THE WAR IN EUROPE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 720, 13 September 1870, Page 4

THE WAR IN EUROPE.

♦ WHAT LED TO THE WAR. {From the Argus Correspondent.') Pabis, July 15. We, and with us the whole of Europe, are about to undergo a shock the result of which so tongue can foretell, and whose consequences are beyond the power of human calculation. Perhaps -while I write these lines war is officially declared between France and Prussia. I might say, it is declared already; the needful orders are given, armies and fleets are in motion, and on each side of the Bhine 300,000 men are facing one another, armed as never armies have been, ready and eager to hurtle one against another in one dreadful and all-destructive onslaught. How this crisis arose, which, in a few weeks, not to say days— quotes rapiunt scelerata in pralia causa ? — has unhinged the minds of nations, and changed the face of the continent, I will endeavour to set before you in a brief but true account, relating day by day the events as they occurred. You will perhaps, recollect, if you have still present in your memory the passage of my last letter relating to the various candidateships for the throne of Spain, that Marshal Prim, in the Cortes on the 11th June, after recounting his fruitless Odyssey in quest of a king, alluded to another candidate, and obscurely hinted that he had great hopes of bis acceptance. This declaration had passed almost unnoticed. Nobody had inquired or seemed to care who this mysterious personage might be who, at the appointed hour was to appear in obedience to the magic call of Prim, and like a "Veus ex machina," put an end to the imbroglio of Spanish affairs; when all of a sudden, on the 4th of July, some most sensational intelligence, brought on the wings of the telegraph, came to astound all Paris. These tidings were that a deputation had just set out for Madrid on a visit to Prince Leopold de Hohenzollern-Zigmaringcn, to whom the crown of Spain had been offered, and by whom it had been accepted. This was the candidate held in reserve by Prim, whom nobody had thought of, whose name had been unmentioned by anybody, but whose name I had, however, written to you at full length in my letter of the 18th June, informed as I had been of it by my own correspondents. I am personally acquainted with Prince Leopold, and have been, on account of certain events in another country, in direct communication with his father and sundry members of his family. When I wrote to you concerning the enthronement of Prince Charles of Roumania, *I explained the situation and alliances of this family. They belong to the elder branch of the Hohenzollerns, the younger branch of which house now occupies the throne of Prussia, and are allied by marriage with the greater part of the reigning families of Europe; more especially so with the Imperial family of France, through the Murats and the Beauhamais. Prince Leopold, who is wedded to a sister of the King of Portugal, is the elder brother of Prince Charles of Roumania, and has a sister married to the Count of Flanders, brother to the King of Belgium. But with all these connexions be is nevertheless and above all a Prussian prince, a member of the Royal Family of Prussia, and a colonel in the Prussian army. This it was which so deeply stirred the public opinion in France, which saw in this candidate, so suddenly and mysteriously evoked some hidden and underhand connivance between Madrid and Berlin, fraught with peril and threatening to France. And, in good Booth, the first intelligence did not reach the public ear through the usual official channel, but through a private medium. Prince Leopold, after writing his acceptation of the proffered crown, communicated the document to his aunt, a princess of Baden, who telegraphed the intelligence to the Princess Margaret, the wife of Don Carlos, at that moment at Yevey, in Switzerland ; this Princess sent the tidings to a legitimist paper of Paris, the Gazette de France, by which it was published in the number of the 4th July, and only in the evening of that day, when the Paris telegraph informed Marshal Prim that his secret was divulged, did he make an official announcement of his intentions to our unsuspecting ambassador. The sensation produced in Paris by the disclosure of these secret goings on grew stronger every moment, and a deputy gave warning on the sth of bis intention to put a question thereupon to the Government the very next day. On the 6th, the Due de Grammont, our Minister of Foreign Affairs, stood up and read aloud the following declaration, which I translate literally from the Journal Officitl :— tf I rise to reply to the question put to the Government yesterday by the honourable M. Cochery. It is true that Marshal Prim has offered to Prince Leopold de Hohenzollern the crown of Spain, and that the Prince has accepted it. But the Spanish nation has not hitherto expressed its consent, nor are we acquainted with the true particulars of this negotiation which has betn kept a secret from us. A debate at the present moment can therefore lead to no practical end, and we beg you to adjourn it. We have never ceased to show our sympathy to the Spanish nation, and have carefully avoided whatever might savour of an undue interference with the domestic affairs of a great and noble nation invested with the full exercise of its sovereignty; with regard to the various pretenders to the throne, we have never swerved from the strictest neutrality, taking good heed not to evince for any one of them either preference or antagonism. This line of conduct we shall steadily pursue, but we do not think that our respect for the rights of a neighbouring nation obliges us to allow a foreign power, by seating one of his princes on the throne of Charles V., to overthrow to our prejudice the present equilibrium of Europe (loud cheering), and thus imperil the interests and the honour of France. (Loud and continued cheering.) This contingency, we firmly hope, will never be realised, and to preclude such an event we rely both on the wisdom of the Ger-

