On August twenty-third, on France’s northeastern frontier under siege by the Prusso-French Coalition, Longwy.

  The tricolor that symbolized the sovereignty of France had already been torn and ragged after days of fighting, yet it still flew high above the stout fortress—unyielding, like the commander who defended it.

  Counting today, the Longwy fortress on its hilltop had endured the furious bombardment of more than one hundred enemy guns for five consecutive days. After each cannonade came the assaults: whole battalions and companies of Prussians charging like swarming locusts. Now, of the 900 officers and men inside, most were dead or wounded. Fewer than 200 could still stand and take up a weapon. Of the fortress’s original 38 defensive guns, only four remained capable of firing.

  Worst of all, a royalist who had defected to the interventionists sabotaged the fortress magazine before the war began. Thus, after the defenders repelled the Prussians from the hill once again this morning, the remaining ammunition was nearly exhausted. Perhaps tomorrow, the last survivors would have to fight back with bayonets, stones, clubs, and even their teeth.

  At the thought, Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier, commander of the fortress, felt a surge of regret. Half a month earlier he had failed to heed General Berthier, commander of the Army of the North, who had urged him to stockpile ammunition, food, and medicines. He had also ignored a second warning from the corps commander: émigré nobles had already leaked the fortress’s defensive design and gun emplacements to the Prussians, so every battery had to be reinforced, and any traitors inside had to be rooted out and hanged without delay.

  When the Prusso-Austrian Coalition arrived before the walls, the first massive bombardment destroyed one-third of the fortress’s firing positions and wiped out two-thirds of its ammunition stores. Even so, surrounded by tens of thousands of enemy troops, Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier and his men refused the surrender letter delivered by the émigrés. Under his lead, they beat back more than ten Prussian assaults in five days.

  Now, with food and ammunition gone, the end had come. Looking at the scarred ramparts and the rubble-strewn works, at the grievously wounded howling in an open-air aid station, and at the young soldiers whose eyes were full of despair, the commander who would rather die than yield knew the hour had arrived to perform his final duty.

  Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier beckoned to his one-armed deputy and whispered his intent. Then he turned and walked away alone. Fifteen minutes later, a one-armed Captain raised a white flag and went out of the fortress.

  On the evening of August twenty-third, as night fell, the Longwy fortress burned its tricolor, opened its gates, and ceased resistance. In the very moment when the Prusso-Austrian Coalition cheered its victory, Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier swung his saber with all his strength and cut the ropes that bound together more than ten great wooden barrels. In an instant, thirteen foul-smelling oak casks rolled down the slope, plunged over the cliff, and fell into the river below—then sank to the bottom.

  Not until the next morning did the Prussians find the body of Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier in the grass by the cliff. He had shot himself.

  As for the great oak casks that vanished before the fortress fell, they never appeared in any record of the Northern Command Headquarters. The only point worth noting was this: after the Prusso-Austrian Coalition entered France, sickness rose sharply among its troops, chiefly enteritis and dysentery.

  …

  When Metz, capital of the Moselle, fell unexpectedly, General Kellermann, commander of the Army of the Rhine, was preparing to move his headquarters from Strasbourg on the Rhine into the Moselle.

  Upon learning that Metz had been lost, Commander Kellermann immediately ordered General Custine to lead a force of 30,000—two infantry divisions, three cavalry regiments, and several volunteer battalions—on a forced march to Nancy, the capital of Meurthe, some 60 kilometers from Metz. Custine was instructed to use forests, rivers, and hills to organize layered defenses, and to do everything possible to slow the Prusso-Austrian Coalition’s southward advance.

  On the right wing, General Beauharnais and his 15,000 officers and men were left at Strasbourg by Commander Kellermann to defend the Rhine line against the Austrian army across the river.

  As for Kellermann himself, having just arrived at the headquarters in Nancy, the first thing he did was send men to search for the missing corps commissioner, Deputy Gensonné. Kellermann meant to discuss how they would explain the fall of Metz to the supreme commander of the Northern Command Headquarters, General André, and thereby lessen their own culpability.

  To be frank, the political upheavals of these past months had left General Kellermann, who fancied himself an old fox of the military world, completely at sea. At first he had aligned himself with Lafayette and the Constitutionalists. Yet under pressure from the Jacobins, the well-resourced Constitutionalists collapsed without firing a shot, and the three commanders of the northern main armies were replaced one after another.

