Military Railroads in the Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War - year 1870

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The confusion on the ground was matched higher up the command chain. Because Niel’s idea of an overriding military commission in charge of the railways had failed to take root, orders for running trains came from everyone and everywhere ranging from the Ministry of War and its various bureaus to local authorities and préfects, right down to officers and non-commissioned officers seeking to prioritize their needs over others. All of these were not averse to threatening railway officials with dire consequences should they disobey, however impractical their orders or trivial their requests: ‘the assumption that trains could be made to operate simply by issuing orders was never abandoned by some high officers, even after painful experience’.

Orders would be countermanded and then reinstated with great frequency. The accumulation of wagons and matériel was legion and their use as storage was widespread, blocking up sidings and preventing their re-use by other parts of the Army. Officers took advantage of the lack of central command to retain wagons both to provide storage for their supplies and to transport their equipment should their regiment be moved. This, of course, was the obvious consequence of the failure to have an overall control system. The needs of one part of the Army were not necessarily concomitant with the efficient pursuit of the conflict: an obvious conclusion, but one which the military command in 1870 seemed unable to comprehend.

The French strategy of invading Prussia before the enemy could mobilize was risky but, as Westwood suggests, ‘it might have won the war if only the French railways had been properly used’. However, they were not. Perhaps the French situation is best summed up by a despairing brigadier – who was in charge of 4,000 men – complaining that when he reached Belfort he had ‘not found my Brigade. Not found General of Division. What should I do? Don’t know where my regiments are.’ Many of the men, it turns out, were having much more fun. Behind the lines, a floating mass of supposedly lost soldiers had built up enjoying the hospitality of the jingoistic locals and making scant effort to find their regiments. The numbers involved were such that a group of up to 5,000 men had accumulated at Reims in eastern France, the capital of Champagne country, and had to be physically restrained from plundering the supplies in the wagons which had accumulated there.

Metz, a few miles from the border, was the destination of much of this early traffic as it was initially the headquarters of the Army. Napoleon went there on 28 July to take control of the newly named Army of the Rhine which was already 200,000 strong and expected to expand as reinforcements arrived. After a series of defeats during August, Metz became besieged and supplies were limited, but the lack of organization on the railways made the situation far worse. Metz, in fact, had a large station with four miles of sidings and should easily have been equal to the task, but right from the start, with the arrival of the first infantry trains, there were delays in detraining owing to the absence of orders, and the supply wagons were mostly simply shunted into the sidings and effectively ‘lost’. According to Pratt, ‘everything was in inextricable confusion. Nobody knew where any particular commodity was to be found or, if they did, how to get the truck containing it from the consolidated mass of some thousands of vehicles.’ Consequently, when Metz eventually fell, the town was still awash with wagons, both full and empty, which the Germans were able to put to use. Pratt estimates that no fewer than 16,000 wagons were captured by the Germans at Metz and other parts of the French rail network, which, as he wrote, meant that ‘not only had the French failed to get from these 16,000 railway wagons the benefit they should have derived from their use but, in blocking their lines with them under such conditions that it was impossible to save them from capture, they conferred a material advantage on the enemy, providing him with supplies, and increasing his own means both of transport and of attack on themselves’.

The strategic importance of Metz led the Germans to draw up contingency plans, knowing that the town was a fortress and expecting, wrongly as it turned out, that the French would retain it well into the war. As a contingency, the Germans allocated 4,000 men to build a twenty-two-mile line around the city using material captured from the French. The railway was not a great success as it had steep inclines, limiting its capacity to just three or four vehicles per train, and sharp curves that resulted in derailments. The only notable structure, a bridge over the Moselle, was so poorly constructed that it was washed away in the autumn rains, but fortuitously for the Germans that was on the day Metz capitulated, obviating the need to rebuild the line.

