After Wissembourg, General Abel Douay's battered division – now commanded by General Jean Pellé – had reeled away to the southwest in the direction of Strasbourg. After pulling itself together on 5 August, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm's Third Army moved off in Pellé's baggage-strewn wake. Having lost contact with MacMahon, the Prussian crown prince wanted to scour the ground east of the Vosges before turning into the mountains to join the Prussian First and Second Armies on the other side. To do this, he made a difficult change of front southward: the Bavarian II Corps scrambled down the road to Lembach on the right, the Prussian V Corps and XI Corps descended on Woerth and Soultz in the center, and the Württemberg and Baden divisions – commanded by the Prussian General August von Werder – moved up on the left at Aschbach.

The roads were difficult with ascending ranges of wooded hills that only occasionally opened on to fields of corn or tobacco before the woods or vineyards closed in again. At first, the crown prince and his staff chief, General Albrecht von Blumenthal, assumed that MacMahon was running for cover in the fortress of Strasbourg. Late on the 5th, however, a Totenkopf hussar rode through Woerth, noted barricades on the road to Froeschwiller, dismounted, swam across the Sauer, had a long look at MacMahon's sprawling position, and galloped back to headquarters.