and his entire fortune. Before Verdun, the French army had been fighting to win; after Verdun, victory was already within reach—only the question of how much they would harvest remained.
In another timeline’s Battle of Valmy, whether among military scholars in France or experts in other European states, the near-unanimous view was that foul weather, extraordinary luck, and the Polish question had allowed General Dumouriez to snatch a victory by sheer good fortune. At that time, French troops were of extremely poor quality: they had little organization and less discipline, and Dumouriez himself, as commander-in-chief, had lived through several attempted mutinies. A setback in a minor engagement was enough to plunge French soldiers into despair, and on the battlefield that despair often turned into a headlong rout—so much so that the French commander nearly fell into the hands of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition twice.
Even with the advantage of time and terrain on the defensive side, French infantry accomplished almost nothing in battle (Valmy was broadly similar). When holding positions, neither infantry nor cavalry earned much credit; when chasing a coalition force that had already lost its will, they became hesitant and sluggish, dragging their feet. By contrast, it was the vast mass of farmers in the Ardennes, Lorraine, and Alsace—organizing of their own accord—who fought a cruel, bloody war of raids behind enemy lines, killing far more foreign soldiers. Of course, the French army’s greatest “ally” was still the same trio: jagged mountain roads, cold autumn rain, and deadly disease.
Now, after three years of painstaking work in Champagne, André had changed all of this. The battlefield had already proven that the powerful Army of the Meuse was not inferior to the elite Prussian army; and the rapid, efficient intelligence system—together with France’s overwhelming advantages in artillery, rifled muskets, and tactics and technique—had successfully aided the two commanders, Moreau and Davout, in carrying Verdun to victory.
When the Verdun campaign opened, General Macdonald—who had long held the northern line at Chalades–Varennes–Méloncourt—received Commander Moncey’s order to counterattack. He quickly sent his 15,000 men south to seal the Islettes Pass. Before dusk, the French, without the slightest difficulty, encircled and annihilated the few hundred Prussian infantry defending the village of Clermont. During this interval, the coalition commander at the two passes, General Hess, attempted to lead infantry to retake Clermont; but the French, already entrenched, and supported by multiple guns, repulsed the attackers with ease.
At dawn the next day, General Hess—having received substantial cavalry reinforcements from Duc de Brunswick—reassembled 8,000 Prussian infantry and 1,500 light cavalry and prepared to launch a large-scale assault on the French positions at Clermont. At the same time, on the French side, twenty 12-pound André cannon—rushed in overnight—made their formal battlefield debut.
To strengthen defense and striking power, an engineer detachment, working with an infantry regiment, labored through the night and, before dawn’s fighting, cut a parallel trench two meters wide along the narrow road leading into the pass. Outside, they drew two belts of wire entanglements spaced thirty meters apart; inside were two infantry breastworks spaced fifty to sixty meters apart. Breastworks, artillery, trench, and wire together formed the French all-around defensive system at Clermont. If, every twenty to thirty meters, one were to add a water-cooled Maxim heavy machine gun, it would almost perfectly reproduce the defensive pattern of the First World War.
Eager to reopen his supply line, the coalition field commander General Hess did not have his infantry conduct probing attacks, nor did he wait for the artillery support that lagged behind; instead, he ordered all 1,500 light cavalry to charge directly at the French position at Clermont in a flood-like assault, hoping to drown the French in a single blow. Plainly, General Hess had learned nothing from General Clermont-Clifford’s failed siege of Méloncourt. At this moment, the French commander at Clermont was, by coincidence, Macdonald—renowned precisely for defensive warfare.
As the enemy cavalry began their attack, French gunners had already pulled away every camouflage cover, revealing row after row of savage fangs. Twenty 12-pound and 9-pound guns held their black muzzles high, awaiting the final order to fire, ready to unleash a dreadful light of death.
An artillery captain ran back and forth between the third gun positions, relaying instructions. He stopped beside a 12-pounder and told the gun captain, “Range one thousand meters, bearing b2; load shell; set a half-fuse.”
