Metz capitulated one month after Strasburg, Oct. 27, 1870.  Three marshals of France, six thousand officers, and one hundred and seventy-three thousand men surrendered to the Germans.  Many were entirely demoralized; but the Garde Imperiale, a body of picked troops, was faithful to the last.

“That a vast army which had given ample proof of military worth in the two great battles of Gravelotte, and which moreover possessed the support of the most important stronghold in France, should have permitted a scarcely superior enemy to hem it in and to detain it for weeks, making no earnest attempt to escape, and finally, at the conqueror’s bidding, should have laid down its arms without striking a blow, would before the event,” says an English military authority, “have seemed impossible.  It set the investing force free to crush the new-made Army of the Loire, and it occurred in the nick of time to prevent the raising of the siege of Paris, which the Germans had in contemplation.”

Smaller places held out nobly,—­Phalsbourg in Alsace, and Thionville and Toul, but above all Belfort.  Garibaldi was there with a considerable body of Italians and a contingent of two hundred well-armed Greeks.  There was great jealousy of Garibaldi and his Italians in the Southern army, and their outrageous conduct towards priests and churches set against them the women and the peasantry.

Belfort never surrendered.  But the army under Bourbaki, called the Army of the East, nearly a hundred thousand strong, suffered horribly in the latter days of the struggle.  It was not included in the armistice made at the close of January, 1871, between Bismarck and Jules Favre, for Favre was in total ignorance of its position.  Bourbaki attempted suicide.  His soldiers, shoeless, tentless, and unprovided with provisions, pushed into the defiles of the Jura in the depths of one of the coldest winters ever known in Europe, hoping to escape into Switzerland.  Eighty thousand men made their way over the mountains; fifteen thousand were made prisoners.  A few escaped to their homes.  A correspondent who saw them after they reached safety, said,—­

“In all of them, pinched features and a slouching gait told of gnawing hunger, while their hollow voices told of nights spent on snow and frozen ground.  Some had tied bits of wood under their bare feet to keep them from the stones.  For weeks none had washed, or changed their clothes.  Their hands were black as Africans’.  For three days neither food nor fodder had been served out to them, and before that they had only got one four-pound loaf among eight men.”

While men were thus suffering in the mountains, an event of the greatest political importance was taking place at Versailles.  On January 19, a week before the capitulation of Paris, the king of Prussia received a deputation from the German Reichstag, offering him the imperial crown of Germany.