Undoubtedly the princ.i.p.al one of these was Napoleon"s error in believing that he could make war in the north of Europe, before ending that which had been going on for a long time in Spain, where his armies were suffering serious reverses, at a time when he was preparing to invade Russian territory. The soldiers of French nationality, being thus spread from north to south, were in insufficient numbers everywhere. Napoleon thought he could supplement them by joining to their battalions those of his allies, but this was to dilute a good wine with muddy water. The quality of the French divisions was lowered, the allied troops were never better than mediocre, and it was they, who, during the retreat, sowed disorder in the Grande Armee.
A no less fatal cause of our defeat was the inadequacy, or indeed the total lack of organisation in the occupied countries. Instead of doing as we had done during the campaigns of Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, and leaving behind the advancing army small bodies of troops which, stretching back in echelon, could keep in regular touch with one another to ensure tranquillity in our rear, to expedite the forwarding of munitions and individual soldiers and the departure of convoys of wounded, we unwisely pushed all our available forces towards Moscow, so that between that city and the Nieman, if one excepts Wilna and Smolensk, there was not one garrison, nor storage depot, nor hospital. Two hundred leagues of countryside were left to roving bands of Cossacks. The result of this was that men who had recovered from illness were unable to rejoin their units, and as there was no system of evacuation, we had to keep all the wounded from the battle for Moscow in the monastery of Kolotskoi for more than two months. They were still there at the time of the retreat and were nearly all taken prisoner, while those who felt able to follow the army died of exhaustion and cold on the roads. Finally, the retreating troops had no supply of stored food in a country which produces vast amounts of grain.
This lack of small garrisons in our rear was the reason why of the more than 100,000 prisoners taken by the French during the campaign, not a single one left Russia, because there was no way in which they could be pa.s.sed back from hand to hand. All these prisoners escaped with ease and made their way back to the Russian army, which thus recovered some of its losses, while ours increased from day to day.
The absence of interpreters also contributed to our disasters, more than you might think. How, for example can one obtain information about an unknown country, if one cannot exchange a single word with the inhabitants? When, on the bank of the Beresina, General Partouneaux mistook the road, and instead of taking that leading to Studianka, took the one leading to General Wittgenstein"s position, he had with him a peasant from Borisoff who, not knowing a word of French, tried to indicate by signs that the encampment was Russian, but, as he was not understood, through lack of an interpreter we lost a fine division of 7 or 8000 men.
In very similar circ.u.mstances, during October, the 3rd Lancers, taken by surprise, in spite of the advice of their guide, whom they did not understand, lost two hundred men. Now the Emperor had in his army some bodies of Polish cavalry, nearly all of whose officers and most of their N.C.O.s. spoke fluent Russian; but they were left in their regiments whereas some should have been taken, from each unit, and attached to generals and colonels, where they would have been extremely useful. I consider the provision of interpreters an important but often neglected element in military operations.
I have already commented on the major mistake that was made in forming the two wings of the army from the Prussian and Austrian contingents. The Emperor must have greatly regretted this, firstly on learning that the Austrians had given pa.s.sage to the Russian army of Tchitchakoff, who then cut our line of retreat on the banks of the Beresina, and secondly when told of the treachery of General York, the head of the Prussian Corps. His regret must have increased further during and after the retreat, for if he had formed the two wings from French troops and had taken to Moscow the Austrians and Prussians, the two latter, having suffered their share of the hardships and the casualties would have been as much enfeebled as all the other corps, while Napoleon would have kept intact the French troops he had left on the two wings. I would go even further and say that to weaken Prussia and Austria Napoleon should have required from them contingents triple or quadruple the size of those which they contributed. It has been said with hindsight that neither of the two states would have complied with such a demand, but I disagree.
The King of Prussia who had come to Dresden to beg the Emperor to accept his son as an aide-de-camp would not have dared to refuse, while Austria, in the hope of recovering some of the rich provinces which Napoleon had s.n.a.t.c.hed from her would have done everything to satisfy him. The overconfidence which Napoleon had, in 1812, in the fidelity of those two states was his undoing.
It is often claimed that the fire of Moscow, for which praise is given to the courage and resolve of the Russian government and General Rostopschine, was the princ.i.p.al cause of the failure of the 1812 campaign. This a.s.sertion seems to me to be contestable. To begin with the destruction of Moscow was not so complete that there did not remain enough houses, palaces, churches and barracks to accommodate the entire army, and there is evidence of this in a report which I have seen in the hands of my friend General Gourgaud, who was then princ.i.p.al aide-de-camp to the Emperor. It was not therefore lack of shelter which forced the French to quit Moscow.