This ‘Iron Cross Railway’, as it was dubbed by the locals, was an illustration of the thoroughness of the German planning. In contrast to the French, German mobilization had proceeded remarkably smoothly. Even though the Prussians did not, unlike the French, have a standing army, and therefore had to call up all its men, Moltke’s work over the previous four years bore fruit. As van Creveld suggests, ‘it was only necessary to push a button in order to set the whole gigantic machine in motion’. Crucially, Moltke insisted that the soldiers should be got to the front first, and their supplies would follow. The process was helped by the fact that thanks to the layout of the railways, and the work of the line commissions, six railway lines were available to the Prussian forces, and a further three to its allies in southern Germany. Moltke had reckoned they would reduce the time taken to move troops to the French border from twenty-four to twenty days, but in the event, after war was declared, nearly 400,000 men reached the border in just eighteen days after mobilization was put into effect on 14 July (which significantly was before war had even been officially declared). Once mobilization started, the line commissions took over and many normal passenger trains were removed from the schedule in order to prioritize military moves. So effective was the Prussian mobilization that it is possible to argue that the war was actually won before the firing of a single shot, thanks to Moltke’s ability to harness the railways to his military ends. The early battles all ended in a series of defeats for the disorganized French and the war was effectively over with the surrender of half the French army and capture of Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan on 31 August 1870.

After that victory, the Prussians headed west to besiege Paris, though they hardly made use of the railways during this advance. The Germans had expected to fight the war on or around the border and had even prepared contingency plans to surrender much of the Rhineland, whereas in fact they found that, thanks to French incompetence, they were soon heading for the capital. The war, consequently, took place on French rather than German territory, much to the surprise of Moltke, upsetting his transportation plans, which had relied on using Prussia’s own railways. The distance between the front and the Prussian railheads soon became too great to allow for effective distribution, and supplies of food for both men and horses came from foraging and purchases of local produce. This was the result of a failure of planning and a lack of flexibility. The Prussians had expected to use railheads in their own country and did not have sufficiently well worked-out contingency plans to move them forward on to the French railways when that became the obvious solution. However, they were rescued by another piece of luck for Moltke; as his tactics had by good fortune resulted in the troops being spread over a wide arc, it was easier for them to live off the land, which they did with ease as eastern France was fertile. Warfare had returned to the bad old days of a pre-Napoleonic-type of war.

Efforts were made to advance the railheads but the Prussians found that many of the French railways had been rendered unusable thanks to the sabotage at which the French became remarkably adept. The most comprehensive damage was caused to the Nanteuil tunnel on the line between Reims and Paris, which was blown up with great precision by French military engineers who managed to bring down twenty-five meters of tunnel, the explosion filling the remaining structure with fine sand. The Prussians worked for two months to unblock it, but just as they finished, a storm brought down a fresh influx of sand. They then tried to create a detour around the hill by drafting in laborers from Germany as the local population refused to work on the scheme, but even after its completion the trains remained blocked further down the line, at Lagny, near Paris, by French artillery.

This was the pattern throughout much of France. The French demolished large numbers of bridges and tunnels not only on the Est railway, whose area covered most of the battle sites, but also on the main lines of the Nord and, as the conflict spread to the west, the Ouest, the Paris-Orléans and the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée. The destruction was not always successful as there was a reluctance, born of national pride as in Austria, to blow up complete structures and at times commanders delayed pushing the button until too late. Luard, the early historian of the use of railways in war, also suggests that the French missed opportunities to wreak more havoc through guerrilla-type attacks: ‘At one period indeed, there is little doubt that a well-organized raid on the railway between Toul and Blesure [on the main line between Alsace and Paris] would have had every chance of successfully interrupting for some time the main artery by which the supplies of all kind were sent from Germany to the armies before Paris, and might possibly have led to the raising of the siege of that city.’

At other times it was sheer incompetence that left the railways intact: ‘In one case, while engineers were inspecting a bridge prior to laying charges, the train which had brought them steamed off, taking their explosives with it.’ As in the US, the French discovered that simply removing track was ineffective, since the Prussians were not averse to shifting rails from the nearest branch line to replace those which had been removed. It could turn out to be a game of cat and mouse. After the French defeat near Wissembourg on 6 August, the last French train left the nearby railway center at Hagenau at 3 a.m., tearing the tracks up behind it to prevent pursuit, but by the morning of the next day, barely thirty hours afterwards, the first Prussian train arrived on newly relaid track to remove the wounded.

Indeed, instances of retreat always pose the most insuperable problems for the railway managers. Suddenly, hoped-for loading points become unavailable as the enemy invades and lines are cut. The military is always seeking to use the railways until the last available moment while the railway managers want to leave as quickly as possible to ensure the rolling stock is brought to safety rather than left for the enemy to use. And all this is taking place as morale is plummeting and tempers become frayed.