There was no doubt: this, Clermont included, was a preselected killing ground. Weeks earlier, artillery surveyors had already provided the artillery commander and gun crews with detailed firing tables and map annotations—scales, elevations, directions, and all the technical data required for setting the guns.
On receiving the order, the gun captain passed tasks down to the crew. After a final correction of elevation and setting, the artillery lieutenant gave the fire command; a gunner seized the lanyard and jerked hard. One second later, driven by black powder, the round burst from the muzzle with a shriek, skimmed the blue sky, and flew like a fireball toward the designated b2 point one thousand meters away.
When the thunder of French guns rolled across the field, the Prussian cavalry—still trotting forward at the gallop—could not help craning their necks, staring upward in tense alarm. At that moment, roughly twenty rounds traced graceful white arcs across the sky. In their eyes the dots grew, swelled, and in a blink were smashing down—toward their faces, over their heads, behind their backs.
“Damn it—how did the French haul these 9-pound and 12-pound heavy guns over here?” the cavalry officers cursed almost in unison, but the charge order had been given; no one could stop.
Through his monocular, General Hess also saw the French position: shells rising from the smoke. A pang of grief stabbed through him. He estimated that, before the twenty “solid shot” struck the ground, the densely packed light cavalry would perhaps lose ten brave riders.
“Full speed—charge faster!” the cavalry commander shouted, urging his men on. Only by ramming spurs into horseflesh and driving the mounts into a desperate sprint could they hope to escape the killing zone of heavy guns.
Very soon, the Prussian horsemen realized these incoming rounds were not spherical solid shot at all, but cylindrical, conical projectiles—each with a visible burning fuse. Plainly, the French were not relying on the iron body’s kinetic energy to strike or ricochet and kill, but instead…
“God damn it—shrapnel shell!” General Hess groaned inwardly.
As a senior officer, he knew the type: a special round already used successfully since the late sixteenth century, with a hollow casing packed with balls and a fuse. Once fired, it would burst above the enemy or in the middle of a crowd, scattering shot and sweeping a wide area with terrifying efficiency. The twenty shells racing toward him were the same in essence, only with a different external form.
What he could not imagine was that, to stop Prussian cavalry, the French would actually prepare such expensive and notoriously unstable ammunition, disregarding their own gunners’ safety. Every commander knew that though shrapnel was formidable, it carried a 5%–8% risk of bursting the gun, and thus many European artilleries had abandoned it.
Yet this Prussian general guessed part of the truth and missed the rest. First, André artillery was designed in a way that greatly reduced the chance of bursting. Even if a burst occurred, the thick gun barrel could endure it; the crew would not be harmed—the piece would merely become scrap for the foundry. Second, as the Prussians had noticed, the projectile’s internal shot had changed: instead of pure spheres, the design now used barrel-shaped pellets, which not only improved safety but also increased lethality.
With a series of soul-grabbing shrieks, the shrapnel shells skimmed over the heads of the first few ranks of cavalry, then began to land in the airspace over an area ten meters behind them. At that instant, the fuses burned out and ignited the powder charge sealed within. After dull, repeated blasts, countless small iron balls erupted from the barrel-shaped casing, retaining the casing’s deadly speed and murdering everything living within a radius of fifteen meters.
Of the twenty shells, half detonated directly above or within the dense attacking formation. In the span of a heartbeat, they carved out more than ten empty pockets inside the cavalry mass. Through Macdonald’s monocular, at least 100 Prussian riders in green uniforms fell from their saddles.
Most were struck in the head or back by fragments or the blasted iron balls; many died before they could even cry out, and both man and horse slammed heavily into the ground. The gravely wounded—riders and horses together—twitched in pools of blood, struggling in their final moments.
“So this gun is that powerful—why wasn’t it deployed earlier at Méloncourt?” Macdonald asked the Meldar lieutenant beside him, who was serving as artillery liaison.
Meldar dared not speak ill of his direct superior, the artillery commander General Senarmont, so he pushed the blame straight upward and said, “The deployment of André heavy guns is ordered directly by the highest Command Headquarters.”
