The Radiant Republic

Potsdam, Sanssouci.

It was a “Versailles” that belonged to the Prussians. The entire palace stood upon layered hills, its high terraced steps forming a massive plinth. The scale was immense and the effect magnificent. The main structure was a pale reddish tone, colonnaded and Byzantine in style—elegant and stately, grand and imposing.

At this moment, Talleyrand—splendidly dressed—stood with perfect poise beside a gilded carriage. He waited in silence for a messenger to report the court’s final decision from within Sanssouci. As he waited, he gazed across an ornate iron fence at the great building: a central dome like a half sphere, with long ridged wings stretching to either side.

After two hours of waiting, the envoy finally climbed into the carriage without a word. Inside, his cane struck the wooden paneling with sharp, angry thuds as he loudly signalled the driver to turn the horses at once. King Wilhelm II of Prussia and his chief minister, Comte de Bischoffwerder, had formally refused to open a new round of negotiations with André’s peace envoy. They had chosen to carry the war through to the end.

“Comte—west, back to Frankfurt?” the driver asked casually.

“No. East. Stay in Berlin.” The diplomat’s face was iron-grey. As he yanked the blue velvet curtain shut with a violent motion, he swore in secret that the Prussian monarch who had slighted and neglected him would pay a heavy price.

Two weeks earlier, Talleyrand had been ordered to leave the comfortable ease of the Free City of Frankfurt and travel to the busy Prussian capital. This time, he would act as Marshal André’s envoy for peace talks, remove certain points of contention between the two states, and revise the Secret Treaty of Valmy into a Berlin Treaty, in order to avert war between them.

In truth, Talleyrand did not like the mission at all. It was a diplomatic effort doomed to fail. He had long understood that neither the Prussian monarch nor Marshal André, to whom he had given his service, intended to live at peace with the other. The only difference lay in timing: stirred by the provocation of the Russian empress, Wilhelm II was eager to fight at once and erase the humiliation of Valmy; on the other side, André preferred to delay the second Franco-Prussian war until two years later.

On the day he arrived in Berlin, Comte de Bischoffwerder claimed to be unwell and sent only a low-ranking assistant to receive Talleyrand after his long journey. Not until the fifth day did André’s envoy, through the connections of a French émigré noblewoman, Baronne de Laval—a descendant of a French Marshal from the Hundred Years’ War—gain entry to the Berlin palace in the city and obtain a meeting with Bischoffwerder himself.

The meeting was brief and cold. The arrogant Prussian chief minister, citing the lack of formal authorisation from King Wilhelm II, refused to discuss the continuation of the Secret Treaty of Valmy.

Driven by a sense of duty, Talleyrand did not abandon his effort. He turned instead to the tactic he used best: taking the long way round. From the Versailles treasures André had sent, the diplomat selected a pearl necklace once worn by Queen Marie Antoinette and used it to buy the favour of Wilhelm II’s secret mistress, a beautiful and provocative French actress.

Even that “success” merely allowed Talleyrand, in an unofficial capacity, to see Wilhelm II in a private box at the Berlin opera. Owing to the mistress’s pleading, Comte de Talleyrand was invited to Sanssouci several days later, where he would, as an envoy, receive a formal audience with the Prussian king and Minister Bischoffwerder.

When the impeccably dressed Talleyrand arrived as agreed, he found the gates shut in his face. The Prussians broke their word and refused any form of peace talks with Andréan France. Perhaps because of the French actress, Wilhelm II did not order André’s envoy expelled and tacitly allowed Talleyrand to remain in Berlin as he pleased—even though the king had no intention of stopping the second war with Andréan France.

Before long, André received a secret letter from Talleyrand in Berlin. The diplomat wrote that not all Prussians supported King Wilhelm II in continuing the war against France. In fact, among the most ardent voices for peace were the king’s own brother, Prince Heinrich of Prussia; the Minister of the Interior, Alvensleben; the Minister of Justice, Struensee; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lucchesini; and roughly half the nobility. Moreover, the defeat in the war of 1792 had left the treasury increasingly drained. To raise the supplies and pay for a second war against France, Sanssouci demanded that the head of the cabinet impose heavy war taxes upon the public, which in turn stirred strong anti-war sentiment among ordinary people.

Talleyrand also told André that France had not lost ground diplomatically. In a certain sense, Andréan France, as the injured party, drew more sympathetic eyes, because Berlin had unilaterally and dishonourably torn up the Secret Treaty of Valmy. Apart from the Russian empress, who openly supported a second Franco-Prussian war, most European monarchs remained cautiously neutral, watching in silence as a conflict began between “two nouveau riches”—one old, one new.