Many people think that it was the fear of food shortage, but this is also erroneous, for reports made to the Emperor by M. le Comte Daru, the quartermaster-general of the army, show that even after the fire there was in the city an immense quant.i.ty of provisions, which would have supplied the army for six months, so it was not the prospect of starvation which decided the Emperor to retreat. These facts would appear to indicate that the Russian government had failed to achieve its aim, if this was indeed the aim it was pursuing; but in reality, its aim was quite different.
The court wished in fact to deliver a mortal blow to the ancient aristocracy of the Boyars by destroying the city which was the centre for their continual opposition. The Russian government, although entirely despotic, has to pay much attention to the great n.o.bles, whose displeasure has cost several emperors their lives. The richest and most powerful of these n.o.blemen made Moscow the backdrop for their intrigues, so the government, more and more alarmed at the growth of the city, saw in the French invasion an opportunity for its destruction. General Rostopschine, who was one of the authors of this plan, was entrusted with its execution, the blame for which he later laid on the French. The aristocracy was not taken in, it accused the government so loudly and manifested so much discontent at the useless burning of its palaces that the Emperor Alexander, to avoid a personal catastrophe, was obliged not only to permit the rebuilding of the city, but to banish Rostopschine who, in spite of his protestations of patriotism, died in Paris, hated by the Russian n.o.bility.
Whatever the motives may have been for the fire of Moscow, I think that its preservation would have been more harmful than useful to the French, for in order to control a city inhabited by some 300,000 citizens always ready to revolt, it would have been necessary to take from the army, and place as a garrison in Moscow, 50,000 men, who, when the time came to retreat, would have been a.s.sailed by the inhabitants, whereas the fire having driven out almost all the populace, a few patrols were enough to ensure tranquillity.
The only influence which Moscow had on the events of 1812 was due to the fact that Napoleon was unable to understand that Alexander could not sue for peace without being a.s.sa.s.sinated by his subjects, and believed that to leave the city without a treaty would be to admit that he was not able to hold on to it. The French Emperor insisted, therefore, on staying as long as possible in Moscow, where he wasted more than a month waiting in vain for a proposal of peace. This delay was fatal for it allowed the winter to become established before the French army could go into cantonments in Poland. Even if Moscow had been preserved intact it would not have made any difference; the disaster arose because the retreat was not prepared in advance and was carried out at the wrong time. It was not difficult to forecast that it would be very cold in Russia during the winter, but I repeat, the hope of a peace misled Napoleon and was the sole cause of his long stay in Moscow.
The losses suffered by the Grande Armee were enormous, but they have been exaggerated. I have already said that I have seen a situation report, covered with notes in Napoleon"s hand, which gives the figure of those who crossed the Nieman as 325,000, of whom 155,000 were French. Reports issued in February 1813 gave the number of French who returned across the Nieman as 60,000, added to this figure can be that of 30,000 prisoners returned by the Russians after the peace of 1814. Giving a total loss of French lives of 65,000.
The loss inflicted on my regiment was in proportion much smaller.
At the beginning of the campaign we had 1018 men in the ranks and we received 30 reinforcements at Polotsk, so that I took into Russia 1048 troopers. Of this number I had 109 killed, 77 taken prisoner, 65 injured and 104 missing. This amounted to a loss of 355 men, so that after the return of the men whom I had sent to Warsaw, the regiment, which from the bank of the Vistula had been sent beyond the Elbe to the princ.i.p.ality of Dessau, had in the saddle 693 men, all of whom had fought in the Russian campaign.
When he saw this figure, the Emperor, who from Paris was supervising the reorganising of his army, thought it was a mistake, and sent the report back to me with an order to produce a corrected version. When I returned the same figure once more, he ordered General Sebastiani to go and inspect my regiment and give him a nominal roll of the men present. This operation having removed all doubt, and confirmed my report, I received a few days later a letter from the Major-general couched in the most flattering terms and addressed to all officers and N.C.O.s and particularly to me, in which Prince Berthier stated that he had been directed by the Emperor to express his Majesty"s satisfaction at the care we had taken of our men"s lives, and his praise for the conduct of all our officers and N.C.O.s.