Macdonald shot the clever little fool a murderous glare and decided that after the war he would kick Lieutenant Meldar back to Army of the Meuse headquarters. On the battlefield, no commander dared question decisions made by Commander André.
…
“Faster—keep accelerating—eight hundred meters left!” the cavalry commander yelled with all his strength, trying to stiffen the courage of the horsemen behind him. They had to break out of the heavy-gun coverage before French gunners could reload and fire a second salvo of shrapnel. The cavalry screamed and howled as they charged; perhaps only by shouting could they suppress the terror in their hearts and keep from losing their nerve mid-attack.
But the damned French had prepared yet another dirty trick. Within eight hundred meters of the front edge of the position, they had laid a thick belt of soft earth; after a night of rain, it became a morass of muck. The cavalry’s maximum sprint speed could not be sustained above roughly twenty-five kilometers per hour (less than four hundred meters per minute). If a horse accelerated too hard, it was likely to stumble and fall, producing a catastrophe of tumbling bodies and snapping limbs.
“Damn it—one minute more, and at roughly four hundred meters ahead there’ll be two more volleys of shrapnel or canister,” General Hess calculated silently, anticipating the second punishment. He had not even counted the small 4-pound and 6-pound guns, whose canister was lethal within one hundred meters.
Now the Prussian general began to regret it. He should not have been so impulsive and rash, leading his cavalry into trap after trap. But regret and reflection were useless. Once cavalry formed into a dense front for an attack, there was only one path: forward. Any hesitation, any slowing, risked being knocked down by comrades galloping past; even if one survived the fall, the countless hooves behind would trample the body into pulp.
Just as predicted, when the cavalry closed to four hundred meters, twenty shrapnel shells and eight 4-pound or 6-pound solid shot arrived on schedule, smashing down in front of them or bursting above their heads. Horses screamed; flesh flew; the field became a grotesque ruin. After two volleys of shrapnel and solid shot from more than twenty guns, the attacking Prussian light cavalry had already lost one-seventh of its strength—more than 200 riders.
One minute later, after enduring the final canister blast, the cavalry were within a little over one hundred meters of the French line. The fierce Prussians began to swing sabers and howl, determined to break through in one final surge.
“Damn the French!” Now, at last, the cavalry officers noticed that between them and the infantry breastworks there was not only a trench but also lines of wire entanglements circling the entire killing ground.
“The first two ranks—follow me and smash the wire; the rear ranks—keep driving into the breastworks!” The cavalry commander at the front turned his head and issued his final order to the riders on both sides and behind. Then the brave colonel raised his saber high and drove into the last sprint. Even knowing he was about to die in front of the wire, he still hoped to cut down one or two of those vile, treacherous Frenchmen.
At the first breastwork, about one hundred meters behind the wire, 2,000 French soldiers stood with smoothbore muskets leveled, aiming as one at the onrushing riders. Behind them were twice as many comrades loading. At the second breastwork stood Macdonald’s reserve—more than 7,000 cavalry and infantry—ready to cover a withdrawal to the second line if needed. But in the French commander’s eyes, the reserve would not be required.
Just before the enemy horses struck the wire, a chorus of whistles rang out along the French breastworks. The 2,000 defenders in the first line raised their flintlocks; at an officer’s shout—“Volley!”—they opened fire at the optimal distance of a little over fifty meters, slaughtering Prussian horsemen who could no longer advance.
Row after row of shots cracked. Prussian riders fell from saddles again and again. The lucky died instantly; like their colonel commander, they were spared all earthly suffering. The wounded who hit the ground still conscious often saw the last scene of their lives: in unspeakable terror, they watched the hooves of galloping horses smash down upon their chests and backs as comrades crashed over them…
In the final second, the front ranks of Prussian cavalry, with their commander, struck the wire with a brutal, collective impact. The horses’ eyes had been blindfolded, and they did not know an obstacle lay ahead. When hundreds of legs slammed into the wire fence, the enormous inertia of a charging horse actually snapped many strands. Under waves of horses throwing themselves forward, the wooden stakes anchoring the wire were torn out by the roots. The first belt of wire was finally ruined beneath the weight of the charge.
