The Chief of the Staff was
Major-General Vuillemot; the Provost-General was Colonel Mora, and the
principal aides-de-camp were Captains Marois and de Boisdeffre. Specially
attached to the headquarters service there was a rather numerous picked
force under General Bourdillon. It comprised a regiment of horse gendarmes
and one of foot gendarmes, four squadrons of Chasseurs d'Afrique, some
artillery provided chiefly with mountain-guns, an aeronautical company
under the brothers Tissandier, and three squadrons of Algerian light
cavalry, of the Spahi type, who, with their flowing burnouses and their
swift little Arab horses, often figured conspicuously in Chanzy's escort.
A year or two after the war, I engaged one of these very men--he was
called Saad--as a servant, and he proved most devoted and attentive;
but he had contracted the germs of pulmonary disease during that cruel
winter of 1870-71, and at the end of a few months I had to take him to the
Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris, where he died of galloping
consumption.
The German forces opposed to Chanzy consisted of a part of the so-called
"Armee-Abtheilung" under the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, and the "Second
Army" under Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, the latter including the
3rd, 9th, 10th, and 13th Army Corps, and disposing of numerous cavalry
and nearly four hundred guns.
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