After having had this letter read out before all the squadrons, I had intended to keep it as a precious memento for my family, but on further consideration, I decided that it would not be right to deprive the regiment of a doc.u.ment in which was expressed the Emperor"s satisfaction with all its members, so I sent it to be included in the regimental archive. I have frequently repented of this, for scarcely a year had pa.s.sed before the government of Louis XVIII was subst.i.tuted for that of the Emperor, and the 23rd Cha.s.seurs was combined with the 3rd. The archives of the two regiments were collected together, badly cared for, and after the total disbanding of the army in 1815, they disappeared into the yawning gulf of the war office. I tried in vain, after the revolution of 1830, to recover this letter, which was so flattering to my old regiment and to me, but it could not be found.
Chap. 22.
The year 1813 began very badly for France. The remains of our army, returning from Russia, had scarcely crossed the Vistula and started to reorganise, when the treachery of General York and the troops under his command forced us to retire beyond the Elbe, and shortly to abandon Berlin and all of Prussia, which rose against us, helped by the units which Napoleon had imprudently left there. The Russians speeded up their march as much as possible, and came to join the Prussians, whose King now declared war on the French Emperor.
Napoleon had in northern Germany no more than two divisions, commanded, it is true, by Augereau, but consisting mainly of conscripts. As for those French troops who had fought in Russia, once they were well fed and no longer slept on the snow, they recovered their strength, and could have been used oppose the enemy; but our cavalry were almost all without horses, very few infantrymen had kept their weapons, we had no artillery, the majority of the soldiers had no footwear and their uniform was in rags. The government had employed part of the year 1812 in making equipment of all sorts, but owing to the negligence of the war department, then in the hands of M. Lacuee Comte de Cessac, no regiment received the clothing allotted to it. The conduct of the administration in these circ.u.mstances deserves some comment.
When a regimental depot had got together, at great expense, the numerous items required by its active battalions or squadrons, the administration arranged, with forwarding agents, the transport of the supplies as far as Mainz, which was then part of the Empire. These goods were in no danger while crossing France to the bank of the Rhine; however M. de Cessac ordered a detachment of troops to escort them as far as Mainz. There they were handed over to foreign agents, who were supposed to forward them to Magdeberg, Berlin, and the Vistula, without any French supervision. This undertaking was carried out with so much bad faith and delay that the packages containing the supplies of clothing and footwear took six to eight months to go from Mainz to the Vistula, a distance they should have covered in forty days.
This had been no more than a serious inconvenience when the French armies were in peaceful occupation of Germany and Poland, but it became a calamity after the Russian campaign. More than two hundred barges laden with supplies for our regiments were ice-bound in the Bromberg ca.n.a.l, near Nackel, when we pa.s.sed this point in January 1813, but as there was, in this immense convoy, no French agent, and as the Prussian bargees already considered us as enemies, no one told us that these vessels were loaded with goods. The next day the Prussians took possession of this huge quant.i.ty of clothing and footwear and used it to equip several of the regiments they sent against us. Although the result of this was that the increasing cold killed a large number of French soldiers, there are those who boast of our efficient administration!
The lack of order in the French army"s line of march as it went through Prussia was due princ.i.p.ally to the inept.i.tude of Murat, who had a.s.sumed command after the departure of the Emperor, and later to the feebleness of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais, the Vice-Roi of Italy.
When the time came for us to re-cross the Elbe and enter the territory of the Confederation of the Rhine, the Emperor, before removing his troops from Poland and Prussia, wanted to facilitate a return to the offensive by leaving strong garrisons in the fortresses which could a.s.sure the crossing of the Vistula, the Oder and the Elbe, such as Thorn, Stettin, Magdeberg, Danzig, Dresden, etc.
This major decision on the part of the Emperor may be looked at in two ways. So it has been praised by some knowledgeable military observers and condemned by others.
The first party say that the need to provide a place of rest and safety for the numerous sick and wounded, which the army brought back from Russia, compelled the Emperor to occupy these fortresses, which, in addition, could store a ma.s.sive amount of military equipment and foodstuffs. They add that these fortresses hindered enemy movements and by investing them, the enemy reduced the number of troops which could be actively employed against us; and finally that if the reinforcements which Napoleon was bringing from France and Germany enabled him to win a battle, the possession of the forts would help to ensure a new conquest of Prussia, which would bring us to the banks of the Vistula and force the Russians to return to their country.