…

From Aachen and Düsseldorf to Cologne, Bonn, and Koblenz, wherever Marshal André lodged, the stream of visitors around him never ceased. Besides the officers coming and going, there were diplomats from Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and the German states. Some were well-known German scholars—Goethe, Schiller, and Alexandre von Humboldt among them—along with artists and musicians.

Command Headquarters was crowded with arrivals and departures, almost like a typical European court. In the midst of it, André would deliberately, or half deliberately, display a sovereign manner, speaking to everyone in an exalted tone. The flatterers listened with studious smiles, ready at every moment to applaud and praise.

Each evening, three great tents were set up in the garden of Command Headquarters. Beneath each stood a long table, and more than one hundred place settings were laid. Yet perhaps because of fiscal strain, the food and drink were judged by the guests to be “Spartan in their simplicity”: boiled white meat in broth, a few cold dishes, German bread, and fruit salad. There was only one drink—cheap pale German beer. There was not a single piece of silver, not a single glazed ceramic, and no English bone china.

Even so, the diplomats of every country refused to give up the chance to draw close to the “great conqueror of Belgium and western Germany”. In most cases, the clever and slippery nobles and envoys would eat and drink their fill in fine taverns beforehand. Then, by the clock, they would arrive at the temporary quarters of Command Headquarters for the banquet.

Once the meal began, they would ceremonially take a crust of bread, chew it slowly for more than ten minutes, and leave it at that. As for the beer and the soup, the nobles would not touch them under any circumstances.

“Damn it—those nobles, one after another, you can’t drive them off or beat them away. They’re a headache.”

André raised his beer, took a cautious sip, and found it wretched all the same. In fact, the banquet’s food and drink had been arranged by André himself. He had seen a feast list brought by Kellermann the younger, the adjutant, and the expenses were casually set at five thousand francs. It pained him. He immediately ordered that an ordinary banquet must not cost more than two hundred francs, until he made other arrangements.

General Berthier, the Chief of the General Staff, looked uneasy. He kept taking out his watch and checking the time, his brow tightening again and again.

“Stop worrying,” André turned his head slightly and murmured to him. “Since three days ago, you and I have had no way to control what is happening hundreds of kilometres away.”

“I think I should have stayed with the Army Group,” Berthier muttered, as if complaining.

André shot him a look and reproached him. “You are the Chief of the General Staff—the second man of Command Headquarters. You must remain at my side from beginning to end. Otherwise, how am I supposed to put on this performance?”

Berthier was clearly moved. His agitation eased at once, because he had heard the dictator confirm that he was “the second man of Command Headquarters”. Even now, at the side of General Moncey, commander of the Elbe Army Group, the acting Chief of the General Staff on the Prussia expedition was merely an obscure Hanoverian officer who had surrendered—Colonel Scharnhorst.

Two weeks earlier, at the Northern Command Headquarters meeting in Koblenz, General Senarmont, the Inspector-General of Artillery, had posed a sharp question to General Berthier, who was drafting the operational plan: how would the large number of guns cross mountains, ford multiple fast rivers, follow the enduring and tireless French infantry, and be transported—without error—within ten days from Mainz to Leipzig, five hundred kilometres away?

Under the standard used by Command Headquarters and the artillery inspectorate, every 1,000 men of fighting troops were to be allocated 3 to 4 guns—a concept Napoleon had proposed, though in practice various factors meant the French rarely followed it. Thus, the Elbe Army Group’s one hundred thousand men would carry as many as three hundred and fifty guns, along with their associated equipment—carriages, limbers, and the like—and at least thirty basic loads of ammunition, including solid shot, canister, and shell.

It was impossible for the artillery to march in step with the infantry. The route from Mainz to Leipzig was cut by many rivers and required crossing the steep Thuringian Forest. Besides, the roads of southern Germany were poor; they were nothing like the paved roads of the département of Marne, where one could easily march 10 kilometres in an hour. Well-trained infantry could maintain forced marches of roughly 50 kilometres a day for ten days; artillery could manage at most 15 to 20 kilometres, and once the columns met slick ground in mountainous country, even 10 kilometres in a day might become a luxury.

General Berthier, drawing on past experience, proposed multiple solutions—using the Central German canal, disguising the guns as merchant cargo, and so on—but the officers rejected each one. The risk was unacceptable. André’s artillery was the key to French victory. If Hanover or Brunswick intercepted it, the disaster would be immense.

