search of defensible positions and each other, while periodically losing skirmishes to the Prussians.
About the time of our enforced departure Napoleon III had left Paris for Chalons, while appointing Bazaine to the command of his Army of the Rhine. A few days later Bazaine, fearing encirclement by the fast-moving Prussians, had withdrawn to the west across the River Moselle. But near Metz he encountered two German corps and had finished up encircled after all; as we sat in our peaceful farmhouse reading about it, Bazaine’s force was still trapped in the town of Metz, invested by no fewer than two hundred thousand Prussian troops.
So much for one half of the glorious French Army. Of the rest, MacMahon’s instinct had been to stay close to Paris and so offer protection to the capital, but popular pressure, brought to bear by Parisians outraged by the violation of their precious
The Germans around Metz, commanded by the wily Moltke, had divided their forces. Bazaine was left trapped while the rest of the Prussians set off to meet the advancing MacMahon. MacMahon’s forces, exhausted by their difficult march, had been encircled by the Prussians at Sedan. MacMahon himself was wounded and French command lines were paralyzed.
The Army was annihilated. The French allowed 100,000 men and no fewer than 400 guns to fall into Prussian hands.
The French Second Empire collapsed in chaos. Napoleon III himself surrendered to the Prussians, and a Government of National Defense under the Governor of Paris, General Trochu, had emerged in the capital. And meanwhile two Prussian armies had advanced on Paris itself.
Even as we had landed in our Kent field, Paris, sixty years earlier Bonaparte’s capital of Europe, lay under a Prussian siege. The only hope appeared to lie with Bazaine, but he remained entrapped in Metz, and the rumors in London were that his supplies were running low. The Prussians, meanwhile, were predictably cock-a-hoop, and there was much wild speculation about plans for Kaiser William to ride in procession through the streets of conquered Paris.
I laid down the last newspaper with hands that trembled. “Dear God, Traveller. What an astonishing few weeks we have missed! Surely this humiliation of France will burn in the mind of every Frenchman for generations to come. They were already an excitable bunch—look at Bourne for an example. Surely nothing but a state of war can exist between the French and their German cousins for all time.”
“Perhaps.” Traveller lay back in his bath chair, his thin hands wrapped together over the robe which covered his belly, and he stared unseeing through the dusty windows of the farmhouse. With the sunlight catching the wisps of white hair which hovered about his skull, he looked as old and frail as I remembered him at that terrible moment when it seemed that even the Moon would not save our lives. “But it is not ‘all time’ that concerns me, Ned; it is the here and now.”
“What troubles you, sir?”
With a trace of his old irritation he snapped, “Think about it, boy; you’re supposed to be a diplomat. The Prussians have felled France. Surely even the wily old fox Bismarck cannot have foreseen such astonishing gains —and these in addition to his primary objective.”
“Which is?”
“Is it not obvious?” He studied me wearily. “Why, the unification of Germany, of course. What better way to bully and cajole the German princelings into a political union than to set up a common foe?—and how much better if that foe is the unlovely France of Robespierre and Bonaparte. I predict that we will see a declaration of a new Germany before this year is out. But of course it will amount to little more than a greater Prussian Empire, for if those petty Bavarian princes think that Bismarck, in his pomp and triumph, will allow them much say in the running of this new entity, they will be sorely disappointed.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “So the Balance of Power is shattered; that Balance which has survived since the Congress of Vienna—”
“A Balance which Britain has fought to maintain ever since.” He drummed his fingers on the table top. “Let us be frank, Ned. The British government could scarcely give two hoots if Prussian guns lay Paris waste; for the French, in British minds, are bedevilled by the twin monsters of revolution and military expansionism. And these absurd franc-tireur attacks on British economic targets, like the dear old
“But the development of a new Germany will be greeted with dread in Whitehall. For it has long been an objective of British foreign policy that there should be no dominant power in central Europe.”
I frowned, and was struck by the cynicism of this view of British goals—for surely the maintenance of a peaceful settlement was to be lauded. “Tell me what you’re afraid of, sir,” I said directly.
His bony fingers drummed more loudly. “Ned, up to now the British have stayed out of this damn war of Bismarck’s; and quite right too. But how long before British interests are so endangered by the emergence of Germany that they feel forced to intervene?”
I thought that over. “But the British Army, while the finest in the world, is not well-equipped for large engagements in central Europe. Nor has it ever been. And besides, many of our troops and officers are scattered around the world in the service of His Majesty in the colonies. Surely Mr. Gladstone would not commit us to a foreign adventure with no chance of success.”
“Gladstone. Old Glad Eyes.” He laughed without humor. “Gladstone, I have always felt, is a pompous oaf, and not a patch on Disraeli for wit or intelligence. Obviously Disraeli’s ‘flood-gate’ suffrage reform of 1867 would have been a disaster for the country… Who knows what damage might have been done? Certainly industry would have been denied its rightful say in affairs—perhaps we would still have the nonsensical situation of London as capital! What a ludicrous thought. So perhaps it’s a good thing that Dizzy retired, bruised, from politics, to concentrate on his bizarre literary adventures… but still, one misses the fellow’s dash.
“Perhaps, though, it is a blessing that we have a Glad Eyes inflicted on us in this hour; for, as you say, he and his gang of milksop Whigs would surely be loth to commit us to an absurd adventure… And if the rumors are true he may be more interested in ventures to Soho than Sedan.”
I guffawed at that disrespectful sally.
Traveller continued, “So perhaps Gladstone would not launch us into war in Europe. But… he has other options.”
“Tell me what you mean, Sir Josiah.”
He leaned forward now, folding his arms on the table. “Ned, you will recall your brother’s experiences in the Crimea.”
For a moment these dark words, uttered sepulchrally in the midst of that bright farmhouse morning, made no sense to me; and then, in a sudden, shocking moment, I understood. “Dear Lord, Traveller.”
He was, of course, suggesting that anti-ice weapons might be deployed once more by the British Army; and this time, not in some distant, oddly-named peninsula of southern Russia—but in the heart of Europe herself.
I searched his face for some sign that I was mistaken in my interpretation; but all I saw in those long, somber features was a terrible fear, coupled with immense anger. He said, “Anti-ice weapons could reduce the Prussian Army in minutes. And Gladstone knows this. Bismarck has surely gambled on the unwillingness of the British to become entangled in European disputes—but the pressure on Gladstone to use this astounding advantage must be growing by the day.”
I watched the fear and anger wrestle in Traveller’s eyes, and imagined this brusque but fundamentally gentle man once more forced to labor over weapons of war. On impulse I grabbed at his sleeve. “Traveler, you have brought us to the Moon and back. You have immense strength; I have every confidence that you will not allow your genius to be employed in any such fashion.”
But his fear lingered; and Traveller pawed at the newspapers once more, as if seeking some glimmer of hope in their fading words.
Our idyll was not to last more than a few minutes beyond the end of that conversation. The first fist to hammer at the Lubbocks’ door was that of the Mayor of the nearest town—whose name we had not even learned yet—and, as I studied this gentleman’s portly, mud-spattered frame and empty smile, I realized, with a sink of the heart which startled me, that I was indeed home.
