In 1870 France embarked on a war with Prussia and her allied German
states that was to be a complete disaster. For Napoleon III, after his
ignominious surrender with thousands of his troops from the Army of the
Rhine and the Army of of Chalons, it meant his abdication and exile. For
France it resulted in the humiliation of her army, a bitter civil war in
Paris, the loss of two Provinces (Alsace and Lorraine) and a heavy
indemnity.
Maarten Otte provides background chapters to place the lead up to the
war and the issues that were involved; he describes the make up of the
opposing armies and some of their principal commanders. The campaign
around Sedan was short, fought in the fag end days of August and early
September 1870, though the war was to drag on for four months. The Sedan
Campaign was fought over a relatively small area and the locations of
some of the key battles have changed little, though some of those near
the built up areas, such as Sedan itself, require some imagination.
After the war several German regiments erected monuments and a
surprising number remain today, often hidden away in isolated fields and
copses. Several communal cemeteries have a number of German graves.
Perhaps one of the most macabre of these is the ossuary in Bazeilles,
where the visitor is able to see skeletons that still have shreds of
uniform and footwear on them.
A notable feature of this battlefield is to see memorials to the
conflicts of the twentieth century - the Great War and the Second World
War - Sedan was a focus of the most recent and most bloody western
European wars.