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But the cost was catastrophic. The first two ranks could not continue forward: their horses’ legs were tangled in hooked wire, and the riders were flung high into the air, then slammed down. Those whose limbs were not broken scrambled for any scrap of cover, trying to avoid being trampled by comrades behind.
The wounded horses, meanwhile, did not know how to avoid anything—nor could they, with blindfolds still on. After the accident, the only thing they could do was scream for their masters or roll frantically on the ground, futilely trying to tear free of the wire binding their bodies. The result was merely that they became obstacles, causing more riders—unable to dodge in time—to smash into them, producing yet more falls in a chain reaction. The cavalry could no longer gather momentum to break the second belt of wire, cross the trench, and strike the infantry breastworks.
Falling into the French trap, the Prussian riders wore faces of stark fear—yet also of stubborn refusal to submit. Even under the unceasing punishment of 2,000 smoothbore muskets, they still clung to belief and courage, forgetting the terror of death. They followed the same attack line traced by their front ranks as they fell, and stepped without complaint into the abyss.
When the last rank of Prussian cavalry, with a death-defying resolve, managed to pass through one belt of wire and—by sheer luck—evade the countless lead balls fired by thousands of muskets, and prepared to smash into the second belt, French gunners had already completed the eleventh reload of twenty-eight guns. In an instant, the muzzles vomited canister in a storm.
Minutes later, when French gunfire and musketry gradually ceased and the smoke drifted away on the wind, the final “achievement” of 1,500 Prussian cavalry had stopped at the foot of the second wire belt. They were only thirty meters from the French first breastwork—yet that short distance became an unbridgeable chasm. What remained on the field were horses riddled with holes, lying on the ground and crying out in agony, their terrifying screams echoing for a long time over the open plain before the French line.
“Poor bastards.” Macdonald lowered his monocular and ordered his messenger, “Have the engineers repair the damaged wire at once. Tell the Sixth Infantry Regiment to clear the battlefield. Also, inform the coalition commander opposite: in thirty minutes, the Prussians may send one hundred unarmed men and two wagons to our forward edge to collect the dead.”
Only now did Macdonald fully understand why Commander André had not deployed André artillery, wire, trench, and breastworks at Méloncourt in advance. Because this was not “defense” at all—it was a massive trap designed for one-sided slaughter. In less than fifteen minutes, 1,500 Prussian light cavalry had fallen on the charge line, while French losses were only a little over ten men, all hit by cavalry pistols.
If taking Verdun had merely severed the coalition’s manpower and supply line, stunning the intervention army, then the result at Clermont completed the “shut the door and beat the dog” formation. After this, Duc de Brunswick and his main force were trapped completely inside an ambush ring formed by superior French strength, with no way out.
…
Princess Louise leaned slightly and, with considerable elegance, poked her head out of the carriage door. On the Champagne highway to the eastern front, the road had been jammed by a mass of wagons and guns; within one hour, the German princess had leaned out eight times already, craning to see what lay ahead. Inside the spacious carriage, the elderly scholar Goethe reclined against the cushions in a doze, occasionally letting out a faint snore; the young Humboldt, meanwhile, worked tirelessly, head lowered over a writing board between his knees, revising and annotating the third draft of the Plan for Compulsory Education in pencil.
If earlier Humboldt had accepted André’s assignment only out of fear that his benefactress Princess Louise would be humiliated by the French, and had intended merely to do the minimum and muddle through, then once he received the Plan for Compulsory Education—said to have been drafted personally by General André—he was stunned. Because what the plan described was almost exactly what Humboldt himself had been thinking about day and night for a long time.
In fact, this Plan for Compulsory Education was precisely the same system that, more than ten years later, Humboldt would implement when he became director of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior’s cultural and education department and took charge of all educational and cultural affairs in Prussia: a system that benefited later generations and became a source of pride for all Prussians, and later Germans. It was also this system that gave children of every class, across all Europe and the world, the same opportunity to receive an education.