  Fortunately, Kellermann had transferred to the Army of the Rhine in May, and would not be implicated in Lafayette’s downfall. Even so, the crushing defeat of the constitutional nobles in the National Assembly left Kellermann uneasy. Soon afterward, however, Lieutenant General Kellermann reached a peak in his career: he was entrusted with the highest command of a field army.

  As for the corps commissioner Gensonné—compared with André, the commissioner of the Army of the North—his abilities were far inferior. General Kellermann once described the man in private: apart from playing with words in the Strasbourg Jacobin branch and shouting a few slogans, he was nearly useless. What delighted Commissioner Gensonné most each day was riding in a handsome open four-wheeled carriage, taking one or two pretty women with him, and—under the pretext of inspecting defenses—swaggering about under the escort of two gendarmes.

  When Major Kellermann (the son)—General Kellermann’s son and his aide-de-camp—finally found Deputy Gensonné, the man was naked in a patch of woods outside Nancy, “at it” with a heavily painted courtesan. The two guards were also laughing and hiding in the grass, peeping as they watched.

  Twenty minutes later, when the disheveled Gensonné returned to headquarters, General Kellermann gave him grim news.

  “One hour ago I received a notice from Paris. On the twentieth—three days ago—the Assembly and the cabinet jointly appointed Lieutenant General André as supreme commander of the Greater Northern Theater.”

  “What? An, an, an…André!” At the name, Commissioner Gensonné panicked. He collapsed onto the sofa at once, all the arrogance from his entrance gone.

  “General—what do we do? I…I…I’ll be shot!” His voice shook, as if he were about to cry.

  If one traced the true cause of Metz’s fall, it could only be tied to the commissioner’s lust and misconduct. Two weeks earlier, Gensonné had seduced a Baronne in Strasbourg. By the habits of French high society and Parisian life, that would normally have been nothing more than a scandalous bit of gossip among the great.

  But the misfortune was that the Baronne’s husband, himself a libertine, was an active-duty army Colonel who had recently been appointed by General Kellermann as the commander responsible for Metz’s defense. When he learned that the corps commissioner had cuckolded him, the Colonel flew into a rage and swore revenge on the shameless Jacobins.

  Before long, prodded by a few émigré nobles who had infiltrated the city, the commander of Metz’s defenses incited a mutiny inside Metz. After the resisting officers were subdued, the rebels opened the gates and handed over an intact Metz fortress—and the largest city and munitions supply base on the northeastern frontier—to the Prusso-Austrian Coalition.

  If anyone else had been appointed supreme commander, Gensonné would not have feared much; few dared call a deputy serving as corps commissioner to account. But André was different. He had the power to have the Legislative Assembly strip Gensonné of his seat, thereby removing his legal immunity. After that, whether the man was sent to a military tribunal or shot on the spot would be entirely at the dictator André’s discretion. Judging by André’s habit, upon taking office, of using heads to establish authority, Gensonné felt he was as good as dead. He trembled all over, and his speech became incoherent.

  General Kellermann, the son of a tax collector of the propertied bourgeoisie, was so angered by Gensonné’s cowardice that he nearly burst. You were all deputies—why was André so capable, while the man in front of him was so contemptible? Yet the army commander also understood: his own political future was now tied to this timid commissioner. They would rise together, or fall together.

  Besides, as a core figure of the Brissot camp, Gensonné—aside from greed and lust—was otherwise quite satisfactory to Kellermann. He did not love dictatorship. He did not buy loyalty with money. He did not forcibly interfere in the Army of the Rhine’s appointments or operational orders. In that, he stood in sharp contrast to the domineering Commissioner André.

  Because the outcome had already been decided, Kellermann comforted Gensonné. “My friend, do not worry. I believe André acts with measure. With a great enemy at the gates, everything he has done since taking office is meant to make the two armies under the Northern Command Headquarters more united, more consistent against the enemy—not divided, suspicious, and at odds with each other.”

  Hearing this, Gensonné found it reasonable. After all, he had once shared a certain fellowship with André in Bordeaux, and their relationship was not bad. Perhaps matters were not as dire as he had imagined. The commissioner’s face brightened, and his earlier gloom eased.

  “But now,” General Kellermann continued, “we must give the Northern Command Headquarters and Paris an explanation that can stand up, for the unexpected fall of Metz.”