Just as the Chief of the General Staff began to run out of words, Colonel Scharnhorst—newly promoted by André as director of operations in the General Staff—rose of his own accord to speak. He proposed an entirely new method: sealed oak crates and combined transport by waterway.

In concrete terms, it meant planning in advance and packing the guns’ barrels, carriages, mounts, and thirty basic loads of ammunition into fully enclosed oak crates, sorted by category. More than a thousand such crates would be loaded at the port of Mainz onto two merchant vessels equipped with their own unloading gear. The ships would proceed along the Rhine and then into the Main, continuing until they landed at Bamberg. From there, heavy pack horses would transport the crates around the Thuringian Forest, twenty kilometres away, and into the Werra. Afterward, using the many simple canals of southern Germany, the cargo would pass continuously through the Saale and the Gera and finally reach Leipzig near the Mulde and the Elbe.

Although the total journey would add one hundred kilometres, it avoided the steep Thuringian Forest and used canals, reducing the overall time to eight or nine days. In terms of security, the route ran along sparsely populated borders of the southern German principalities—weak states whose relations with France were not particularly hostile. A single infantry regiment escort would suffice to protect three hundred and fifty guns. As for feasibility, Scharnhorst—once an instructor—had treated it as a strategic problem at a Hanoverian military academy. Three years earlier, he had even gone personally through the southern German states to conduct field surveys and validate the method. Of course, the topic then had been how to help Prussian or Austrian forces move artillery rapidly through southwestern Germany to the outskirts of Strasbourg…

Without question, the combined-waterway plan proposed by the director of operations, Scharnhorst, won the approval of the officers led by Moncey, Hoche, and Senarmont, and was submitted as the final plan to Marshal André. Scharnhorst’s exact control of every transfer time point along the route drew universal admiration. The German plan even treated time as something to be fought for by the minute—requiring laborious analysis and precise calculation on the ground.

When André reviewed the marching and operational plan, he first thought, with a jolt, that another André had brought container transport—something that would not flourish until the twentieth century—forward into 1793. Yet as he learned more, he realised that Dutch “wagoners of the sea” had already used such river-and-sea transport patterns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In fact, even the ancient Egyptians, thousands of years ago, had used the most primitive form of container transport to move goods from the Mediterranean through an old canal across the Sinai to the Red Sea and even to the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

In the draft plan, Colonel Scharnhorst had grasped perfectly Marshal André’s ultimate objective: concentrate and annihilate Prussia’s main force, and take Berlin. He also combined frontline tactical deception with the strategic deception of Command Headquarters in a way that astonished André and made him praise the plan repeatedly.

In truth, General Berthier—Scharnhorst’s direct superior—also admired his subordinate’s talent, yet the Chief of the General Staff felt the first stirrings of jealousy, especially after André formally appointed Scharnhorst, in his capacity as director of operations, as acting Chief of the General Staff of the Elbe Army Group.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Unfortunately, General Berthier was not skilled at social manoeuvre, and his clumsy way of speaking only made matters worse. Not only did he fail to persuade the Commander-in-Chief to change Scharnhorst’s appointment, he instead prompted André—under the pretext of needing detailed reports from the front—to pull General Berthier out of the Elbe Army Group headquarters and return him to the field headquarters at Koblenz.

To support the Elbe Army Group’s secret march, Command Headquarters, led by André, continued to make a great public show in Koblenz, appearing frequently in public and hosting various banquets and receptions.

After listening carefully to General Chassé, the commander of the gendarmerie, on the security situation in Belgium over the past three months, André finally signed the January Edict and planned to implement it across all Belgian provinces simultaneously beginning in the second half of February. At the same time, the gendarmerie department would transfer supervisory authority to the administrative palace’s police office, and the transfer would be completed by mid-March.

The January Edict stipulated the following.

First, it would abolish all personal dependency ties of peasants in Belgium, including serfs and semi-serfs, and end estate restrictions. Peasants could freely purchase land, leave the soil, choose occupations, and marry.

Second, it granted the cities autonomy and established city senates and City Hall, giving cities full authority over fiscal administration. However, provincial-level administrative, judicial, and tax officials would be appointed directly by Northern Command Headquarters. Officials at all levels in Belgium were obliged to submit to questioning and supervision by the administrative palace’s inspectorate, also known as the police office.

Third, all armed forces—including city police, rural militias, and the National Guard—would be incorporated into Northern Command Headquarters’ reserve order of battle and placed under gendarmerie administration.

