the Young Guard at Pirna, he saved that army from destruction, and induced Vandamme's disaster at Culm; by directing the simultaneous advance of Macdonald on Liegnitz, and Oudinot on Berlin, he lost all the advantages of his central situation between them, and brought on the defeats of the Katzbach and Gross Beeren; by lingering so long on the Elbe after these catastrophes and that of Dennewitz had evidently rendered the position there no longer tenable, he sacrificed 100,000 men, without any advantages, from fatigue and famine, and for the first time gave a decisive numerical superiority to the Allies; by afterwards retaining 170,000 excellent troops in the beleaguered fortresses, and engaging at Leipsic with a force now become inferior to that of the three Allied armies put together, he rendered inevitable a great defeat, which was converted into total ruin by the unaccountable mistake of fighting with a broad line of marshes, traversed only by a single road and bridge, in his rear. All these errors arose from the great General being merged in the imperious Emperor; from undue, and, as it proved, fatal, confidence in his star; from a determination to do everything at once, and fascinate the minds of men by extricating himself out of apparently hopeless difficulties by a dazzling triumph. So evidently were these causes mainly instrumental in inducing his fall, that one is tempted to believe that human folly as well as greatness is made the instrument of Omnipotence in working out its designs, and that there is much truth in the Roman maxim,-" Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat." CHAP. XI. 1813. CHAPTER XII. LORD CASTLEREAGH AND SIR CHARLES STEWART AT THE CON- XII. 1813. CHAP. THE calamities of the campaign of 1813, and of the retreat from Leipsic, to the French, exceeded anything which could have been conceived. Had the Allied geneDeplorable rals been aware of the state to which their once formidable the French opponents were reduced, they might have marched unarmy which resisted to Paris. The wreck of the army fully equalled the Rhine. the devastation produced by the Moscow campaign. The condition of recrossed magnitude of the losses which the French had undergone, was not fully known till it was revealed by the candour of the celebrated national historian of the period. "Napoleon," says Thiers, "brought back the remains of the French army to the Rhine in the most deplorable condition. The Guard of 40,000 was reduced to 10,000. The united corps of Oudinot, Reynier, Augereau, and Bertrand, could only muster 12,000 combatants when they entered Mayence, with the defence of which they were charged. The corps of Marmont and Ney, destined, under Marshal Marmont, to defend the course of the Rhine from Mannheim to Coblentz, could scarcely assemble 8000 men. Victor, charged with the defence of the upper Rhine from Strasbourg to Bâle, was not 5000 strong. The two corps of Macdonald and Lauriston, united into one under the former, had not 9000 effective men to dispute the passage of the Lower Rhine from Coblentz to Arnheim. CHAP. XII. 1813. The whole cavalry of the army, which once formed four corps, was reduced to 10,000, of whom a half were not mounted. The Polish Legion had almost totally disappeared, and the few who remained of it were sent to the rear to Sedan, to endeavour to effect some degree of reorganisation. A mass of stragglers, without arms, most of them bearing with them the contagion of the terrible typhus fever which originated in the fortresses on the Elbe, crossed the Rhine in small bodies, overspread the provinces on the left bank, and diffused consternation and death wherever they passed. It was almost a second retreat from Russia, with this difference, that there remained about 60,000 men in arms, and that we fell back, not on exasperated Germany, but on France, where we found indeed our country, but our country ruined and exhausted." 11 Thiers, This account, from so undoubted a source, of the deplorable condition of the French army after its retreat to the Rhine, affords the most decisive proof of the wisdom of Lord Castlereagh's decided opinion, so often expressed, that the Allies should not halt, but carry their arms into the heart of France; and of the erroneous estimate which Sir R. Wilson had formed of Napoleon's boundless resources to defend its territory, which, as already seen, led to his transference to the Austrian army of Italy. xvii. 3, 4. 