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Page 15
Meanwhile the aid promised to Prussia by the Czar had been too slow
for the lightning that struck at Jena. The oncoming Russians reached
the Vistula, but were forced back by the victorious French, who took
possession of Warsaw. There the Emperor established his winter
quarters, and remained for nearly three months, engaged in the
preparation of new plans of conquest and new schemes for the
pacification of Europe.
After Jena, Prussia, though crushed, remained belligerent. Her
shattered forces drew off to the borders, and were joined by the
Russians in East Prussia. The campaign of 1807 opened here. On the
eighth of February, the French army, about 70,000 strong, advanced
against the allies, commanded by Benningsen and Lestocq. At the town
of Eylau, about twenty miles from K�nigsberg, a great but indecisive
battle was fought, in which each army suffered a loss of nearly
eighteen thousand men. The Russians and Prussians fell back about four
miles to Friedland, and both armies were reinforced, the French to
about eighty thousand, and the allies to approximately the same
number.
Here for a season the two great camps were pitched against each other.
The shock of Eylau and the inclemency of the spring, no less than the
political complications that thickened on every horizon, held back the
military movements until the beginning of summer. But at length the
crisis came. On the fourteenth of June was fought the great battle of
Friedland and the allied army was virtually destroyed. The loss of the
Russians and Prussians was more than twenty-five thousand men, while
the French loss was not quite eight thousand. Napoleon commanded in
person, and his triumph was prodigious.
Let not the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum fail to look long and
attentively on the picture of the scene which represents the beginning
of the battle on the side of the French. There on a slight elevation,
in the wheatfield of June, sitting on his white horse, with his
triangular hat lifted in silent salutation, surrounded by the princes
and marshals of his Empire, sits the sardonic somnambulist, while
before him on the left the Cuirassiers of the Guard, on their
tremendous horses gathered out of Normandy, plunging at full gallop,
bearing down through the broken wheat, with buglers in the van and
sabers flashing high and bearded mouths wide open with yellings that
resound through the world till now, charge wildly, irresistibly onward
against the unseen enemy, reckless alike of life and death, but
choosing rather death if only the marble face but smile!
UNDER THE RUSSIAN SNOWS.
The first empire of France was buried between the Niemen and Moscow.
The funeral was attended by vultures and Cossacks.
It was on the twenty-fourth of June, 1812, that Napoleon began the
invasion of Russia. The dividing line was the River Niemen. The
inhabitants fell back before him. He had not advanced far when he
encountered a new commander, with whom he was unfamiliar. It was
Field-Marshal Nature. Marshal Nature had an army that the Old Guard
had never confronted. His herald was Frost, and his aid-de-camp was
Zero. One of his army corps was Snow. His bellowing artillery was
charged with Lithuanian tempests. Hail was his grape and shrapnel. The
Emperor of the French had never studied Marshal Nature's tactics--not
even in the Alps.
The Russian summer was as midwinter to the soldiers of France and
Spain and Italy. Some of the invading divisions could hardly advance
at all. The howling storms made impassable the ungraded roads; the
1200 guns of the Grand Army sank into the mire. Horse-life and
man-life fell and perished in the sleet of the mock-summer that raged
along the watershed between the Dwina and the Dnieper.
The Russians under Kutusoff fell back to Smolensko. There on the
sixteenth of August they fought and were defeated with a loss of
nearly twelve thousand men. The way was thus opened as far as the
Moskwa. At that place on the seventh of September Kutusoff a second
time gave battle, at the village of Borodino. This was one of the most
murderous conflicts of modern times. A thousand cannon vomited death
all day. Under the smoke a quarter of a million of men struggled like
tigers. At nightfall the French had the field. The defeated Russians
hung sullenly around the arena where they had left more than 40,000 of
their dead and wounded. The Frence losses were almost equally
appalling. "Sire," said Marshal Ney, "we would better withdraw and
reform." "_Thou_ advise a retreat, Michel?" said the marble head, as
it turned to the Bulldog of Battles.
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