During his visits to Aachen and Cologne, with the second Franco-Prussian war imminent, André weighed the risks. To avoid provoking violent backlash from German landholding nobles and Catholic forces by excessive interference, he decided to suspend the January Edict in the German territories west of the Rhine until the war ended.

However, the policy of exchanging military service for land had never stopped. Under André’s orders, it was intensified. Each time General Augereau came to Command Headquarters, he complained loudly in André’s presence: the defensive area west of the Rhine was vast and complex, and the western German corps, with an establishment of twenty thousand, was far too small to meet the needs of the coming war.

In the end, after consulting the General Staff and the gendarmerie department, André merely expanded the western German corps to twenty-five thousand and placed the defences south of Mainz under the Army of the Rhine (Third Army), commanded by General Custine. He could not favour one side over another, so he also allowed General Brune’s Army of the Belgium to increase its strength by five thousand.

Of course, the Rhine defences were strengthened, but Belgium was weakened, especially considering the future threat from Britain. For that reason, Command Headquarters moved the remaining eight thousand troops of the former Army of the Moselle, left on the Rhine, to the Dunkirk, Lille, and Tournai region on the border of France and Belgium. On that basis it formed a Channel Corps composed of French, Irish, Belgian, and Dutch troops, with an initial target strength of thirty thousand.

In overall structure, Northern Command Headquarters would command three main Army Groups and three garrison corps. The main forces were Hoche’s First Army (formerly the Army of the North), Moncey’s Second Army (formerly the Army of the Meuse), and Custine’s Third Army (formerly the Army of the Rhine). The reserve forces were Brune’s Army of the Belgium, Augereau’s western German corps, and Chassé’s Channel Corps. As for the twenty thousand main force of Custine’s Army of the Moselle, it had been entirely incorporated into Hoche’s First Army and Moncey’s Second Army during the southward concentration.

Several days earlier, General Custine had gone to Strasbourg and taken command of the Third Army from General Kellermann. Kellermann would soon come to the temporary quarters of Command Headquarters and take over General Chassé’s gendarmerie command. Chassé himself had requested two months earlier that he be allowed to command the Channel Corps, so that he could take part in the future campaign to “liberate” the Netherlands. The Channel Corps would become Northern Command Headquarters’ Fourth Army.

As for the choice of gendarmerie commander, André considered it for a long time and ultimately chose General Kellermann as an efficient administrator rather than a brilliant field commander. Moreover, Kellermann’s mother country was Saxony, and André would soon become the Elector of Saxony’s son-in-law; that connection gave the two men a natural closeness. When André asked his opinion, the German descendant agreed without hesitation. The only consequence was that Major Kellermann the younger could no longer serve as André’s adjutant and was reassigned down to the field units of the Elbe Army Group.

Within Northern Command Headquarters’ directly administered departments, the main divisions were as follows: the General Staff under General Berthier; the General Gendarmerie Department under General Kellermann, responsible for discipline, military intelligence, and training supervision; the general supply and medical logistics department under General Petiet; the artillery inspectorate under General Senarmont, equivalent to an overall armaments bureau and responsible for the use of new weapons; and a Guards composite division under the Commander-in-Chief, not yet at full establishment.

After this reorganisation, Northern Command Headquarters’ total strength still remained around two hundred thousand, with three main Army Groups and three garrison corps as its combat forces. If needed, Northern Command Headquarters could mobilise another two hundred thousand from the National Guard of the fifteen northern provinces, as well as worker and rural reserve units.

Only a few weeks earlier, André had planned to reduce his total strength to one hundred and fifty thousand to ease fiscal pressure. Prussia’s sudden disruption forced him to abandon the reduction plan. He even had to commission the joint commercial bank to raise a military loan of as much as forty million francs on the major bond markets of Europe.

Although Perrier shouted himself hoarse selling the war bond and set the annual interest rate at 6 percent, sales were still disappointing. After three weeks, only twelve million francs had been sold, much of it to Belgians. In Germany, almost no one believed the French could hold the territories west of the Rhine; the bonds were nearly ignored. André was so furious that he almost allowed the gendarmerie to loot wealthy German merchants in the territory.

When André had no choice left, a securities broker from Frankfurt came to the president of the joint bank, Perrier, and said he had been entrusted by someone to underwrite the remaining twenty-eight million francs of French war debt, paying in gold. Afterward, the Military Intelligence Office conducted a quiet investigation and learned only that the buyer was a mysterious Swedish magnate. André had expected the anonymous purchaser to demand political or economic conditions. Yet the broker relayed only a single sentence from his principal:

“Do not forget that Sweden provided this help.”

