In fact, MacMahon had undertaken a task of terrible difficulty. On taking over the command at Châlons, where Napoleon III. arrived from Metz on the 16th, he found hopeless disorder not only among his own beaten troops, but among many of the newcomers; the worst were the Garde Mobile, many regiments of whom greeted the Emperor with shouts of _À Paris_. To meet the Germans in the open plains of Champagne with forces so incoherent and dispirited was sheer madness; and a council of war on the 17th came to the conclusion to fall back on the capital and operate within its outer forts--a step which might enable the army to regain confidence, repress any rising in the capital, and perhaps inflict checks on the Germans, until the provinces rose _en masse_ against the invaders. But at this very time the Empress-Regent and the Palikao Ministry at Paris came to an exactly contrary decision, on the ground that the return of the Emperor with MacMahon's army would look like personal cowardice and a mean desertion of Bazaine at Metz. The Empress was for fighting _à outrance_, and her Government issued orders for a national rising and the enrolling of bodies of irregulars, or _francs-tireurs_, to harass the Germans[43]. [Footnote 43: See General Lebrun's _Guerre de 1870: Bazailles-Sedan_, for an account of his corps of MacMahon's army. In view of the events of the late Boer War, it is worth noting that the Germans never acknowledged the _francs-tireurs_ as soldiers, and forthwith issued an order ending with the words, "They are amenable to martial law and liable to be sentenced to death" (Maurice, _Franco-German War_, p. 215).]