Another reason for the reduced role of the railway after the initial phase of the war was that the fortresses protecting the railways remained a formidable obstacle, despite Moltke’s recognition of this issue in his note to Bismarck after the Austrian war. In the early months of the conflict, several fortresses blocked the main lines towards Paris, preventing the Prussians from operating through-trains. The fortress at Toul in Lorraine was particularly troublesome and it was only when the occupants finally surrendered in September that the siege of Paris could be supplied by rail. Even then, however, because of lack of capacity, the trains were mostly used for ammunition, while the besieging troops had been sent out to forage for food. Other fortresses at Strasbourg and Schlestadt delayed the German advance, but when they were captured at the end of October, the Prussians could finally enter Mulhouse permanently. They had made several earlier forays there which, according to Westwood, ‘were registered by the local railway authorities, who would run the train service when the French held the city, and suspend it when the Prussians were in occupation’. One fortress near the border, Bitche, held out until the end of the war, preventing the Prussians from using a local peripheral line.

The Prussians were hampered, too, by the activities of the francs-tireurs , the guerrilla army of irregulars which sprang up in the wake of the defeat of the conventional forces. The francs-tireurs’ most notable success was the blowing up of a troop train between Reims and Metz in October 1870. This was real Wild West stuff as they laid an improvised mine between the tracks which was detonated by the weight of the locomotive. When the surviving troops tried to flee the wreckage, they were massacred by the French forces waiting in ambush.

In order to draw attention away from their own errors, the Prussians were wont to blame everything on the francs-tireurs and their efforts to counter them led to reprisals that were widely regarded as atrocities by foreign observers. The Prussians hit upon the idea of using local prominent people as hostages on the front of the locomotives of their trains. There was much resistance to this ghastly scheme, even among Prussian officers who, according to the historian John Westwood, would invite the dignitaries into their well-appointed carriages because ‘evidently many felt ashamed of the order and tried to make things easier for the hostages’, not least because it was a particularly harsh winter. In the event, there are no reports of any hostages coming to harm but French prisoners of war were subjected to journeys on open wagons which resulted in their freezing to death. While this may suggest that the strategy was successful, it is more likely that in fact attacks by the guerrilla forces were less frequent than the Prussians had suggested. The Prussians claimed that 100,000 of their troops were needed to guard the railways in France, a figure that was widely quoted at the time but appears to be an overestimate because that would represent nearly 10 per cent of their forces, and, as we have seen, it suited the Prussians to exaggerate the difficulties posed by the francs-tireurs. In another case, Fontenoy, a village which had the misfortune to be near a bridge on the main line between Prussia and Paris destroyed in a successful attack of sabotage, was burned down even though there was no evidence that the villagers had sheltered the guerrillas.

In fact, many of the derailments, minor accidents and track failures were due to the incompetence of the Prussian running of the railway rather than the result of attacks by partisans. Through the invasion, the Prussians gained control of 2,500 miles of French railway but operating it effectively was beyond them. They were, after all, working in a foreign country with strange equipment and with little help from French railway workers, who mostly abandoned their jobs once the Prussians arrived rather than collaborate with the enemy. In such conditions, accidents were inevitable but the francs-tireurs were a useful scapegoat though they could hardly be held responsible for the fact that chimneys kept being knocked off Prussian locomotives because French bridges were too low for them.

A War of Mobilization

Those in France emanated, fan-like, from Paris, while the Prussian/German lines ran mostly on a north-south or east-west axis. In terms of density, the railways were about equal, with Prussia having the fourth most dense in the world and France the fifth. Both types of railway, too, could be harnessed to military objectives, but the east-west lines in Germany proved to be the most important. After the war, both sides accused the other of having constructed their railways with the aim of facilitating war. They were both right to some extent. In neither country did military objectives determine the shape of the network but in both they played a significant part in their development, through negotiation, lobbying and, ultimately, money.

In France, where half a dozen large railway companies had emerged in the 1850s, the railways were privately operated but their construction was supported at times with substantial state investment. The routing of new lines was governed by commissions mixtes consisting of both public and private interests but there were several instances where the Army determined the route of a railway. However, military interests were by no means always paramount as three-way rows developed between the companies, eager solely for profit, the Ministry of War, pushing for the most militarily strategic route, and the Ministry of Finance, worried about the cost of deviating from the commercial solution sought by the private sector.

