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258 supplies failed, the requisitions degenerated into plunder. Unfortunately, the Germans had been led by the early events of the war to lose respect for their opponents. They knew that many thousands of their countrymen gaining their livelihood at Paris had been brutally expelled, and that prisoners were sometimes treated by the French with ferocious insolence. The citadel of Laon, having surrendered, was blown up at the moment when the Germans entered it, and the generality of the French press celebrated this as a glorious and heroic act. And there was a pitiful boastfulness in the midst of defeat which a generous warrior would despise. A popular French writer, after describing the retreat from Worth, exclaimed, "And now, who will say that the French army has been conquered, or does anybody suppose that it can be, with such soldiers, commanded by a man like MacMahon?" and Victor Hugo, the first of imaginative writers living, published a letter to the Germans after Sedan, in which he says, "You have had the victory, and we have had the glory!" Contempt for the character of an enemy is always demoralising, and acts were committed by several corps — acts not only of ruthless severity, but of lawless violence — which will long rankle in the memories of the best and most thoughtful men in France.

During the whole of September Prince Frederick Charles was patiently starving out the French at Metz. Steinmetz was gone. That gloomy veteran had learnt too much of the ancient ways of war under Blucher in his youth to adapt himself, when past seventy, to the calculating science of Moltke. The intelligent officers of the new school who served under him were often startled by his orders, for he tried to do by brute force what could be better done by brains. After the wasteful slaughter at Gravelotte he disappeared from the army. Bazaine was not molested with cannon, but whenever he attempted to break out, he found the Prussians too strong for him. After his defeat at Naisseville and the apitulation of Sedan, he remained quiet during some valuable weeks, and then, learning from Prince Frederick Charles that