Nothing more.

This, combined with earlier reports from the Military Intelligence Office, led André to form certain suspicions about the gift.

…

Back at the “Spartan” banquet of Command Headquarters, the news that the enormous military expenditure had been underwritten by a mysterious party put André in an excellent mood. He announced that all the pale German beer at the banquet would be replaced with Champagne from Reims. This friendly gesture immediately drew a collective cheer from the assembled diplomats. In their minds, the French dictator—famous for stinginess—had finally been generous for once, and they would no longer have to drink that damned German cat’s urine.

Before even half a bottle of Champagne had been emptied, André’s acting adjutant, Lieutenant Meldar, hurried over in quick steps. After whispering a few words at the Commander-in-Chief’s ear, André rose at once and signalled the military band to stop, because King Wilhelm II’s envoy, Baron de Stein—the former Prussian ambassador to Mainz—had arrived at the field headquarters of Command Headquarters.

The lean Baron de Stein walked straight up to André. He snapped his heels together, took from his assistant a document bearing on its cover the black-headed eagle, bowed slightly, and presented it with both hands to the French dictator. Then, neither servile nor insolent, he said:

“Marshal, this is the final reply of His Majesty King Frederick Wilhelm II, the great sovereign of the Kingdom of Prussia, to France.”

André, who knew perfectly well what it was, did not take the document that was not truly a letter of credence. He feigned delight and replied, “Baron, please read it aloud. I am eagerly awaiting the goodwill of the King of Prussia. After all, the people on both banks of the Rhine hope that peace will endure forever.”

Baron de Stein paused. He glanced around at the diplomats gathered on all sides, opened the Prussian declaration, and read the ultimatum himself.

“…If the last soldier of the French army has not, by February fifteenth, withdrawn completely from all German Imperial territories west of the Rhine, then the brave and fearless Prussian army swears to fight to the death in defence of the interests of the Holy Roman Empire.”

At the last line, André froze. After a long moment, rage turned into laughter. He kicked out and overturned the long table before him, sending food and drink crashing onto the grass. Then André drew his sword and drove it into the ground. He glared at the Prussian envoy and roared like a beast:

“Damn the Prussians! Very well—since that shameless Wilhelm II longs to fight France again, I will give him a war that is both expected and unexpected. There is no need to wait until February fifteenth. From now on—from the moment you left Sanssouci—Prussia and France are at war again. I will sit on the west bank of the Rhine and wait for the Prussian army to come and die; and then I will march on Berlin, so that your faithless petty monarch will weep and kneel before me, begging for André’s mercy!”

Baron de Stein, feeling insulted, handed the document to the Marshal’s adjutant. He bowed again and hurried away at once, plainly afraid that the enraged French Marshal would detain him and his party. André did, in fact, consider doing so. Yet under so many eyes he chose to let the envoy go. This Baron de Stein would later become Prussia’s chief minister—a man hailed as the father of German reform, who would rescue Prussia from the brink of ruin.

As the diplomats began to take their leave, Metternich, serving as Austria’s commercial chargé d’affaires in Brussels, came forward. He told Marshal André with solemn seriousness that Vienna would always honour the Brussels Convention between them, and on a personal note he wished the French Marshal and his army good fortune.

The Austrians were clearly delighted. If Prussia and Andréan France were to fight again, then in the short term Austria would not have to fear military threats from the north and northwest. It could devote itself to consolidating northern Italy and, when the French southern armies threatened the Kingdom of Sardinia, seize the moment to draw Italy under Habsburg control. As for the outcome of a Franco-Prussian war, Metternich hoped for mutual ruin, leaving Austria to tidy up the aftermath.

André did not care about the butterfly’s little tricks. This was the nature of Europe’s treacherous game. With an expressionless “Thank you,” he sent the guests out.

When he turned back, André had already changed his face. Grinning, he asked General Berthier, who stood not far away wiping his uniform, “Well, old friend—how was my acting just now?”

“Overdone. Slightly overdone,” Berthier replied with ill humour, because the kick had splashed soup onto his brand-new uniform. Meldar chuckled nearby.

André only shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, so long as the Prussians believe it. Now then—where are Moncey and the others?”

Berthier said, “If all goes smoothly, they have already crossed the Thuringian Forest. They are now less than one hundred and thirty kilometres from Leipzig. At most, three days of marching remain.”