  At that, Commissioner Gensonné’s face fell again.

  …

  As the supreme commander of the Northern Theater, André’s first stop after leaving Paris was the new camp at Soissons, where he remained for one night. There, the high commander threw his 3,000 volunteers, and the more than 10,000 sans-culottes who had flocked along the road from towns and cities to enlist, straight into the recruit depots. He had always believed that only three full months of brutal training could turn a man into a qualified soldier. After they were assigned to their regiments and battalions for another ninety days of hardening, those tough men could go to the battlefield to win victory and glory for the nation and for themselves—rather than forcing their officers to write condolence letters to their families.

  When André returned to Reims, he received news that the Longwy fortress had fallen, and that Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier, its commander, had died by his own hand. In the official dispatch, however, André ordered the report altered to state that Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier had died bravely in battle—because a Christian, at any time, must not choose suicide, or he would fall into hell. Even so, the Military Intelligence Office delivered good news: at the last moment, Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier had fulfilled the sacred duty of a French soldier.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  On August twenty-fourth, André entered the Marne and established his headquarters at the Bacourt camp north of Reims. He then ordered the commanders of the two armies, General Berthier and General Kellermann, as well as Deputy Gensonné, commissioner of the Army of the Rhine, to report to the Reims headquarters to discuss operations against the enemy.

  In fact, as early as one o’clock on the morning of August twentieth, when André had just been appointed supreme commander of the Northern Theater, he intended to issue his first order: to require officials in Lorraine and Alsace to organize the people to abandon stores and deny resources, so that the German soldiers would not receive a single piece of bread or a single potato; and to call for organized guerrilla harassment behind enemy lines.

  Yet fifteen minutes later, André tore up the notice his aide-de-camp had just drafted. He muttered to himself, “The disasters of war should not be borne by the people in occupied districts. That is a soldier’s shame.”

  At this stage of warfare it was difficult to say whether guerrilla war would truly be effective. Before universal values could emerge and spread, a strategy that relied on the enemy treating civilians rationally was, at best, a gamble.

  Afterward, as the supreme commander of the north, André’s first formal order merely required provincial officials and the National Guard to assist fleeing refugees, and urged the population not to provide voluntary help to the invaders—nothing more. As for his vow in the Legislative Assembly to send every traitor of France to the guillotine, without anyone noticing, “traitors” had come to mean only those rebels who had joined the émigré formations.

  Later, André also explained to the embedded correspondent from Figaro: “Under the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a free state cannot deprive the people of their basic right to survive…nor can we compel or encourage civilians with no experience of war to turn their homes into a slaughterground, to face foreign invaders armed to the teeth with crude pikes and cleavers, or even with bare hands.”

  In addition, André flatly rejected a joint proposal from the Paris Commune and the Jacobin Club. Those radicals demanded that the death penalty be made the only punishment for officers who defected on the battlefield, and that all cowards and panic-stricken men be crushed with blood and terror.

  Had André not spent three years laying his groundwork, he might have enforced harsh and bloody battlefield rules for the sake of victory. But now he already held victory firmly in view, and there was no need to make innocents bleed and weep. Many times, the power of restraint was more compelling than savage cruelty.

  The supreme commander, André, publicly declared: in unfavorable circumstances where the enemy was stronger, any city-defense commander or battlefield commander who had fought to the end and defended the interests of the nation and the people had fulfilled his duty as a soldier. After that, he might choose to abandon a city or withdraw. Even if he ultimately chose to surrender, the state should not treat him as a traitor—still less should popular hatred be transferred onto his family in the rear.

  This statement, heavy with political purpose, naturally displeased the radicals in Paris. Yet they could do nothing against the Northern Command Headquarters, which held both military and political power. At least until André failed, no one dared openly challenge “the Revolution’s only savior of France”—a line that was, to be clear, Figaro’s shameless flattery of its own patron.

  Soon, across Lorraine and Alsace, officers who had been implicated by earlier setbacks could finally breathe again. At the very least, the supreme commander of the Northern Theater did not treat them as deserters or cowards. As for captured soldiers who had been coerced and exploited by émigré nobles and forced into the émigré formations, they began to hope that the French army would launch a full counteroffensive soon, so that they might redeem themselves.

  On August twenty-fourth, Duc de Brunswick and his staff and entourage climbed the now-occupied Longwy fortress. Besides the routine encouragement of the troops, the Prussian prince attended the funeral of the fortress’s French commander, Lieutenant Colonel Cuvier, in the capacity of an ordinary soldier.

