xymnovel Chapter 66 The real storm has arrived; France faces its test.
Chapter 66 The real storm has arrived; France faces its test.
1870年9月1日，凌晨2点30分，默兹河西岸法军第1军前沿观察哨。
Private First Class Pierre Le Maire, wrapped in a military overcoat, paced back and forth in the cold night wind. His task was to monitor the movements of the Prussian troops on the east bank of the river and then report the situation to the company headquarters every half hour.
Over the past three days, the Prussian troops, who had reached the other side of the Meuse River, had been moving around frequently. The neighing of horse-drawn wagons, donkey carts, and mule carts had been incessant all night long. Even a fool would know that a major battle was about to break out.
In the days before trucks were invented, the Prussian army, deep in the French heartland, could not rely on France's fragile railway lines and had to rely more on various kinds of livestock to transport supplies.
Donkeys are common in Europe today, and donkey milk is even more precious than mare's milk. In the 19th century, it was a beverage enjoyed by the upper class, used directly for medical relief, and as a substitute for breast milk.
To supply the army, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of livestock were needed, creating an extraordinary commotion.
On the west bank of the river, Le Maire raised his binoculars and carefully observed the movements on the opposite bank.
By the light of the bright moon, Le Maire could vaguely see countless dark figures gathering by the river, and some soldiers carrying long planks and iron frames.
What alarmed the French private even more was that dozens of black pontoons were floating on the river, swaying gently with the waves.
"What are these Prussians up to?"
"I still lack experience," Lemerre muttered to himself, unable to immediately discern that the other party intended to cross the river.
However, before Le Maire could even process what was happening, he saw three signal flares with red trails rising into the air from the opposite bank.
Startled, Le Maire immediately understood and quickly blew the military whistle around his neck.
A piercing whistle broke the silence of the night. The soldiers on patrol below looked up at Lemerre, who was standing on the observation post. Leaning on the fence of the observation post, Lemerre shouted at his comrades below with all his might.
"Tell the company headquarters that the Prussian pigs are on the move; they are building a pontoon bridge. I saw a lot of pontoons."
Without questioning the authenticity of Le Maire's information, many French soldiers also saw the signal flare that streaked across the night sky.
Several soldiers immediately rushed towards the company headquarters, but shortly after they left—a short time so brief that Lemerre couldn’t be sure if his comrades had relayed the information to the company headquarters—the Prussian offensive began, and the ground started to tremble violently.
At 3:00 a.m., five hundred cannons mobilized by the Prussian Third Army Corps staged a spectacular fireworks display in the pitch-black night.
Countless orange-red flames illuminated the Prussian artillery positions.
The Prussian army that attacked the Meuse River was mainly composed of the Third Army Corps and the newly formed Fourth Army Corps. The Fourth Army Corps was a newly established army corps, so the main force was the Third Army Corps. The commander of both army corps was naturally Friedrich Wilhelm.
This Prussian crown prince, through the machinations of his father Wilhelm I, was destined to be adorned with an unassailable legacy of merit in this battle.
Despite his gilded appearance, William was capable. Faced with the Meuse River defense line hastily constructed by the French army, William did not choose to disperse the artillery fire as usual, but instead concentrated all his firepower on three key points of the French defense line.
The Verdun ferry crossing in the north, the Dinant ferry crossing in the center, and the Saint-Michel ferry crossing in the south.
William assigned more than 150 cannons to each of these crossings, enough to create a devastating firepower density against the French army.
Orange-red fireballs streaked across the night sky like a meteor shower under the bright moonlight.
Thanks to the advantages of breech-loading steel cannons and battle-hardened gunners, even at night when it was difficult for observers to make accurate calibrations, many shells still hit important French positions such as artillery positions, machine gun emplacements, and command posts with great precision.
On the surface, the French positions, bombarded by a large number of artillery shells, were illuminated by towering flames that lit up the entire crossing. In the darkness, people could see columns of black smoke shooting straight into the sky.
The most heartbreaking thing about this sudden shelling was that a 6-pound Krupp shell directly hit the command post of the 1st Infantry Brigade of the 2nd Division of the French 1st Army.
The shell blasted the entire tent to pieces, and the brigade commander and his staff were all killed.
Jean Dupont was awakened from his sleep by the deafening explosion. Forgetting all decorum, Dupont scrambled and crawled from his tent to the bottom of the trench, following the instructions given to him from above to dodge the shells. He clutched his head tightly with both hands.
It's not that we didn't want to take shelter in the artillery bunkers, but the number of bunkers was not proportional to the number of people. The rapid repair of the fortifications meant that many supporting facilities were not fully in place.
The artillery shelter was one of them, but fortunately, the French army had previous experience fighting Prussia and knew the fierce firepower of the Prussians, so they paid more attention to the construction of the artillery shelter.
DuPont was just unlucky. As he ran, both of the bunkers he passed were crowded with people. Helpless, DuPont had no choice but to settle for a place in the trench and wait for the shelling to end.
Suddenly, not far from DuPont, a 4-pound shell exploded. The powerful blast carried a piece of hot shrapnel that grazed DuPont's scalp and left a deep scratch on the trench wall.
The mud and rocks kicked up by the explosion rained down on his back, shattering into tiny fragments with few large pieces. Apart from making DuPont look a little disheveled, it didn't cause him any serious injury.
However, the scorching heat waves that blew in from time to time almost suffocated DuPont. This immense pressure, where he didn't know when he would be taken away by a shell, made DuPont very uncomfortable.
"My God, how can their artillery fire be so accurate?"
During a lull in the shelling, Dupont overheard the terrified words of a young soldier beside him. Louis, who, like Dupont, hadn't been allocated a seat in the bunker, grabbed the soldier and shoved him to the ground, roaring into his ear.
"Shut your mouth if you don't want to die, and bury your damn head lower. These Prussian pigs are using observation balloons; they can see our every move."
Observation balloons? Seeing the knowledgeable Louis say this, DuPont looked up with some curiosity and indeed saw three huge hydrogen balloons floating in the sky. They were the Prussian army's artillery observation balloons.
It was night, and the artillery observers on land couldn't see the opposite bank clearly. But in the air, aided by the massive flashes of explosions, the situation was entirely different.
The three balloons were moving slowly in the air at an altitude of about 500 meters, drifting on the opposite bank to avoid being shot down by the French army.
The vast field of vision in the air was enough for Prussian soldiers on the balloon to continuously transmit information about French positions within 10 kilometers to the artillery command on the ground via letters.