The same considerations were being assessed over the border in Prussia, by the same players. Military advisers wanted rail lines built under the protection of fortresses, at a safe distance from frontiers and on the ‘opposite’ side of waterways – in other words, the bank furthest from the likely enemy, whose identity was known to both sides long before the start of the war. Money, too, was often a deciding factor, though the military clearly won the argument over the construction of several lines, notably the Ostbahn, which could take troops to and from the north-east.

The Prussians, in fact, were at a disadvantage because they had a far greater number of railway companies, under different state administrations, and there was therefore far less uniformity in the system. The Minister of Railways in Saxony complained rather wittily that it would be ‘to the general good in peacetime, and of benefit to the military man in wartime, if the superintendent met at Cologne was dressed like the superintendent at Köninsberg, and if there was no danger of a Hamburg station inspector being taken for a superintendent of the line by somebody from Frankfurt’. Rather more alarmingly, he added that there were parts of the network on which a white light meant ‘stop’ and others where it signified ‘all clear’, a real risk to the safety of people traveling on the system.

In the run-up to the war, there was widespread feeling in Prussia that the French had the better railways. That was backed up by compelling evidence in a pamphlet, published as late as 1868, by an anonymous Prussian officer who concluded that ‘the overall French [railway] performance exceeds the Prussian by far’. He cited the fact that only a quarter of Prussian lines were double-tracked, compared with over two thirds in France, creating far greater capacity. Moreover, he found that French stations were roomier, allowing faster loading and unloading and that the French had more rolling stock. He also suggested that the domination of the system by half a dozen large companies made it more unified with greater standardization of equipment.

Meanwhile, in France, senior officers who were eager to stir up hostile opinion against Prussia were warning that the French railways were inadequate to the task of defending la Patrie and that the Prussians had the better system. In fact, neutral observers such as van Creveld, the logistics expert, suggest that the French system was better: ‘On practically every account, the French railway system in 1870 was actually better than the German one.’ Nevertheless, even though the anonymous Prussian officer was right, the difference in the two systems would not prove decisive because the French were ultimately let down by their administrative arrangements.

In the late 1860s, as war drew closer, both sides attempted to tailor their railways to the needs of the coming conflict. Moltke was, again, lucky. He had a counterpart in France, Maréchal Adolphe Niel, the Minister of War, whose ‘intentions were quite similar and his vision no less lucid’. Niel, like Moltke, attempted to reorganize the railways to ensure that in the event of war, they would be under central military planning. In this he was supported by his sovereign, Napoleon III, but his reforms stalled in the face of resistance from conservative elements within the government. However, before that opposition could be overcome, Niel died. It was to prove a most untimely death which left a series of half-introduced reforms that would only add to the chaotic situation on the French side after war was declared. Without a man of Niel’s drive to push through change, the central commission he created, which was essential to the military’s ability to take control of the railways in wartime, was more or less forgotten and consequently was not in a position to be activated when war commenced.

In Prussia, the whole approach to war was more scientific and thorough. Moltke had reorganized the Prussian general staff, taking on highly trained military personnel drawn from the cream of army officers. Nothing was left to chance. There was endless analysis and planning, with railway and logistical issues being accorded high priority, and the whole approach was completely unlike the military organization of any other European nation. Nowhere else was there this emphasis on a scientific approach to warfare. This resulted in a bizarre political structure with an army that held a place of almost feudal status in society being supported by a highly technocratic and effective machinery.

As part of this process, Moltke quietly introduced a key reform affecting the railways. The translation of the report written by McCallum on his experience of running the railways for the North in the American Civil War was influential in convincing the Prussians that they must adopt the same structure. On this basis, Moltke was able to push through a reform enabling the military to strengthen its control over the railways, in particular those running on an east-west axis. He created a central committee of civil and military officials attached to the main railway office in Berlin to co-ordinate mobilization in the event of war. Even more crucially, for every major east-west railway across the territory of the North German Confederation – the area effectively controlled by Prussia after the 1866 war – he created individual line commissions controlled by the military which reported to the general staff of the central committee in Berlin. According to Allan Mitchell, the concept was crucial to the war effort because ‘this arrangement removed the principal obstacle to rapid troop movement: the necessity of crossing several state borders or of using the tracks of private companies’. Once war was declared and these commissions took control, it became possible to move soldiers long distances without changing engines or personnel, effectively giving the military control of the railways.