“Can it be implemented in our German homeland?” That had been Humboldt’s question two nights earlier when he sought counsel from the German scholar Goethe at Somme Manor. Humboldt had privately copied two additional versions of the plan, intending to slip them to Goethe and Princess Louise, hoping they could carry the documents back and deliver them to Prussia, Austria, or other German states for ministers to plan and execute.
Goethe shook his head without expression. From his black leather bag he drew out a copy of the very same Plan for Compulsory Education and explained, “This is only one of a thick stack of papers placed on my desk after I arrived in Reims. They can be copied freely and taken away. In fact, Commander André has no intention of keeping it secret at all. But if you ask me whether any state inside the Holy Roman Empire can implement compulsory education—I can tell you responsibly: not one, at least for ten years. If you broaden the scope to all Europe, then France—no, rather, France under André—will be your only choice.”
The first prerequisite for compulsory education was reliable funding. Prussia, whose treasury was so empty it could starve rats to death, was eliminated at once. Austria, Bavaria, and Saxony, by contrast, were indeed rich and well suited in material terms. Yet those realms were overwhelmingly Catholic; their rulers did not dare implement such a radical educational reform, fearing the domestic religious conservatives, as well as the determined opposition of the Roman Church and the Pope.
France, instead, was the very opposite: its conservatives and the Catholic Church had been suppressed for years by radical Jacobins and had long since lost the courage to march into the streets and oppose this and that. Especially under André, thanks to his careful management, wealthy Marne and Ardennes already possessed the money, the manpower, and the sites required to carry out universal compulsory education; all that was missing was a principal organizer to lead the work. Goethe’s meaning was clear: he urged Humboldt to treat André’s France as the testing ground, and only after success to promote the model across the German lands.
After Goethe had been confined in the Reims camp for one week, a gendarmerie review board announced that it had “clarified” that the German scholar had no connection whatsoever to the Hessian mercenaries’ massacre of civilians. The blockade was lifted, and Goethe was transferred to Somme Manor east of Chalons, where he joined Princess Louise and Humboldt.
This morning, a gendarmerie major arrived at the manor with a cavalry squadron and declared that he had orders from the Northern war commander to “invite” the three coalition envoys to proceed together to the eastern front, because André had already, two days earlier, ordered the Northern Command Headquarters to relocate to the Valmy area and merge with the main body of the Army of the Meuse.
Unexpectedly, after traveling only three kilometers, they ran into an enormous traffic jam. The Champagne highway was sealed tight. The War of National Defense had entered its final stage; every unit and every man wanted to hurry forward, to reach the battlefield before fighting began, lest the war end and they never see a single German.
Thus men fought for road space, pushing and cutting, refusing to yield, and the result was that no one moved. Before long, arrogant light cavalrymen swung sabers and lashed at the mules pulling the guns, trying to force the 12-pounders blocking the road’s center to move. It backfired: the mules screamed in irritation and simply stopped working.
A baggage officer—a plump captain—was enthusiastically calling out to new recruits from the Soissons camp, asking them to help right the wheels of several wagons that had slipped into a ditch. If the soldiers would also help drive a herd of cattle (for meat) to the forward camp nine kilometers ahead, the captain promised each man one tin of canned meat (2 pounds) as payment.
“Two tins of beef!” A soldier stepped out quickly and bargained on behalf of his comrades.
The fat quartermaster captain waved a helpless hand. “Get to work. I’ll issue at most one hundred tins!”
So fifty recruits gathered with laughter and chatter and, under the quartermaster’s direction, helped the baggage train. The soldiers who failed to get a job grew unhappy; some drifted toward the coalition embassy carriage, thinking to disturb it and see if they could scavenge something. When Princess Louise leaned out again, she happened to meet the gaze of more than ten approaching soldiers.
“Tsk, tsk—what a pretty little woman. Eyes like green jewels. What’s she doing at the front?” One soldier licked his lips in exaggerated fashion and turned to ask his companions.
“What’s she doing? Same as any other woman—brought to be used by the officers,” a recruit said with a curl of his lip, as if it were obvious.