  During the ceremony, Duc de Brunswick’s private secretary Lombard and his staff officer Goethe each composed, in French, a sixteen-line poem—since in eighteenth-century continental Europe, public verse at such occasions was most often expressed in French—to mourn the 746 French defenders who had died in the siege (with 173 captured), and the 2,600 soldiers of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition.

  After returning to headquarters, Duc de Brunswick, commander-in-chief of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition, re-evaluated the Prussian army’s poor performance at Longwy in light of the staff’s figures. In the prince’s view, Prussian cavalry remained excellent, infantry was passable, but artillery lagged far behind, and the logistics system was outdated and rigid.

  In besieging a border fortress with no friendly relief, the coalition had employed more than one hundred heavy guns, including siege mortars, bombarding for nearly five days. Yet comparatively little of it produced decisive effect. In truth, the fortress’s final fall was owed largely to the émigré formations: they detonated the magazine, marked the precise gun positions, and provided other assistance.

  Those rebels commanded by French émigré nobles greatly increased the coalition’s striking power. The successful subversion of the Metz defense commander also delivered a major, unexpected victory. Yet the Prussian prince—easygoing, fond of literature and the arts, and impeccably well-mannered—despised the French émigrés from the bottom of his heart, and never truly trusted them.

  By contrast, the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm placed considerable trust in the émigré nobles. Under their influence, he convinced himself that the French people sympathized deeply with the persecuted Louis XVI and the Bourbon household. He even believed a claim made by a French General who had defected to Koblenz: “I can take every French border fortress, because all their keys are in my pocket.”

  Misled by such boasts, Friedrich Wilhelm grew ever more certain that if his uncle—the coalition commander, still lingering near Longwy and reluctant to advance south—would simply order a drive, the intervention army could reach Paris in the shortest time, and then be greeted with the warmest welcome by the French people loyal to the monarchy.

  According to the final decision reached by the Prusso-Austrian Coalition headquarters in early August, the invasion plan was divided into three columns—right, center, and left—with the following missions:

  The right column would be 30,000 Austrian troops (the Bohemian Corps) under General Clermont-Clifford. Using Namur in the Austrian Netherlands as a base, they would move upstream along the Meuse, pass through the primeval Ardennes forest, and advance south on the coalition’s right. Their primary objectives were to seize Charleville-Mézières, the capital of Ardennes, and the fortress of Sedan.

  The center column was the main force of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition: an army of 80,000 led personally by Marshal Duc de Brunswick. It included 60,000 Prussians, more than 10,000 troops from various German states (chiefly Hessian mercenaries), and 6,000 émigré troops. After taking Verdun, this main column would invade Lorraine directly.

  The left column, under Prince Hohenlohe-Kirchberg, was an auxiliary force. Because the old prince was advanced in years and his eyesight poor, most of its affairs were handled by his aide-de-camp holding the rank of Colonel—the Prussian Crown Prince. This left column had only 20,000 miscellaneous troops from the German states, plus 4,000 émigrés. Using the Palatinate as its base, it would launch feints toward Metz, Strasbourg, and Nancy on the main force’s left, with the aim of luring and pinning the Army of the Rhine so it could not detach forces westward to support the French.

  Under this plan, once the three columns converged in Lorraine, they were to cross the Meuse and advance on Paris. The precise rendezvous point would depend on the progress of each column.

  Judging from the results since the armies began moving south and the war opened a week earlier, the Bohemian Corps on the right performed worst. It was almost in a state of being beaten in place.

  Evidently, General Clermont-Clifford, commanding 30,000 Austrians, had learned nothing from Lafayette’s mistake. He copied the earlier French Army of the Moselle and wandered blindly through the mountains of the Ardennes forest. Long before August, the French Army of the North had already destroyed every route that led through the Ardennes toward Charleville-Mézières. Now no intact bridges remained over the rivers, and the limestone roads were either blocked by great trees felled across them or dug into countless pits and trenches, making wagon movement impossible.

  Even worse, a band of shameless men of unknown strength, wearing green jackets, lurked in the dense forest and fired from concealment all day long, waging harassment and guerrilla attacks without restraint. Guided by local forest hunters who spoke French (Walloons), several small French detachments in green jackets successfully ambushed Austrian supply convoys eight times in just three days, inflicting heavy losses in provisions and matériel.

