This kind of false propaganda had its uses. It could stir up ethnic hatred while lending legitimacy to their cause, allowing the soldiers to commit acts of injustice without the slightest qualm.
But the drawbacks were just as obvious. Once their morale collapsed, ordinary soldiers became so terrified of the suffering they might face if they surrendered that they all chose to flee, scrambling over one another to get away.
As for the French Army's military police, they weren't fools. They would dutifully do their job when there were only a few deserters, but faced with a rout on this scale, only a madman would try to stop it—like a mantis trying to block a chariot.
By then, the French Army's defeat was sealed.
When Lamoricière saw the airships in the sky, he finally couldn't sit still. After all, when the intelligence reports had arrived, he had thought they were just the ravings of those fanatics from the Papal States.
In fact, when he had seen those hot-air balloons earlier, he had already had a vague feeling that perhaps the Austrians might build even larger ones.
But what Lamoricière saw now was a step beyond that. These airships could not only control their direction of flight but also drop bombs on the ground.
Given how helpless the French Army had been against hot-air balloons, it was facing the same outcome against the airships.
Being beaten one-sidedly on the battlefield was far more terrifying than having the battlefield laid bare to one side.
However, the German Allied Forces, which had circled around behind Sarrebourg, now changed tactics. Faced with the French Army's fierce assault, they simply used incendiary shells to set the nearby woods ablaze.
It was true that the Allied Forces' troops behind the French lines were too few to