A reserve corporal also crowded in and added, “Tsk, what a pity. She’s too slender—this kind of thin build doesn’t suit my taste. My old man said women who follow the army should be rich like cream: big hips, fat ass, can bear more children, and the children will be easier to raise…”
“Gentlemen—over here!” The quartermaster captain jogged up and warned the recruits to roll back to their work. He had seen that the carriage was surrounded by gendarmes, and that the escort commander was a gendarmerie major. The quartermaster had no desire to be marked down and then have a flock of accountants descend on the baggage camp to audit every line and torment him for three days and three nights.
So he called out to the idle recruits, “I’ve got thirty tins of pork now. I can take fifteen more men to help—shut up, all of you. Only pork. Anyone who won’t work can get lost. The gendarmes will teach you troublemakers a lesson.”
On the other side, Princess Louise, harassed by the crude talk of thuggish soldiers, blushed scarlet and no longer dared to lean out; she sat properly inside the carriage. Fortunately, the road soon cleared, and the once-calm carriage began to sway forward again. Humboldt, however, sighed and reluctantly removed his writing board and pencil from his knees—because Goethe, now awake, had bluntly pointed out that Humboldt had misspelled several French words yet again.
“Strange—why are there so many French soldiers on the road?” Princess Louise’s casual remark made both Goethe and Humboldt jump inwardly, not knowing how to answer.
In truth, the two scholars had already noticed: French troop numbers were huge, reinforcements from the rear seemed endless, and even the new recruits were strictly trained; most officers were seasoned. Especially striking was French artillery. On this single road, they had already seen twenty heavy guns moving east. In the Reims camp, Goethe had heard an artillery officer mention that the front would concentrate 300 guns in total, half of them heavy pieces.
As for the coalition, Humboldt told Goethe frankly that Duc de Brunswick had brought at most fifty guns, with fewer than twenty 9-pound and 12-pound heavy pieces. In fact, even if one counted small French guns captured in battle, the coalition had only forty-five guns in total, including thirteen heavy pieces.
As for manpower, neither Goethe nor Humboldt spoke a word. They already knew that André had concealed the true strength of the French army, while secretly feeding Duc de Brunswick a false figure of fewer than 50,000 French troops. In reality, French forces committed to the campaign were likely between 120,000 and 150,000.
In manpower, the French were three times the Prusso-Austrian Coalition; in artillery, the ratio was roughly 6:1. As for morale and quality, the French were nothing like the feeble rabble described by émigré commanders. Even the so-called replacement recruits largely kept discipline, obeyed officers, and, above all, obeyed gendarmes.
The front-line reports had already proved it. With the escorting gendarmerie major’s tacit permission, a panicked Goethe learned from the quartermaster captain that Verdun and its forts—including Vaux and Douaumont—had been recovered by the French, and that the coalition main force, 43,000 men (having already lost 2,000 in the pass fighting down to Clermont), was now falling into a tightening French encirclement.
…
“Fourteen cavalry squadrons, 1,500 horsemen—wiped out after a single charge? Damn it, that’s impossible. Even if he truly is the God-Favoured, he cannot have designed every detail on a battlefield so perfectly!”
By this point it was the fourth time Duc de Brunswick had demanded an answer from the defeated General Hess. The old Prussian marshal’s tone had moved from disbelief, to heartbreak, to shameful rage, and now to a kind of muttering self-address.
To call it “wiped out” was somewhat exaggerated. After the battle, more than one hundred riders still made it back to the coalition camp; nearly half survived only because their horses had been wounded and forced them to leave the field early. As for the rest, the French commander declared that, out of humanitarian considerations, French medics bandaged the wounded cavalrymen and then returned them to the Prussians.
Afterward, unwilling to accept defeat, General Hess prepared to organize an infantry phalanx attack. He ordered artillery officers to scrape together more than ten guns and attempted to counter-battery the French, hoping to suppress French long-range fire and create a chance for infantry to advance. Yet the duel had barely begun when it turned into one-sided punishment: French 12-pound heavy guns could deliver accurate fire (by the standards of the day) at 1,800 meters. After three rounds of exchange, the French battery seemed untouched, while the coalition’s gunners and guns had lost the majority of their strength.
