October 16, 1793.
The long-prepared Luxembourg surrender ceremony officially commenced in Diekirch.
This place lay more than twenty kilometers from Rodeshausen, where the Allied Forces had actually surrendered. However, Rodeshausen was simply too desolate, so the General Staff Headquarters decided to hold it instead in Diekirch, Luxembourg's second-largest city.
Journalists from various countries had long since claimed the best spots along both sides of the road. Art dealers, having sniffed out a business opportunity, dispatched large numbers of painters, all poised to record this historic moment.
Behind them crowded more than five thousand spectators. Diekirch had fewer than thirty thousand residents in all, yet at this moment, the city was nearly empty of everyone.
At ten in the morning, amid a blend of organ, bugle, flute, and War Drum music, several Prussian Black Eagle Banners appeared before the crowd.
Though the blue-gray Military Uniforms of the Prussian soldiers were tattered, they still carried Flintlock Guns and marching packs on their backs. Their formation was exceptionally neat, even maintaining parade-ground spacing. They hardly looked like a defeated army.
On one hand, this was because the Prussians placed excessive emphasis on formation drills—more than seventy percent of their daily training consisted of practicing formations, leaving the soldiers with deeply ingrained muscle memory for lining up.
On the other hand, it was Joseph's demand. He wanted to display the Prussian Army's "martial splendor." The stronger the enemy appeared, the greater the impact when they surrendered.
The surrender column was extremely long. It took over an hour for them all to arrive at the ceremony grounds under the "escort" of more than a thousand French Army cavalrymen.
In truth, there were only a little over seven thousand Allied Forces soldiers here. The rest had long been dispersed among prisoner camps elsewhere. Otherwise, cramming more