man nation and on the friendship of the people of Spain. Were it otherwise, full of reliance on your support, gentlemen, and on that of the whole nation, we shall boldlj and unhesitatingly do our duty. (General sensation and repeated cheers.) There was no mistaking this language, nor did the public misinterpret it in the least ; the declaration was a most solemn one. Not only was Spain alluded to, hut Prussia herself was called to the bar of France, and summoned to give a speedy and categorical explanation of her behaviour, or else war was at hand. I do not pretend to pronounce a judgment either on the tenor or the tone of this declaration, nor inquire whether it was made at a timely moment, and whether the contingency whose realisation was said to be feared did not become thereby more imminent. I merely state the immense echo which was given to it throughout France, who immediately, and as if mored by an electric shock, was up and in arms. lam no admirer of war ; I look upon it as monstrous and hateful, more especially in the conditions now brought about by the new inventions, which make the poor soldier more and more, in the energetic language of the people, " food for powder." I was present the other day at a trial made of one of these destructive engines, the invention of which is ascribed to the Emperor himself, and which are called mitrailleuses (grape shot shooters). In a large space of ground set apart for reviews, near Versailles, had been assembled some 500 horses, broken down, worn out by age, in a word, just ready for the knackers; two of these mitrailleuses, and only two, were brought up ; the signal was given, and within 45 seconds the mangled bodies of 300 horses lay strewn upon the ground, horrible to see I What, then, will it be when the mark shot at will be the breasts of men — young and Btrong and full of life; and that on both Bides, for the Prussians have also their mitrailleuses 1 The dead will be numbered by hundreds of thousands — a million of families will mourn their lost ones, and only the vultures will be satisfied. This is what I have been saying to myself for several days with a feeling of the deepest anguish, yet cannot help being struck with the enthusiasm for war which I see all round me, and the influence of which is more or less felt by every one. The instinct of the mass is stronger than all the reasoning of the philosophers. M. de Grammont's declaration was, thanks to the telegraph, known the same day at Madrid and at Ems, where the King of Prussia then was. The next day the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs addressed a circular to all the diplomatic agents of Spain abroad, setting down the motives whioh had induced Marshal Prim to offer the Crown to Prince Leopold. M. Sagasta affirmed that the Government of the Regent had negotiated with Prince Leopold personally, thus seeming to deny any participation of Prussia in the matter, which was inexact— that " his Government had deemed it contrary to his honour to submit to the influence of any foreign Cabinet whatever." He added that the Prince selected " was of age, and his own master," which also was inexact, as we shall presently see, since be was dependent both on the King of Prussia, as the head of the family, and upon his own father, as chief of the elder branch ; and " that the relationship of the Prince with most of the reigning sovereigns of Europe precluded all idea of hostility to any one of them." The note refuted in this way the ideas of M. de Grammont, but made no direct allusion to his speech of the day before. But the bitch was not there ; it waß in Prussia. A courier had been sent to M. Benedetti, our ambassador at Berlin, with instructions from our court to repair immediately to Ems, and to enter into negotiation with King William himself, with a view to obtain the withdrawal of Prince Leopold's candidateship, and thus do away with all further complication. At the same time the Prussian ambassador, Baron de Werther, set out for the same destination. The answers of Prussia — so far at least as we are able to judge from the despatches published up to the present hour — were evasive, and of a natura to prolong the debate. It is not likely that the King wished for war, or that he would have engaged in the affair, had he thought he should arouse to such a pitch the susceptibility of the French nation, but it was now incumbent on him to find some means to get honourably out of it, or to gain time to make ready for war, should war become unavoidable. There seemed to be an easy and convenient way of settling the dispute, the voluntary desistence of Prince Leopold himself. Prince Antony, of Hohenzollern, father to Prince Leopold, was summoned to Ems, where, on the 11th mat., a family council was held. .What was said or done in this council we know not. But bo it waß that the next day Prince Anthony announced by a telegram to Marshal Prim, at Madrid, and to M. Olozaga, the Spanish Ambassador at Paris, that he renounced for his son the crown of! Spain. As there exists a particular rule which forbids each and every member of the Hohenzollern Sigmaringen branch to take any important engagement without being authorised thereto by the head of the family, this renunciation made by the father in his son's name, was as serious and as true to law as would have been a renunciation made by Prince Leopold himself, who, during all this time, was quietly drinking the waters in a small German watering place, and does not appear even to have had the slightest share in the family council held at Ems. The tidings reached Paris about noon, and were announced undiaguieedly in the lobby of the Legislative Assembly by the Prime Minister, producing a considerable rise in the funds. Peace seemed certain, .and the next morning the Constitutiorinel sang loud paeans in honour , of this triumph of the French policy. In the meantime no official communication had yet been made to Purliament, nor to the country i at large ; and every one expected ; that M. de Grammont would on the morrow i make a declaration of some sort or other; and so indeed he did, to the following effect:

— " The information I am able to give to the Assembly concerning the affair Hohenzollern is as follows: — Yesterday the Ambassador of Spain signified to us Prince Leopold "Von Hohenzollern's renunciation of the crown of Spain — (sensation). The negotiations we are carrying on with Prussia, and which have no other end in view, are not yet concluded. It is therefore impossible for us to speak of them, nor can we at present lay before the Assembly and the country at large an account of the whole affair. Nothing was concluded. The incident lloheDzollern was., ended, Spain completely disengaged, but) Prussia still remained, and negotiations were still being carried on. What negotiations, and wherefore ? Listen I It would appear from the last " official " declarations made by the King of Prussia to M. Benedetti, that the monarch had really given to Prince Leopold the authorisation solicited by him to become a suitor for the throne of Spain, but that that authorisation he had given in his quality of feudal chief of the House of Hohenzollern, and not in his quality of King of Prussia; that his Government had been a stranger to the whole affair; that he had been far from ascribing to it the gravity and importance which the sensation it had created in France tended to attach to it throughout Europe ; that he had not the slightest wish to make of this candidature a cause of war between the two powers ; that, besides the candidate having now been withdrawn, the consent by him given naturally disappeared with it, and ought consequently to be considered as null and void. This answer was not looked upon as satisfactory by the French Government, who would fain have obtained from the King of Prussia a pledge never to renew his authorisation should Prince Leopold at any time wish to call back his renouncement. Additional instructions have been sent to our ambassador to that effect, with orders to require an immediate reply; and according to the latest intelligence M Benedetti has twice requested an audience of the King, nnd has been refused, the King having informed him through one of his aides-de-camp that he had nothing more to say to him. Should this be true, and we shall be completely edified thereupon so soon as M. Benedetto's written despatch is in our hands we are safe for war. The despatch must have arrived this morning, and to-day the declaration of war is expected to be read both to the Senate and the Legislative Assembly. This evening and to-morrow morning I shall forward to you the latest intelligence. Jolt 15, Evening. The die is cast, and war declared. To-day the Senate met, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs read aloud a declaration, the official copy of which I enclose in the original French, time being wanting to give you a complete translation. It narrates with great perspicuity and precision the different stages of the affair since its origin. This summary account is in almost every respect similar to that I have given you in the early part of this letter. It tends, as you will observe, to throw upon the King cf Prussia himself the responsibility of the rupture. I transcribe the last paragraphs of the declaration: — "I re quested the King," wrote M. Benedetti on the 13th July, at midnight, "to allow me to inform you in his name that if the Prince of Hohenzollern should resume his design, His Majesty would interpose his authority and forbid it. The King positively declined allowing me to make such a declaration. I strongly insisted, but was unable to modify the dispositions of bis Majesty. The King put an end to our interview by saying that he neither could nor would make such an engagement, and that he was bound, with respect to this contingency, as to all others, to regulate his conduct by circumstances Our surprise was great on hearing yesterday that the King of Prussia had given notice by an aide-de-camp to our ambassador that he should not receive him any more ; and that, in order to give an unequivocal character to his refusal, his Government had notified it officially to the different courts of Europe. (Prolonged murmur*.) " Under such circumstances, to seek further to conciliate matters would have been forgetfulness of our own dignity and sheer imprudence. We, therefore, yesterday called in our reserves, and, with your assistance, we are about to take the necessary steps to safeguard the interest, the security, and honour of France." ("Bravo, bravo !") This declaration waß receifed by loud and continued cheering, while enthusiastic ehouts of " Vive la France !'' "Vive I'Emperenr !" were uttered by the senators themselves and by the visitors in the galleries. The President then rose. Gentlemen Senators, he said, we have now only, through the help of God and our own courage, confidently to look forward to the succcbb of our cause. At the same hour the Prime Minister, M. Ollivicr, read to the Legislative Assembly a similar declaration, which he terminated by requesting, in the name of the Minister of war, an urgent vote of supplies both of men and money. The vote waß immediately taken by sitting and standing. The whole Assembly, with the exception of the Left, rose with enthusiastic shouts of "Vive la F:ance! Vive l'Empereur !" I here pause in my chronicle. What feoots it here to speak to you of the theatres and fashions, of the town and the court, or even of the abdication of the Queen of i-pain, a refugee in Paris, in favour of her son Alfonso XII., or of the petition of the Prince of Orleans, unavailingly soliciting from the Legislative Assembly the abrogation of the law's which, in 1848 and 1849, have condemned their family to exile ; or even of the GDcumenical Council, which voted the day before yesterday the infallibility of the Pope, with 450 votes for, 88 against, and 62 conditional votes. In presence of the immense struggle just begun all other questions fade into insignificance. July 16, 9 o'clock. A stormy debate arose last night in the Legislative Assembly after the declaration of the Minister, VI. Thiirs and several deputies '

having called for the production of the documents, which, according to the Government rendered war a necessity, and more especially the last despatches attesting that an insult had been deliberately offered to our ambassador. The House passed on to the previous question by 83 against 164. Then were voted unanimously (save one dissentient voice) a credit of 50 millions of francs for the war department and IS millions for the navy. Hostilities are expected to begin in two or three days. The Emperor takes the command of the army, and sets out, it is said, tomorrow.