At this critical moment, Marshal MacMahon was hastening to Chalons; De Failly, after having been ordered hither and thither from hour to hour, had received final orders—he was to join the Marshal; but Douay’s 7th Corps, although Dumont’s Division had arrived, increasing the total to about 20,000 men and 90 guns, had not yet been, and was not for three days, directed from Belfort upon the great camp in the plains of Champagne. CHAPTER VII. VON MOLTKE KEEPS THE WHIP HAND. Weary of his task, weakened in body by a painful malady, depressed in mind by a series of disasters, and worried by advice from Paris, the Emperor Napoleon, on the evening of the 12th of August, transferred to Marshal Bazaine the burden which he could no longer bear. Whatever may have been his other aptitudes, he was not born to command Armies in the field nor had he that power of selection which may enable an inferior to choose and clothe with his authority a superior man. Had a Radetzky, instead of an Emperor, commanded the Austrian Army in 1859 it is probable that the stability of the “dynasty” would have been tried by defeat and the unity of Italy deferred until a later day. Whether the Emperor Napoleon recognized his incompetence, or whether, as he often did, he yielded to pressure, matters little except to the students of character. He nominally gave up the command, yet retained a certain indefinite control, and he placed at the head of his Army a Marshal who, although the senior in rank to the recently promoted Marshal Lebœuf, the late Chief of the Staff, was still the junior of Marshal Canrobert; both, fortunately, were loyal men, and the latter ready to serve under his junior. Yet it is doubtful whether Bazaine ever exercised that moral ascendency which is essential at all times, and never more so than at a crisis when the fate of Armies depends not only on wise direction, but prompt and willing obedience. The Marshal, appointed on the 12th, did not take up his command until the next day, and then he was required to remedy in less than twenty-four hours the deep-seated mischief produced by a fortnight of terrible blundering. His special task was to transport the Army over the Moselle. Four days earlier that might have been done without a shot being fired, because even if the German horse had come up to look on they must have been idle spectators as their infantry comrades were far in the rear. The fatal error was committed when the Emperor did not overrule all opposition, and, adhering with unswerving firmness to his first thought, neither halt, ponder, nor rest until the Moselle flowed between him and his foes. The military position on the morning of the 7th dictated that step; his adversaries believed or surmised that he would take it, because it was the right step to take. Nor can we doubt that, as Commander-in-Chief, Louis Napoleon, who had a little