  As the main force of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition, the coalition army spent five full days and burned vast amounts of ammunition, while suffering casualties three times those of the French defenders, merely to take the battered Longwy fortress.

  Under Marshal Duc de Brunswick’s operational design, the first campaign of the center and left columns was limited to capturing the border fortresses of Longwy, Montmédy, and Sedan. Then they would build supply bases there. Any French force attempting relief was to be driven off by maneuver rather than costly frontal fighting. After that, the army would camp for winter and prepare for the decisive campaign next year.

  But reality was that the left column bogged down in the Ardennes, moving at a crawl. The main column captured only Longwy, while the German-state troops assigned to invest Montmédy suffered a modest defeat en route. The French ambushed a Hessian force at a mountain pass; two infantry regiments were largely destroyed, and even their commander, General Riedel, was killed.

  Just as Duc de Brunswick was preparing to reinforce the Montmédy operation with 20,000 additional troops, the weak auxiliary column entrusted with diversion and screening achieved an unexpected major success. The Germans and the émigrés entered Metz almost without fighting, not only seizing badly needed stores but also pushing the line south to within 20 kilometers of Nancy.

  In a letter, the Prussian Crown Prince put it this way: “Now the entire Army of the Rhine—more than 50,000 men—trembles beneath the lash of my riding crop. Prince Hohenlohe-Kirchberg and I agree that French soldiers have lost their will to fight; their officers already miss the benefits of the monarchical era; as for the people, they submit unconditionally to our requisitions…Therefore we must abandon the earlier conservative approach. We should not wait for next year’s decision. We must change strategy and fight one or two major battles in Lorraine and Champagne that will shatter French morale. Then, before winter, we can recover Paris, suppress the revolt, and restore the kingdom.”

  …

  “Damn it—who allowed a young man with the rank of Colonel to meddle with the supreme commander’s settled decisions? And this fellow Friedrich Wilhelm is no William the Great, admired by Prussian soldiers!”

  At headquarters, Duc de Brunswick had just received the Crown Prince’s letter. After reading it, he flew into a rage. This good-tempered Prussian prince crumpled the letter in front of his senior officers and threw it to the floor; he all but stamped on it.

  Seeing this, the coalition’s deputy commander and chief of staff, Marshal Comte de Saxe-Coburg, hurried to usher the Austro-Prussian generals out of the staff room. Then he himself picked up the letter and smoothed it flat on the desk.

  Smiling, the Austrian Marshal said to the still-angry coalition commander, “Highness, young men are always impulsive. Until they meet a real setback, it is difficult for us old fellows to convince them. We should simply carry out our established plan. There is no need to heed the child’s arrogance.”

  Three months earlier, when he still commanded in the Austrian Netherlands, the Austrian Marshal would never have spoken so. But because he had failed, in a moment, to insist upon his judgment, the young and impetuous Archduke Charles of Austria fell into a trap laid by the French commander in the second Battle of Tournai in June. The hussars were mauled, and the most elite guards cavalry regiment was almost annihilated. Worse still, the regiment’s standard was captured, and the Vienna war ministry struck it from the rolls. All this drew fierce criticism inside Austria toward Field Marshal Comte de Saxe-Coburg. Fortunately, the Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, Duc de Teschen, himself a member of the imperial family, stepped forward afterward and shielded Saxe-Coburg from the Habsburg fury.

  “Thank you, Comte,” said Duc de Brunswick. His temper eased somewhat, yet he still shot a contemptuous glance at the letter on the desk before dismissing it from his mind.

  He continued, “Chief of staff, please continue drafting the letter we will present to the Prussian and Austrian sovereigns. Now—where were we… I believe that within France, the land is full of people who harbor deep hostility. They submit only because they fear the invaders’ weapons and their reprisals. Our setbacks in the Ardennes and at Montmédy already prove how serious this is. Those farmers who look so simple, and those Walloon forest hunters who speak only French, have more than once deceived our troops into French ambushes.

  “…Both I and Field Marshal Comte de Saxe-Coburg believe that to fight a decisive battle in Lorraine or Champagne during the wet, fog-heavy, cold and damp French autumn—one that will shatter French resistance and then allow us to enter Paris—is not achievable… And without doubt, supply is one of the key problems, like dead weight tied to our legs at every moment.”