In reply to this it is claimed that Napoleon weakened his army by breaking it up into so many scattered units who could not give each other mutual a.s.sistance; that it was not necessary to compromise the security of France in order to save a some thousands of sick and wounded, very few of whom would return to active service, and of whom nearly all died in the hospitals. It was also said that the regiments of Italians, Poles and Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine, which the Emperor mingled with the garrisons in order to lessen the requirement of French units, would not be much use; and in fact almost all the foreign troops fought very badly and ended up by going over to the enemy. Finally it was claimed that the occupation of the forts gave very little trouble to the Russian and Prussian armies, which, after blockading them with an observation force, could continue their march towards France. Which is what actually happened.
I find myself in agreement with latter of these two opinions, because it is evident that the forts could be of use to us only if we overcame the Russian and Prussian armies, which was a reason for concentrating our disposable manpower rather than dispersing it.
It might be said that as the enemy would no longer have to blockade the forts, they would thus have an increase in their manpower to match ours; but this is not so, for the enemy would have to leave strong garrisons in the forts which we abandoned, while we could make use of the men which were at present immobilised. I may add that the defence of these useless forts deprived the army in the field of the services of a number of experienced generals, among others, Marshal Davout, who alone was worth several divisions. I accept that during a campaign one must leave behind several brigades to guard places on which the safety of a country depends, such as Metz, Lille and Strasbourg, in the case of France, but the forts situated on the Vistula, the Oder and the Elbe, two or three hundred leagues from France were of only conditional importance, that is to say dependent on the success of our army in the field. When this did not come about, over eighty thousand men whom the Emperor had left in those garrisons in 1812 were obliged to surrender.
The position of France in the first months of 1813 was extremely critical, for in the south our armies in Spain had suffered some very serious reverses due to the weakening of their strength by the continual withdrawal of regiments, while the English ceaselessly sent reinforcements to Wellington, who had fought a brilliant campaign during 1812, and had captured Cuidad-Rodrigo, Badajoz and the fort of Salamanca, had won the battle of Arapiles, occupied Madrid and now threatened the Pyrenees.
In the north, the numerous battle-hardened soldiers whom Napoleon had led into Russia had nearly all died in action or of cold and starvation. The still intact Prussian army had just joined the Russians, and the Austrians were on the point of following their example. Finally, the sovereigns, and more importantly, the people of the Germanic Confederation, stirred up by the English, were wavering in their allegiance to France. The Prussian Baron Stein, an able and enterprising man, took this opportunity to publish a number of pamphlets in which he appealed to all Germans to shake off the yoke of Napoleon and regain their liberty. This appeal was readily received, as the pa.s.sage, accommodation and maintenance of the French troops who had occupied Germany since 1806 had occasioned great expense, to which was added the confiscation of English merchandise as a result of Napoleon"s continental blockade. The Confederation of the Rhine would have defected if the rulers of the various states of which it was composed had decided to listen to the wishes of their subjects; but none of them dared budge, so ingrained was their habit of obedience to the French Emperor, and so great their fear of seeing him arrive at any moment, to head the considerable forces which he was organising with such speed and building up constantly in Germany.
The greater part of the French nation still had the greatest confidence in Napoleon. Those who were well-informed blamed him, no doubt, for having the previous year led his army to Moscow, and in particular for having awaited the winter there, but the ma.s.s of the people, who were used to considering the Emperor as infallible and had no notion of the events of this campaign nor of the losses suffered by our men, saw only the glory which the occupation of Moscow reflected on our arms, and were more than willing to give the Emperor the means to heap victories round his eagles. Every department and every town gave patriotic gifts of horses, though the numerous levies of conscripts and money soon cooled this enthusiasm.
Nevertheless the nation complied with reasonably good grace, and battalions and squadrons seemed to rise out of the ground, as if by some enchantment. It was remarkable that after all the levies of conscripts which had been made over the last twenty years, we had never recruited a finer body of men. There were several explanations for this.
To begin with, each of the eight hundred departments which then existed had, for several years, maintained a company of so-called departmental infantry, a sort of praetorian guard for the Prefects, who made a point of selecting men of a high physical standard for this duty. These men never left the princ.i.p.al towns of the department, where they were very well housed, fed and clad, and as they had very few duties to perform, they were able to build up their physical strength, for most of them led this life for six or seven years, during which time they were exercised regularly in the handling of arms, and in marches and manoeuvres. They lacked only the "baptism of fire" to become complete soldiers. These companies, depending on the importance of the department, were of 150 to 250 men. The Emperor sent them all to the army, where they were absorbed into the line regiments.
In the second place there was called into service a great number of conscripts from previous years, who had by protection, cunning or temporary illness obtained deferment, that is to say permission to remain at home until further orders. These older men were nearly all strong and vigourous.
