housand rifles
were practically useless owing to the absence of some small pin or other
interchangeable mechanism about the breech-blocks, and the officer who
posted off in hot haste to Paris succeeded with the greatest difficulty
in securing five thousand of the missing implements. Their inactivity,
again, was another matter that kept him on pins and needles; why did
they idle away their time for two weeks? why did they not advance? He
saw clearly that each day of delay was a mistake that could never be
repaired, a chance of victory gone. And if the plan of campaign that he
had dreamed of was clear and precise, its manner of execution was most
lame and impotent, a fact of which he was to learn a great deal
more later on and of which he had then only a faint and glimmering
perception: the seven army corps dispersed along the extended frontier
line _en echelon_, from Metz to Bitche and from Bitche to Belfort;
the many regiments and squadrons that had been recruited up to only
half-strength or less, so that the four hundred and thirty thousand men
on paper melted away to two hundred and thirty thousand at the outside;
the jealousies among the generals, each of whom thought only of securing
for himself a marshal's baton, and gave no care to supporting
his neighbor; the frightful lack of foresight, mobilization and
concentration being carried on simultaneously in order to gain time,
a process that resulted in confusion worse confounded; a system, in a
word, of dry rot and slow paralysis, which, commencing with the head,
with the Emperor himself, shattered in health and lacking in promptness
of decision, could not fail ultimately to communicate itself to the
whole army, disorganizing it and annihilating its efficiency, leading it
into disaster from which it had not the means of extricating itself. And
yet, over and above the dull misery of that period of waiting, in the
intuitive, shuddering perception of what must infallibly happen, his
certainty that they must be victors in the end remained unimpaired.

On the 3d of August the cheerful news had been given to the public
of the victory of Sarrebruck, fought and won the day before. It could
scarcely be called a great victory, but the columns of the newspapers
teemed with enthusiastic gush; the invasion of Germany was begun, it was
the first step in their glorious march to triumph, and the little
Prince Imperial, who had coolly stooped and picked up a bullet from the
battlefie