2. fairs in Italy. Prince Eugene, who was charged with the onerous task of defending the Julian Alps, and barring the approach State of af to Italy of the Austrian legions, had only been able to collect 50,000 men around his standard, in lieu of 80,000, whom the Emperor reckoned upon as being under his orders; and even these were got together with infinite. difficulty, and by exhausting the whole depôts in the interior of the peninsula. His father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, who, as already mentioned, had joined the Coalition, and brought the retreating French army into serious difficulties on the field of Hanau, secretly despatched an officer to propose to him, in the name of the Allied sovereigns, a principality in Italy, if he would abandon the CHAP. XII. 1813. cause of Napoleon, and unite his arms with those of his enemies. But although that Prince was sensible that the cause of the French Emperor was all but desperate, and that he would involve his own wife and children, to whom he was tenderly attached, in his fall, he yet had honour and constancy enough to reply to the officer charged with the mission, that he owed everything to Napoleon; that he could not abandon him in his misfortunes; and that, if obliged to seek an asylum in Bavaria, he was sure that its sovereign would rather receive his son-in-law without 1 Thiers, a crown than without honour. After this honourable xvii. 6, 7; Eugene's answer, which stood forth in bright relief beside the disMemoirs, vi. 14, 65. creditable tergiversation of Murat at the same period, he communicated the whole transaction to Napoleon.1 3. Gloomy aspect of affairs in Spain at the same period. The situation of affairs in Spain at the same period was still more disastrous. Driven across the Pyrenees after the catastrophe of Vitoria, the French army, which sustained that defeat, had since undergone considerable reverses. Pampeluna and St Sebastian had both fallen; the line of the Bidassoa had been forced; all the talents of Marshal Soult, who had been sent by the Emperor from Dresden to restore matters, had been unable to defend the mountain frontier; and after several obstinate battles, and the shedding of torrents of blood on both sides, the British troops had been established in a solid manner within the French territory. Marshal Suchet, after the overthrow of Vitoria, adopted the only rational plan in the circumstances, which was to evacuate the province of Valencia, which he had conquered with so much difficulty, and withdraw all his forces for the defence of Aragon and Catalonia. He even went a step farther, and suggested, in accordance with Soult's wishes, to the Emperor, that he should evacuate all Catalonia, except Figueras and Barcelona; and with his whole forces, including the garrisons brought away, make for the Eastern Pyrenees, and join his troops to those of Marshal Soult, and with this united force overwhelm Wellington. This plan, however, XII. In 1813. presented many difficulties in the execution, not the least CHAP. of which was the certainty of jealousy arising between the two Marshals, if their forces were brought together. addition to this, also, the positive instructions of the War Minister, conveying the orders of the Emperor, constrained him to leave garrisons in all the principal fortresses on the sea-coast in Valencia, and the chief ones in Catalonia. The result of this was, that he could only collect 25,000 men wherewith to re-enter Aragon, a force too inconsiderable to be of any weight in the great duel between Soult and Wellington in the western Pyrenees. Thus the self-confidence and unbending character of Napoleon involved him in the same enormous error in Spain which was proving so fatal to him in Germany; and when a contest was approaching, in which, with miserably inadequate forces, he was to maintain a painful struggle with his enemies in the heart of France, forces amply sufficient to have cast the balance in his favour were doomed to useless inactivity in the fortresses of Spain and Germany. "More than 140,000," says Thiers, "of the best troops of Europe were in this way lost to France, in the fortified places of which he retained so strong a hold; while the defence of the country against 200,000 victorious Allies was maintained by less than half the Thiers, number of real soldiers, recruited only from ruined depôts Suchet's obliged to furnish recruits for the line after two or three 348-454. months' compulsory drilling."1 xvii. 14-19 ; Memoirs, ii. 4. If the external prospects of France were thus gloomy, still darker was the prospect which the interior presented. Discontent "The army," continues the same author, "convinced of and despair the folly of the policy for which it was doomed to shed terior. its blood, loudly murmured, though in presence of the enemy it was ever ready to sustain the honour of the national arins. The nation, deeply irritated by the omission, after the victories of Lützen and Bautzen, to conclude a peace, regarding itself as sacrificed to an insensate ambition, now discovered by the horrors of its |