TOPICS OF TAE, DAY.
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THE WAR.
THE Armies are face to face in the Valley of the Saar, and perhaps before these words are issued, certainly before next Saturday, Germany and France, each in perfect readi- ness, each in complete equipment, each burning with en- thusiasm, will have commenced the struggle which is to decide for this century the leadership of the world. As yet the auguries are with the Teuton. The Emperor of the French, whether pressed by some unexplained necessity, or intent on some over-subtle combination, or, as we believe, deceived by his hopes from some subterranean intrigue, has allowed his great adversary, whose fearful strength no one in his Empire but himself thoroughly comprehends, to secure the fourteen days which was all he needed for preparation. War was declared on the 15th, no advance was made till the 29th, and within those fourteen days Germany, from Posen to the Lake of Constance, has rolled itself together in arms to bar Napoleon's road. We would ask any of our readers who may still be fascinated by French traditions or French confidence, or are still influenced by the delusion that Germany is slow, or are still doubtful if she has been united, to reflect on what has been accomplished within those fourteen days. In a silence like that of the grave, silence absolutely without precedent, and explicable only by a willing submission to an inexorable rule, Germany has been turned into a camp, her youth en masse into soldiers, her cities into fortified positions. More than a million of men, three-fourths of them on the 14th peaceful citizens, scattered over countries many times the size of England, have flung down their tools, stepped silently to places marked out for them for years, and on railways turned at an hour's notice into a branch of the transport service of the State, have been carried as fully equipped and organized soldiers to points selected for their rendezvous by Baron von Moltke nearly four years ago. Through great provinces which but yesterday were independent, amidst " tribes " divided or hostile for centuries, using Governments whose manifestoes against Prussia are hardly dry as trusted instruments, the iron Prussian organization has worked as smoothly as some magnificent machine. The sternness of that organization, which inflicts death for desertion or dis- obedience, is not needed, for all are willing ; but the sternness makes men prompt, and from every division of the Empire, from disaffected Frankfort as from faithful Berlin, from Dresden as from Dusseldorf, from Hesse as from the Saxon Duchies, the accounts are always the same,—the announcement of war arrives at noon, at night comes the summons to all enrolled citizens, and next day the deserted streets show that all the youth, ready as veterans and as skilled, are on their way to the front. That front, as we intimated last week, faces the armaments accumulated by Napoleon in the north-east corner of France, in the triangle formed by a line drawn from Metz to Strasburg. An army which we estimate at 450,000 men, or 100,000 more than that of France, has gathered beyond Saar- briick, stretching back to Troves and Mayence, and the Prussian chiefs have, as we predicted last week, announced that their policy is one of magnificent audacity. Germany will not wait to be invaded, still less will she, in obedience to a policy which has found friends in England, but which, had it been adopted, would have justified insurrection, abandon the faithful people of the Rhineland to the most exacting of invaders. Summoning the Russians to hold down Poland—the Imperial Guard is already on the frontier of Posen—sending General Falkenstein with a corps oranne'e of 50,000 men to watch the Elbe and the coast, despatching the Crown Prince to hurry up the armies of the South towards Breisach, whence, should the great battle be won, they can enter France in unbroken strength, Baron von Moltke urges his main battle forward upon Paris. If he wins, the Empire—we do not say France—will be over- thrown, and he can move forward more leisurely to the next field of battle ; if he loses, he can retreat upon the fortresses of the Rhine, there once more to arrest the enemy, while a second army, as numerous as the first, now forming along the Weser, comes up rapidly to his aid. Whether he will win or not, whether he has even the better chance of winning, scarcely any man in Europe is competent to say. The French army, though, as we believe, outnumbered, is large enough for its work, is well placed, though on somewhat too small a surface, is splendidly equipped, and is full of that gay, boastful, IT is quite possible to make too much of this Draft Treaty.. Its publication throws, no doubt, a strong and