Bismarck slept in a hayloft after Gravelotte, woke the next morning and rode across the battlefield with American General Phil Sheridan. Sheridan recalled that they swigged from a bottle of brandy while riding through the “awful carnage.” The “sight was sickening to an extreme,” and the chancellor veered squeamishly into the gaps between the corpses on the way up to Moscou and Leipzig. Lower-ranking Prussians were not so fortunate; they spent the day after Gravelotte burying their dead and dragging their wounded to makeshift field hospitals. For many, already pushed to the limit by fear, thirst, hunger, and exhaustion, burial duty, not combat, was the most harrowing experience of the war. The men dug mass graves and filled them with 9,000 decomposing corpses. For at least one German officer, the memory was inexpugnable, pursuing him even in his sleep long after the war: “The battles, the shooting, the freezing winter bivouacs: all those things I've long since forgotten, but not the interment of the dead at St. Privat; that was so ghastly that it still wakes me in the middle of the night.”

Bazaine meanwhile awoke from his lethargy and finished herding his broken army off the plateau of Amanvillers. Defeat and retreat seemed to enliven the marshal. In the course of 19–20 August, the 140,000-man Army of the Rhine retreated to Metz, staking out a vast semicircular encampment between Plappeville and the Moselle.