The line commissions remained inactive until the outbreak of war, when their first task was to issue emergency schedules to the key stations along the line. These schedules, which had been prepared in advance, were far more detailed and sophisticated than a simple timetable, setting out precisely the composition of each train, the number of men to be moved and even refreshment stops: ‘The execution of these schedules was to be so precise that many trains would be able to make connections en route, dropping and attaching cars to ensure that units would be complete, in their order of battle, when their trains arrived at the concentration areas.’

The war was actually declared by the French, the culmination of years of tension between the two sides over a variety of issues. The actual casus belli was obscure in the extreme, the candidacy of Leopold, a prince belonging to the Hohenzollern family, the rulers of Prussia, for the throne of Spain, which had been rendered vacant by the Spanish revolution of 1868. Under pressure from Napoleon III, who did not want France to be encircled by a Spanish-Prussian alliance, the candidacy was withdrawn but then the French emperor overplayed his hand, by trying to extract a promise from the Prussians that a Hohenzollern would never sit on the throne of Spain. Bismarck, who had put forward Leopold’s candidacy in the first place, then manipulated the situation by publishing the French demands in an edited form to inflame passions on both sides of the border. Bismarck’s intentions were clear. He felt he needed a war to guarantee the unification of Germany under Prussian control and had long worked towards this outcome. Napoleon, a foolhardy emperor with none of the nous of his illustrious namesake and uncle, was rash enough to declare war on 19 July 1870 despite the thinness of his cause and the fact that Prussian forces were likely to be at least as strong, if not stronger, than the French. He had sprung the trap set by Bismarck, who later, in his memoirs, wrote: ‘I knew a Franco-Prussian war must take place before a united Germany was formed.’

Napoleon’s cause was imperiled right from the outset by the chaotic mobilization of the troops on the French side. It was not the fault of the railway companies. Already, four days before the official outbreak of war, the five big main-line companies – Est, Nord, Ouest, Orléans and Paris-Lyon – had been effectively taken over by the military as they were ordered to place all their equipment and personnel at the disposal of the war ministry. All freight and most passenger services were canceled, the number of telegraph operators doubled and military timetables distributed. Having already made contingency plans, by the next day the Est Company had prepared the first troop train, which was ready for despatch by 5.45 p.m., but the chaos that was to dog the whole French mobilization was already evident. The troops, who were accompanied by the same sort of enthusiastic crowds who were to greet their successors heading for war in 1914, with cries of ‘À Berlin’, had arrived at 2 p.m. only to find that the train was not due to depart for several hours. As a result, they did what such groups of men invariably do: drank their way around the local bars and caused mayhem. By the time the besotted soldiers arrived back at the station, many were collapsing from the effects of alcohol and, more seriously, had lost or given away their ammunition often as ‘souvenirs’, though much of it was later claimed to have supplied the revolutionaries in the following year’s Paris Commune (although that sounds like fanciful military propaganda).

This was a portent of things to come. Sure, nearly a thousand trains were dispatched from Paris over the next three weeks, carrying 300,000 men and 65,000 horses, as well as countless guns, ammunition and supplies. Moreover, the French got to the frontier first. After a mere ten days, 86,000 men had reached the border, while hardly any Prussian soldiers were there to face them on the other side of the Rhine. However, the bare statistics mask an incompetent and ill-organized process that would seriously handicap the entire French war effort. Instead of the tightly planned schedule prepared by the Germans, French regiments were split up because they arrived piecemeal at the stations and men separated from their own commanders were often reluctant to take orders from officers on the train from another regiment. Some trains were dispatched half-full, because of the non-arrival of a company, while others were overloaded as men who had missed their regimental train piled onto the next one. The unwillingness of officers to take control of the boarding and detraining of their men, as required by the regulations, and leaving it to the poor overworked railway officials, added to the confusion and delays. Systems to unload trains might not have been worked out properly, but measures to ensure the provision of coffee to the men at stations with the help of the steam from the locomotive as a kind of improvised espresso machine had been set out in great detail: ‘A receptacle of at least 150 liters is to be taken, in which sugar, coffee and water are placed, with each ration of 24 grams of coffee and 31.05 grams of sugar [it is not explained how such precise measurement can be made!] being allowed 42 centiliters of water. By means of a copper tube of diameter 0.012 meters fitted to a locomotive pressure gauge, a jet of steam is directed into the receptacle, with the tube deep in the water so as to agitate all the liquid. The operation is finished when the steam no longer dissolves…’