an un- pleasant light upon the character of Napoleon, but it does not alter in any way either the position or the duty of Great Britain. The history of this now celebrated document, read by the light of the Emperor's manifesto in the Telegraph, by the Standard's narrative of 1866, by the documents of the Luxemburg controversy, and by the official stories from both Paris and Berlin, is, we have little or indeed no doubt, something like this :—In 1867, shortly after the signature of the Luxemburg guarantee, M. Benedetti, the Emperor's most trusted agent in diplomacy, a Corsican, and a devoted friend of the Bonapartes, was employed to demand from Count von Bismarck the fulfilment of certain vague promises made at Biarritz to the Emperor of the French. The Prussian Premier, who had made these promises under a belief that France would at the end of the war hold the balance of power between Berlin and Vienna, finding his country strong enough to stand alone, and aware that an attempt to concede any- thing would undo the moral effect of Sadowa, peremptorily refused to give up an inch of Prussian soil, and, as we imagine, hinted, or said openly, in order to " draw " his antagonist, that Belgium was much more nearly French. That he meant to give Belgium we do not believe, for the simple reason that Prussia is before everything a military power, and that with Belgium in French hands the Rhine Provinces would be inde- fensible. The hint was eagerly seized, and at last M. Bene- detti was asked to formulate his propositions, which he did in but dare-devil self-confidence which irritates Englishmen and • the Draft Treaty now given by the Times to the world. This Germans, but which, being real and not affected, acts on Southerners like wine, and has carried the tricolour into every capital of the Continent. Marshal Lebosuf, its real head, has the confidence of the Army. The Chassepot, though it has been tried against the Needle-gun without shaking Prussian confi- dence, is a splendid weapon, and the mitrailleuse, though only formidable in certain positions, may in those positions de- moralize a brigade. No one is ever safe under any circum- stances who reckons on the repulse of a French Army. The special correspondents, bewildered by the organized flurry around them, hint at a failure in the Intendance, talk about meat without cooking-pots and cooking-pots without meat, about. this that and the other which is deficient ; but in French. armies the sound of the cannon soon produces order, and France will not be defeated by any momentary muddle. The solitary circumstance against her other than her cause, and her deficiency as we believe in numbers, is that she is led by Napoleon,—that is, by a man who makes war as he makes coups d'e'tat, like a conspirator ; who fights in order to obtain. grand scenic effects ; who if he finds a genius in his army must think before he uses him whether genius is compatible with im- plicit devotion to Omar; and who, unless we wholly misread his manifestoes in this war, deeply mistrusts his fate. There is dejection in his bearing, dejection as of a man who feels a• self-imposed task too heavy for endurance.
An idea is current in England that the Emperor has been waiting to prepare a splendid diversion in North Germany, and he may, of course, have in reserve some striking surprise,—such, for example, as a repetition of his uncle's plan of compelling Denmark to place herself and her fleet at his disposal. With: the whole Danish army at his back, the leader of the Northern Expedition might, no doubt, detach a strong Prussian force from the graver battle. We doubt, however, whether Denmark is prepared for a step which, if it failed, would lead to her extinction ; whether, even if prepared, her army could advance beyond Schleswig ; and whether it can be aided by an efficient French corps d'arme'e. The difficulty of transporting heavy bodies of troops on any long sea voyage is, as we have explained elsewhere, enormous, and without an army the fleet could accomplish little beyond annoying, or it might be destroying, a few coast towns. The possibility of such attacks would but deepen German rage, and we can hardly help. believing that the Emperor, always wrong when popular feeling is the first datum of thought, has allowed himself to be deceived by hopes of an insurrection impossible unless he summons the Poles to arms, and so places the Russian fleet at the disposal of Berlin. In any case short of the landing of an impossible force at Hamburg or at Kiel, the diversion cannot seriously impede the movement of Germany to the front, or greatly affect the result of the supreme decision which, before we again address our readers, will have been pronounced.
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