These measures were legal; but what was not was the call-up of those who had already taken part in the ballot for conscription and whose names had not been drawn. These people, to whom this lottery had given the legal right to remain civilians, were nevertheless compelled to take up arms if they were less than thirty years old.
This levy produced a large number of men fit to support the hardships of war. There was some objection raised to this measure, mainly in the Midi and the Vendee, but the greater part of the contingent fell into line, so great was the habit of obedience. This meekness on the part of the populace enticed the government into practices even more illegal and more dangerous withal, in that they struck at the upper cla.s.s; for after forcibly enlisting men who had been exempted by lot, the same measure was applied to those who had quite legally paid for a replacement, and they were forced into the army, although some families had been financially strained and even ruined in an attempt to save their sons, for at that time replacements cost from 12 to 20,000 francs, which had to be paid in cash. There were even young men who had been replaced two or three times, but who were still forced to go, and it was not unknown for one to find himself serving in the same company as the man he had paid to be his subst.i.tute. This injustice was the result of advice given by Clarke, the Minister for War and Savary, the Minister of Police , who persuaded the Emperor that to prevent any disturbance during the war, it was necessary to remove the sons of influential families from the country and put them in the army, to serve, in some respects, as hostages... To reduce somewhat the odium felt by the upper cla.s.s towards this imposition, the Emperor created, under the name of "Guards of Honour", four regiments of light cavalry, specially reserved for young gentlemen of good family. These units, which were given a brilliant Hussar"s uniform, were commanded by general officers.
To these more or less legal levies, the Emperor added the men produced by an early conscription and a number of battalions formed from the seamen, sailors and gunners of the navy, all trained men, used to handling arms and bored with the monotonous life in port, keen to join their comrades in the army. There were more than thirty thousand of these seamen, and it did not take long for them to become first cla.s.s infantry soldiers. Finally the Emperor, obliged to use every means to rebuild his army, of which the greater part had perished in the frozen wastes of Russia, further weakened his forces in Spain by taking not only several thousands of men to make up his guard, but several brigades and entire divisions composed of old soldiers, accustomed to hardship and danger.
For their part, the Russians and particularly the Prussians, were preparing for war. The indefatigable Baron de Stein travelled the provinces, preaching a crusade against the French, and organising his "Tugenbond" whose members swore to take up arms for the liberation of Germany. This society, which stirred up so many enemies against us, operated openly in Prussia, which was already at war with the Emperor, and insinuated itself into the states and armies of the Confederation of the Rhine, despite the opposition of some sovereigns and with the tacit permission of others, to such an extent that almost the whole of Germany was, in secret, our enemy, and the contingents which were joined to our military forces were prepared to betray us at the first opportunity, as events would shortly show. These events would not have taken so long to come about if the German"s natural laxity and sloth had not prevented them from acting sooner than they did, for the debris of the French army which crossed the Elbe in 1812 stayed peacefully in cantonment on the left bank of the river for the first four months of 1813, without being attacked by the Russians and Prussians who were stationed on the opposite bank, and who did not feel themselves strong enough to do so, although Prussia had mobilised its landwehr, made up of all fit men, and Bernadotte, forgetting that he was born a Frenchman, had declared war on us, and had joined his Swedish troops to those belonging to the enemies of his native country.
During the period which we spent on the left bank of the Elbe, although the army received continual reinforcements, there was still very little in the way of cavalry except for some regiments, one of which was mine, so we had been allotted as cantonments several communes and the two little towns of Brenha and Landsberg, in pleasant country near Magdeberg. While we were there I had a great disappointment. The Emperor wished to speed the organisation of the new levies and thought that for this purpose the temporary presence of unit commanders at their regimental depots would be useful. So he decided that all colonels should return to France except those who had a certain number of men in their unit, the number fixed for the cavalry was four hundred, and I had more than six hundred mounted men. I was therefore forced to stay behind, when I so much longed to embrace my wife and the child which she had given me during my absence.
To the disappointment which I felt was added another vexation, the good General Castex, whom I had held in such high regard during the Russian campaign, was to leave us and join the mounted Grenadiers of the Guard. His brigade, and that of General Corbineau, who had been given the position of aide-de-camp to the Emperor, were both put in charge of General Exelmans. General Wathiez was to replace Castex, and General Maurin to replace Corbineau. These three generals had however gone to France after the Russian campaign and I was the only colonel left, so General Sebastiani, to whose corps the new division was to be attached, ordered me to take over the command, which added a great deal of work to my regimental duties, for I had to make frequent visits, in appalling weather, to the cantonments of the other three regiments. The wound to my knee, although it had healed, was still painful and I did not know if I would be able to remain on duty until the end of the winter, when after a month General Wathiez returned to take up the command of the division.
