418 
THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 
French 
army. 
Plans of 
campaign. 
The French army was organised on a very different method, there 
being no regular peace formation of the higher tactical units. The 
country was certainly divided into a number of commands; but these, 
with the exception of the army corps at Paris and Lyons, formed terri¬ 
torial and not tactical combinations of troops. On declaration of war, 
the staff of the army was chosen and the regiments apportioned to 
each corps, but necessarily the component units of so disunited a mass 
could not work together at first without a great deal of friction. In 
1866 it was apparent that, owing to many causes—the principal of which 
were the longer service in the ranks, exemptions by payment, and the 
a plague of substitutes ”—the Imperial army was vastly inferior, both 
in numbers and morale , to that of Germany. To remedy this state of 
things the recruiting law of 1868 initiated a system of trained reserves, 
abolished exemption by payment, and provided for the formation of 
Gardes Mobiles—corresponding somewhat to a combination of the 
German Landwehr and Ersatz Reserve. By making the Act partially 
retrospective it was hoped that large additions could be at once made to 
the defensive forces of the country, but the premature declaration of war 
prevented these reforms being carried out in their entirety. On the 
1st August, the total of the available troops, including many partially- 
trained men, amounted to 567,000. After making the necessary deduc¬ 
tions, the utmost field force that could be assembled consisted of 300,000 
men with 924 guns, and behind these in second line there were no trained 
reserves. In addition to numerical inferiority, the general condition of 
the French army was by no means satisfactory. The general officers had 
no experience in the leading of large bodies of troops, the staff was 
inefficiently educated, the regimental officers had not sufficient authority 
over their men, the mass of the soldiery were contaminated by the evils 
of substitution, and the bonds of discipline were relaxed, owing to the 
enervating effects of the Algerian and Mexican campaigns and the 
pernicious spread of democratic principles among all ranks. To rapidly 
mobilise the army was a matter of some difficulty, owing to the excessive 
over-centralisation of the administration. Every matter of petty detail 
had to be referred to the Paris War Office, and the machinery capable 
of control in time of peace was utterly unable to cope with the exigencies 
of war. Whereas in Germany the men of the reserves joined at once 
their local corps, in France the reservist was sent first to the depot 
companies, however distant they might be, to receive his equipment, and 
then hurried back to his regiment, which in many cases was close to 
his home. The system of mobilisation was not sufficiently elastic for 
modern war requirements, and the first days after the declaration of 
hostilities, which should have been employed in the general interest of 
the army, were frittered away in dealing with minor administrative 
details. To the German system of decentralisation of large localised 
units, was opposed an excessively concentrated machinery working a 
mass of petty isolated elements. 
The Prussians, fully aware of their superiority in numbers, determined 
from the first to anticipate any attempt of their adversaries to carry the 
war on to German soil. It was obvious that if the French took the 
initiative they would be forced, owing to the situation of the neutral 
