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On the morning of 16 August 1870, hundreds of French cuirassiers were eating breakfast and grooming their horses when Prussian artillery shells slammed into the midst of their camp on the escarpment west of the city of Metz. Four batteries of Prussian six-pounders had unlimbered at mid-morning on the heights south of Vionville, three miles east of the village of Mars-la-Tour, and began a furious fire on the French horsemen.
The Prussian gunners had sighted their cannon by aiming at the reflection of the sun on the French cavalry’s silver cutlery and goblets, as well as at the colourful tablecloths of their mess. The percussion-fused shells exploded on contact, and with deadly accuracy.
The startled cuirassiers mounted up and rode east to escape the crashing shells. Having reached the safety of the French II Infantry Corps, their officers rallied them, and the heavy cavalrymen formed up in their respective squadrons to await the enemy’s imminent advance.
Prussian victories
After Prussia had defeated Austria in seven weeks in 1866, Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck established a new confederation of North German states – but Bismarck needed a war with France to bring the more independent South German states into a united Germany.
The French emperor Napoleon III duly played into Bismarck’s hands by declaring war on Prussia on 19 July 1870. The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, he had solidified French supremacy on the Continent through France’s successful participation with Great Britain in the Crimean War (1853-1856), as well as by achieving victory over Habsburg Austria in northern Italy in 1859. Acutely aware of the threat that Prussia posed to French hegemony, he set about modernising French weaponry in the 1860s – overseeing the development of the breech-loading Chassepot rifle, which had twice the range of the Prussian Dreyse ‘needle-gun’ (so-called because of the shape of its firing pin), and the production of the mitrailleuse multi-barrelled volley gun (an early form of machine-gun).
Though he lacked formal military training, the 62-year-old emperor decided to lead France’s newly created Army of the Rhine in defending the north-eastern frontier of Alsace-Lorraine against the Prussians. In a series of small, but sharp battles, fought during the first week of August 1870, the Prussians defeated the French at Spicheren, Wörth, and Wissembourg.
Afterwards, the eight French corps that made up the Army of the Rhine retreated west in two different directions. Napoleon III and his subordinate Marshal François Bazaine fell back with the II, III, IV, VI, and Imperial Guard to the fortress of Metz, on the Moselle River, while Marshal Patrice de MacMahon led the I, V, and VII, stationed in Alsace, on a much longer retreat to the city of Châlons-sur-Marne, 100 miles east of Paris. Napoleon III intended to reassemble the five northernmost corps in Metz, from where they would march to Châlons-sur-Marne via the fortified city of Verdun.
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