…

Near dusk, Nansouty and his cavalry brigade completed their routine patrol outside Weimar. After watering, feeding, and grooming the horses, the men finally turned to their own supper. Because of the long march and the constant prospect of battle, the horses’ rations, besides the usual oats and barley, had to include a certain portion of meat and eggs. The cavalrymen themselves, by contrast, lived on the same unchanging fare: meat soup and bread.

Fortunately, tonight’s meat was no longer “suspicious meat” from tins, but real pork. The wounded even received beef. As if to celebrate the successful crossing of the Thuringian Forest, General Moncey ordered every soldier to be issued a bottle of red wine, along with half a pound of raisins as a sweet.

All of it was a friendly contribution from the Duchy of Weimar. General Moncey had warned the Elbe Army Group’s soldiers not to enter Weimar without permission. The French had also, along the way, wiped out several bands of brigands entrenched in the Thuringian hills. In return, Karl August, Grand-Duc of the richest of the Thuringian states and ruler of the region’s artistic capital, announced that he would provide bread, fresh meat, and wine for the one hundred thousand French troops for the next week—and would charge the French nothing.

In fact, since marching east from Mainz, not every prince had shown goodwill to the French. Because of the hostile behaviour of the Grand-Duc of Hesse, Moncey ordered Hoche’s First Army to occupy that country in advance and had the gendarmerie forces block river traffic for a full week.

When the French reached Thuringia, the German princes initially refused to supply cheap food. Nansouty’s cavalry brigade, as the advance force, nearly launched an attack. Fortunately, a Saxon envoy arrived in time with August I’s order that the Thuringian states under his protection must open their roads to the French and provide sufficient food and wine.

That night, Nansouty could not sleep in his tent, disturbed by the clanging of hammers. Engineers were gathered at the river, working at full speed to erect two pontoon bridges. At dawn, the one hundred thousand of the Elbe Army Group had to cross without delay. From Weimar to Leipzig was about one hundred and twenty kilometres; in all likelihood, they would reach it by midday the day after next. In the judgment of Command Headquarters and the General Staff, once the French reached Leipzig, they would have already won half the victory. Northward to Berlin lay the endless northeastern plain, ideal terrain for French cavalry and artillery.

When the sleepless General Nansouty climbed out of his tent, he saw that the cables fixing the pontoon bridge on the right bank had already been secured. On the left bank, eight-wheeled flatbed wagons drawn by heavy draft horses rolled in an unbroken stream toward the water, laden with massive pre-cut timbers and the flat-bottomed boats that would be laid across the river.

“Gentlemen—get to sleep at once,” the General ordered. The officers turned and barked at the soldiers to roll back into their tents.

At daybreak, the entire Elbe Army Group stood along the banks of the Ilm by regiment and battalion. About an hour earlier, General Moncey had distributed to officers at colonel level a Proclamation to the Soldiers drafted personally by Marshal André, ordering them to announce it publicly to the ranks in full.

“Soldiers—the second Franco-Prussian war has begun!” Nansouty’s opening line came out, and pain tore at his throat; he was suffering from severe inflammation. With no choice, the cavalry general handed the proclamation of Command Headquarters to Kellermann the younger, a Lieutenant Colonel, who took over the reading in his place.

Lieutenant Colonel Kellermann gripped the proclamation with both hands, leaned his head slightly forward, fixed his eyes on the lines before him, and read in the loudest voice he could muster. Then company and battalion officers repeated it again, so that the words would be carried clearly and accurately to the soldiers standing in tight formation.

“At the close of the first Franco-Prussian war—the War of the Republic’s Defence—the respected Prussian Marshal and his King swore together to maintain friendship and peace with the French people for generations, and that there would be no further war or injury between our two nations. Yet only a week ago, Berlin committed an act of treachery and broke the sacred oath they had sworn…”

One hundred thousand fully armed soldiers stood in dense ranks and listened in silence.

“Prussia’s fate is exhausted; misfortune is at hand. Do these fools believe that our great victory at Valmy was merely the gift of luck?…

“No—you will strike those oath-breakers a second time, a crushing blow, a merciless blow!…

“Forward! Under the guidance of the tricolour and your officers, march boldly across the rivers of Germany and carry the fire of war onto Prussian soil. My most loyal and courageous soldiers will once again defeat and encircle them, and at last bring to an end the barbarous Prussian influence that has harmed the affairs of Europe for more than fifty years.”