[Footnote 1:  Victor Hugo, Choses vues.]

“It was there,” says Victor Hugo, “no one could guess what for, without order, without discipline, a mere crowd of men, waiting, as it seemed, to be seized by an immensely powerful hand.  It seemed to be under no particular anxiety.  The men who composed it knew, or thought they knew, that the enemy was far away.  Calculating four leagues as a day’s march, they believed the Germans to be at three days distance.  The commanders, however, towards nightfall, made some preparations for safety.  The whole army formed a sort of horse-shoe, its point turning towards Sedan.  This disposition proved that its chiefs believed themselves in safety.  The valley was one of those which the Emperor Napoleon used to call a ‘bowl,’ and which Admiral Van Tromp designated by a less polite name.  No place could have been better calculated to shut in an army.  Its very numbers were against it.  Once in, if the way out were blocked, it could never leave it again.  Some of the generals,—­General Wimpfen among them—­saw this, and were uneasy; but the little court around the emperor was confident of safety.  ‘At worst,’ they said, ’we can always reach the Belgian frontier.’  The commonest military precautions were neglected.  The army slept soundly on the night of August 31.  At the worst they believed themselves to have a line of retreat open to Mezieres, a town on the frontier of Belgium.  No cavalry reconnoissance was made that night; the guards were not doubled.  The French believed themselves more than forty miles from the German army.  They behaved as if they thought that army unconcentrated and ill-informed, attempting vaguely several things at once, and incapable of converging on one point, namely, Sedan.  They thought they knew that the column under the Prince of Saxony was marching upon Chalons, and that the Crown Prince of Prussia was marching upon Metz.

“But that night, while the French army, in fancied security, was sleeping at Sedan, this is what was passing among the enemy.

“By a quarter to two A. M. the army of the Prince of Saxony was on its march eastward, with orders not to fire a shot till five o’clock, and to make as little noise as possible.  They marched without baggage of any kind.  At the same hour another division of the Prussian army marched, with equal noiselessness, from another direction, on Sedan, while the Wuertemburgers secured the road to Mezieres, thereby cutting off the possibility of a retreat into Belgium.

“At the same moment, namely, five o’clock,—­on all the hills around Sedan, at all points of the compass, appeared a dense, dark mass of German troops, with their commanders and artillery.  Not one sound had been heard by the French army, not even an order.  Two hundred and fifty thousand men were in a circle on the heights round the Sink of Givonne.  They had come as stealthily and as silently as serpents.  They were there when the sun rose, and the French army were prisoners.”