A few days later, without my having asked, I was ordered to go to France to organise the large number of recruits and horses which had been sent to my regimental depot. The depot was in the department of Jemmapes, at Mons in Belgium, which was then part of the Empire . I left immediately and travelled quickly. I realised that as I was authorised to go to France on duty, it would not be acceptable for me to request even the shortest period of leave to go to Paris, so I welcomed the offer made by Mme. Desbrieres, my mother-in-law, to bring my wife and my son to Mons. After a year of separation, during which I had experienced so many dangers, it was with the greatest pleasure that I once more saw my wife, and held in my arms our little Alfred, now eight months old. This was one of the happiest days of my life. The joy which I felt on holding my little son was increased by the recollection that he very nearly became an orphan on the day of his birth.
I spent the end of April and the months of May and June at the depot, where I was extremely busy. Many recruits had been sent to the 23rd, men of good physique and from a warrior race, for they mostly came from the neighbourhood of Mons, the former province of Hainault, from where the Austrians used to draw their finest cavalrymen, at the time when they possessed the low countries. These are people who love and care well for horses, but as the horses which come from this district are a little too heavy for Cha.s.seurs, I obtained permission to buy some in the Ardennes, from where we obtained a fair selection.
I found at the depot some good officers and N.C.O.s, several of whom had been in Russia and had gone to the depot to recover from injuries or illness, and the ministry sent me some young officers from the school of cavalry at Saint-Cyr. From this material I made up various squadrons, which, although not perfect, could mingle without difficulty with the old cavalrymen from Russia whom I had left on the banks of the Elbe, and throughout whom they would be spread on their arrival. As soon as a squadron was ready it was sent off to join the army.
Chap. 23.
While I was busily engaged in rebuilding my regiment, as were many other colonels, mainly from the cavalry, who were in France for the same reason, hostilities broke out on the Elbe, which had been crossed by the allies.
The Emperor left Paris, and on the 25th of April he was at Naumbourg, in Saxony, at the head of 170,000 men, of whom only a third were French, a detachment of troops which had been sent to Germany having not yet arrived. The other two thirds of his army was formed of units from the Confederation of the Rhine, the majority of which were very reluctant to fight on his behalf. General Wittgenstein, who had gained some celebrity following our disaster at the Beresina, ( although the weather did us far more harm than his manoeuvres ), was in overall command of the Russian and German troops, a combined force of 300,000 men, which faced Napoleon"s army on the 28th of April, in the region of Leipzig.
On the 1st of May there was a sharp engagement at Poserna, in an area where Gustavus Adolphus had died, during which Marshal Bessieres was killed by a cannon-ball. The Emperor regretted his death more than did the army, which had not forgotten that it was the advice given to Napoleon by the Marshal, in the evening of the battle for Moscow, which had deterred him from achieving victory by committing his guards to the action; which had he done, it would have changed the outcome and led to the complete destruction of the Russian force.
The day after Bessieres" death, while Napoleon was continuing his march towards Leipzig, he was attacked unexpectedly on the flank, by the Russo-Prussians, who had crossed the river Elster during the night. In this battle, which was given the name of the the Battle of Lutzen, there was some fierce fighting, in which the troops newly arrived from France showed the greatest courage, the marine regiments being particularly notable. The enemy, soundly beaten, withdrew towards the Elbe, but the French, having almost no cavalry, were able to take few prisoners and their victory was incomplete.
Nevertheless it produced a great moral effect in Europe, and above all in France, for it showed that our troops had retained their fighting qualities, and that only the frosts of Russia had overcome them in 1812.
The Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia, after being present at Lutzen and witnessing the defeat of their armies, had gone to Dresden, from where they had to withdraw on the approach of the victorious Napoleon, who took possession of the town on the 8th of May, where he was shortly joined by his ally the King of Saxony.
After a brief stay in Dresden, the French crossed the Elbe and pursued the Prusso-Russians, whose rear-guard they caught up with and defeated at Bischofswerda.
The Emperor Alexander, dissatisfied with Wittgenstein, a.s.sumed personal command of the allied armies, but having been defeated in his turn by Napoleon at Wurtchen, it seems likely that he recognised his lack of ability in this field, for he soon relinquished the position.