that of the other corps, and a little after noon the French Army was marching back to the camps and bivouacs whence it had advanced on the 31st. The great sortie had signally failed in opening a road through the investing lines. The French had 3,547 officers and men killed and wounded, including in the latter category four Generals, one of whom, Manèque, mortally. The German loss was 2,976 killed and wounded. Marshal Bazaine estimates the number he put in the field at 100,000; the German authorities say they began the fight with 40,800 men and 138 guns; and at the end of the encounter had over the Moselle 73,800 men and 290 guns. Marshal Bazaine and his troops re-entered their prison on the afternoon of the day when the white flag was hoisted on the Citadel of Sedan; and with his and their subsequent misfortunes we have nothing more to do in this work. Neither is it our business to consider whether by marching up instead of down the right bank he could have escaped with some portion of his Army safe and sound to the South of France. That he did his uttermost to push through on the 31st is the contention of the German staff, but it is doubtful whether on the second day the same spirit prevailed. All the knotty questions suggested by the military situation about Metz and elsewhere at the end of August could only be adequately discussed by entering upon a history of transactions with which we have no present concern. The essential fact is that the French Marshals tried to break the barrier and failed at a moment when even their success could not have prevented the capitulation at Sedan. The attempt demonstrated the immense advantages of a carefully prepared defensive position combined with a readiness to use artillery in the front line from the first, and an equal readiness to become the assailant whenever a useful opportunity occurred. But to the mind of this writer the moral of the Metz episode in the great war is the danger attending these large intrenched camps, which will certainly exert in the future, as they have in the past, an irresistible attraction upon inferior commanders, and will task the intellect, and the ingenuity and the firmness of the greatest to put them to a proper use. Neither Bazaine nor any colleague in superior command could be described as a man of genius, and to such soldiers, while war is conducted on a vast scale and armies in the field are numbered by the hundred thousand, places like Metz will not cease to become traps in which frustrated or beaten armies will be caught and captured, sometimes, it may be, by force or stratagem; usually by stress of famine. Meantime the issue of the war will be decided, as it always has been, by the belligerent who is able to keep the field.