'The first section of eight chapters opens with allusion to the trifling defeats on the frontier, it shows the Seventh Corps crowded back on to Rheims; but the principal subject of these chapters is the terrible march from Rheims to Sedan. It is an epic event, pregnant with the irony of fate, and, to my thinking, one of the most tragic military episodes that history records. There is no fighting described in this part; indeed, the only battle that I describe is Sedan. The tragedy lies in the exposition of the faults that gradually led up to the terrible disaster. The reader follows the movements of this ill-fated corps, knowing what a terrible shadow of defeat, disaster, and death overhangs it. It was a wonderful corps, and the way it was managed was wonderful in its crass stupidity.
'My second part is entirely devoted to a description of the battle of Sedan in all its phases, seen from all sides. I have omitted nothing which can help to a comprehension of that enormous episode in the histories of France and of the world. Now we are with Napoleon, now with the Emperor of Germany, now with the _bourgeois_ of Sedan, now with the Francs-tireurs in the woods. Each movement of troops that contributed to the final _dénouement_ is exposed. I have endeavoured to be complete, but as I have said, I had too little space for the immense amount of material in my hands. I have also endeavoured to speak the plain truth without either fear or favour. The reader will be aroused to compassion with the sufferings, bodily and mental, of the heroic and martyred army, just as he will be aroused to indignation at the conduct of its chiefs, which fell little short of downright dementia. It has been my duty to be severely critical, and I have not shrunk from the responsibility of wounding, where it was right and just to do so, susceptibilities which I see no reason for respecting. I dare say there will be some outcry at my blame, but I am indifferent, having spoken the truth.
'The last part of my novel is played out in Sedan, after the battle. From thence the reader follows the rest of the history of the war as it develops itself in other parts of France, until it culminates in the outbreak of the Commune and the final collapse of Paris in a sea of fire and an ocean of blood. The last chapter of the book is an account of Paris in flames, of Paris with its gutters running with blood. I hope by this means to produce a gradation of effect--the catastrophe of Sedan, which ends the second part, followed up by the still greater catastrophe of the last chapter. To resume: The first part of my novel is the march from Rheims to Sedan; the second is the catastrophe of Sedan, from inception to _dénouement_; and the third the collapse not of Paris alone, but of the whole of old-time France, with the _dénouement_ of the burning of Paris, the flames of which clear away not only an old _régime_, but a whole psychological state, and prepare a fresh field for a new and regenerated people. For observe, that my book, as far as outward construction goes, divided into three parts, may also be divided into a novel of historical and a novel of psychological interest. It tells a tale of many adventures, but it also aims to give a full list of psychological studies of French society as it was at the outbreak of the war.