87 
GENERAL CHANZY’S CAMPAIGN; 
LOIRE TO SARTHE. 
DECEMBER 1870 TO JANUARY 
T. M. MAGUIRE, ESQ., LL.D. 
(Inns of Court life Volunteers ). 
(A Lectv,re delivered at the Royal Artillery Institution, 1st N 
/:\ MAR W / 2394 
Lieut.-Col. H. Pipou, E.H.A., in the Chair. 
Chairman —I do not think there is any occasion for me to introduce 
Dr. Maguire to you, so I will call upon him to deliver the lecture which 
he has kindly come to give us. 
Dr. Maguire —Colonel Pipon and gentlemen, the responsibility for 
the selection of the subject must, as usual, rest upon Major Abdy and 
his associates down here. He seems to me to think that inasmuch as 
on a previous occasion there had been a discussion here about the 
general arrangements of Gambetta from October 1870 to February 
1871, it might be desirable to enter into more detail with regard to one 
. particular phase of the operations under the direction of Gambetta : 
whose oratory was to French generals and soldiers what the strains of 
Tyrtseus were to Grecian heroes. 
But before entering upon the proceedings of the very illustrous 
French General Chanzy, whose name will ever be green in the memory 
of his countrymen, and very justly, it might be well to indicate the 
circumstances which brought him into strategical and into tactical 
prominence. 
On the 19th September, 1870, after overwhelming the regular armies 
first—taking one regular army prisoner at Sedan, and shutting up 
another regular army at Metz—the Germans invested Paris; the third 
German army invested it on the south, the fourth German army 
invested it on the north. There was not available for other purposes 
in France then any very considerable number of German forces; the 
first German army was around Metz; the second German army was 
around Metz. Yon Werder was first at Strashurg, and ultimately he 
came down to Dijon and towards the Cote d ; Or and invested Belfort. The 
German forces were—Yon Werder’s Corps, afterwards named the 14th; 
two German armies at Metz, two German armies at Paris, some Germans 
along the line of communications, and nobody else available. Under 
those circumstances Gambetta determined to get a kind of levee en 
masse, somewhat similar to that levee en masse which in 1793 was, as 
Napoleon points out, falsely supposed to have delivered France. The 
8. VOL. XXI. 12 