With no choice, General Hess ordered the assault by two infantry regiments abandoned. From the faces of coalition soldiers—each still pale with terror—he could already see the outcome: a forced attack would only hand the French free “results” and corpses, and might even trigger a mutiny from below. Another fear was that the coalition field hospitals, chronically short of doctors and medicine, could no longer accept or treat more wounded.
By a directive signed recently by the supreme war commander: beginning with the fighting at Clermont, French commanders at all levels would, in principle, no longer take charge of wounded coalition soldiers. Within two hours after battle ended, they were to be returned to the coalition. Healthy prisoners of war, however, were not included, for fear they would rearm and fight again.
The French intent was obvious: to force the trapped coalition of more than 40,000 to surrender unconditionally. For four days now, the coalition had been unable to receive supplies from the rear. Food was still manageable: starting tonight, officers would allow soldiers to draw on their personal rations sufficient for five days. Ammunition reserves could sustain at least two more high-intensity actions. Only medicine was desperately scarce. In the tents every day, hundreds—indeed thousands—of sick and wounded wailed as they approached death, yet most received no treatment at all; even a cup of hot water was a luxury.
Before Macdonald closed the coalition’s retreat at Clermont, several kilometers north of the Champagne highway leading to Reims or Chalons, 25,000 French troops and forty-two guns had already been waiting in full readiness. From Le Chêne on the Argonne forest’s edge westward through Moiremont, Maffrécourt, and Hancourt, they had constructed defensive works across a long stretch of 16.9 kilometers.
The commander holding this northern defense was General Brune, who had been transferred back from the Army of the North to the Army of the Meuse two weeks earlier and promoted in wartime. Under Commander Moncey’s disposition, the northern defensive system relied mainly on forests, lakes, marshes, and rivers; key areas were additionally reinforced with gun positions, trenches, wire, and wide minefields.
Six kilometers south of the Champagne highway, the French commander responsible for the eastern-to-western line running from Chatrice–élis-Doucourt–Vallemont to Gizaucourt—an 11.5-kilometer defensive front—was still the old General Custine, with 20,000 reinforcements from the former Army of the Rhine. Strategically, staff judged that the coalition was unlikely to break out through the south; it would greatly lengthen the route home, and with the French scorched-earth policy thoroughly implemented, the coalition could not obtain food on the march and would likely become forest savages within two or three days. Even so, General Senarmont still assigned twenty-five guns to the southern line, including eight 12-pound André heavy pieces.
As for the western front from Hancourt–Valmy–Gizaucourt, a face roughly nine kilometers wide, Commander Moncey personally deployed the Army of the Meuse main body—50,000 troops—on the Valmy and Yvron heights (Greater Valmy Hill) between the Bionne River and the Champagne highway, to receive Duc de Brunswick’s frontal assault. Several kilometers south of the highway lay the lowland maze of the Auve and other rivers, lakes, forests, and marshes; not only horses, baggage wagons, and gun carriages, but even light infantry moving without packs could not traverse that trap-filled terrain.
In overall terms, the 40,000 French who had originally been strategic reserves were, once the fighting at Clermont began, already fed into the northern and frontal battlefields. After Clermont’s victory, more than 110,000 French formed a tightening encirclement, compressing Duc de Brunswick’s 43,000 men into an area of 100 square kilometers.
To ensure absolute certainty, the Northern Command Headquarters issued a third mobilization order: the 20,000 recruits at the Soissons camp who had not yet graduated, together with reserve NCOs training at Bacourt, plus cadets and instructors from the Reims infantry, cavalry, and artillery schools, were to be fully organized. These 23,000 men would serve as the grand reserve and assemble at the main Army of the Meuse base around Valmy before September 26.
As for the notion of arming 30,000 industrial workers at the joint industrial complex near Chalons-en-Champagne, André ultimately abandoned it—after General Manager Say sent a formal protest to the Northern Command Headquarters. A skilled worker was not easy to train, and by Say’s statistics, the value created by one skilled worker could arm five to eight soldiers.
