Вальтер Скотт
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Volume III
Still the Prussian monarch, who seems now to have taken the command upon himself, endeavouring to supply the want of professional experience by courage, brought up his last reserves, and encouraged his broken troops rather to make a final stand for victory, than to retreat in face of a conquering army. This effort also proved in vain. The Prussian line was attacked every where at once; centre and wings were broken through by the French at the bayonet's point; and the retreat, after so many fruitless efforts, in which no division had been left unengaged, was of the most disorderly character. But the confusion was increased tenfold, when, as the defeated troops reached Weimar, they fell in with the right wing of their own army, fugitives like themselves, and who were attempting to retreat in the same direction. The disorder of two routed armies meeting in opposing currents, soon became inextricable. The roads were choked up with artillery and baggage waggons; the retreat became a hurried flight; and the King himself, who had shown the utmost courage during the battle of Auerstadt, was at length, for personal safety, compelled to leave the high-roads, and escape across the fields, escorted by a small body of cavalry.
BATTLE OF JENA.
While the left of the Prussian army were in the act of combating Davoust at Auerstadt, their right, as we have hinted, were with equally bad fortune engaged at Jena. This second action, though the least important of the two, has always given the name to the double battle; because it was at Jena that Napoleon was engaged in person.
Oct. 14.
The French Emperor had arrived at this town, which is situated upon the Saale, on the 13th of October, and had lost no time in issuing those orders to his mareschals, which produced the demonstrations of Davoust, and the victory of Auerstadt. His attention was not less turned to the position he himself occupied, and in which he had the prospect of fighting Mollendorf, and the right of the Prussians, on the next morning. With his usual activity, he formed or enlarged, in the course of the night, the roads by which he proposed to bring up his artillery on the succeeding day, and by hewing the solid rock, made a path practicable for guns to the plateau, or elevated plain in the front of Jena, where his centre was established.237 The Prussian army lay before them, extended on a line of six leagues, while that of Napoleon, extremely concentrated, showed a very narrow front, but was well secured both in the flanks and in the rear. Buonaparte, according to his custom, slept in the bivouac, surrounded by his guards.238 In the morning he harangued his soldiers, and recommended to them to stand firm against the charges of the Prussian cavalry, which had been represented as very redoubtable. As before Ulm, he had promised his soldiers a repetition of the battle of Marengo, so now he pointed out to his men that the Prussians, separated from their magazines, and cut off from their country, were in the situation of Mack at Ulm. He told them, that the enemy no longer fought for honour and victory, but for the chance of opening a way to retreat; and he added, that the corps which should permit them to escape would lose their honour. The French replied with loud shouts, and demanded instantly to advance to the combat. The Emperor ordered the columns destined for the attack to descend into the plain. His centre consisted of the Imperial Guard, and two divisions of Lannes. Augereau commanded the right, which rested on a village and a forest; and Soult's division, with a part of Ney's, were upon the left.
General Mollendorf advanced on his side, and both armies, as at Auerstadt, were hid from each other by the mist, until suddenly the atmosphere cleared, and showed them to each other within the distance of half-cannon shot. The conflict instantly commenced. It began on the French right, where the Prussians attacked with the purpose of driving Augereau from the village on which he rested his extreme flank. Lannes was sent to support him, by whose succour he was enabled to stand his ground. The battle then became general; and the Prussians showed themselves such masters of discipline, that it was long impossible to gain any advantage over men, who advanced, retired, or moved to either flank, with the regularity of machines. Soult at length, by the most desperate efforts, dispossessed the Prussians opposed to him of the woods from which they had annoyed the French left; and at the same conjuncture the division of Ney, and a large reserve of cavalry, appeared upon the field of battle. Napoleon, thus strengthened, advanced the centre, consisting in a great measure of the Imperial Guard, who, being fresh and in the highest spirits, compelled the Prussian army to give way. Their retreat was at first orderly; but it was a part of Buonaparte's tactics to pour attack after attack upon a worsted enemy, as the billows of a tempestuous ocean follow each other in succession, till the last waves totally disperse the fragments of the bulwark which the first have breached. Murat, at the head of the dragoons and the cavalry of reserve, charged, as one who would merit, as far as bravery could merit, the splendid destinies which seemed now opening to him. The Prussian infantry were unable to support the shock, nor could their cavalry protect them. The rout became general.239 Great part of the artillery was taken, and the broken troops retreated in disorder upon Weimar, where, as we have already stated, their confusion became inextricable, by their encountering the other tide of fugitives from their own left, which was directed upon Weimar also. All leading and following seemed now lost in this army, so lately confiding in its numbers and discipline. There was scarcely a general left to issue orders, scarcely a soldier disposed to obey them; and it seems to have been more by a sort of instinct, than any resolved purpose, that several broken regiments were directed, or directed themselves, upon Magdeburg, where Prince Hohenloe endeavoured to rally them.
The French accounts state that 20,000 Prussians were killed and taken in the course of this fatal day; that three hundred guns fell into their power, with twenty generals, or lieutenant-generals, and standards and colours to the number of sixty.240
The mismanagement of the Prussian generals in these calamitous battles, and in all the manœuvres which preceded them, amounted to infatuation. The troops also, according to Buonaparte's evidence, scarcely maintained their high character, oppressed probably by a sense of the disadvantages under which they combated. But it is unnecessary to dwell on the various causes of a defeat, when the vanquished seem neither to have formed one combined and general plan of attack in the action, nor maintained communication with each other while it endured, nor agreed upon any scheme of retreat when the day was lost. The Duke of Brunswick, too, and General Schmettau, being mortally wounded early in the battle, the several divisions of the Prussian army fought individually, without receiving any general orders, and consequently without regular plan or combined manœuvres. The consequences of the defeat were more universally calamitous than could have been anticipated, even when we consider, that no mode of retreat having been fixed on, or general rallying place appointed, the broken army resembled a covey of heathfowl, which the sportsman marks down and destroys in detail and at his leisure.
Next day after the action, a large body of the Prussians, who, under the command of Mollendorf had retired to Erfurt, were compelled to surrender to the victors, and the marshal, with the Prince of Orange Fulda, became prisoners. Other relics of this most unhappy defeat met with the same fate. General Kalkreuth, at the head of a considerable division of troops, was overtaken and routed in an attempt to cross the Hartz mountains. Prince Eugene of Wirtemberg commanded an untouched body of sixteen thousand men, whom the Prussian general-in-chief had suffered to remain at Memmingen, without an attempt to bring them into the field. Instead of retiring when he heard all was lost, the prince was rash enough to advance towards Halle, as if to put the only unbroken division of the Prussian army in the way of the far superior and victorious hosts of France. He was accordingly attacked and defeated by Bernadotte.
PRINCE HOHENLOE – BLUCHER.
The chief point of rallying, however, was Magdeburg, under the walls of which strong city Prince Hohenloe, though wounded, contrived to assemble an army amounting to fifty thousand men, but wanting every thing, and in the last degree of confusion. But Magdeburg was no place of rest for them. The same improvidence, which had marked every step of the campaign, had exhausted that city of the immense magazines which it contained, and taken them for the supply of the Duke of Brunswick's army. The wrecks of the field of Jena were exposed to famine as well as the sword. It only remained for Prince Hohenloe to make the best escape he could to the Oder, and, considering the disastrous circumstances in which he was placed, he seems to have displayed both courage and skill in his proceedings. After various partial actions, however, in all of which he lost men, he finally found himself, with the advanced guard and centre of his army, on the heights of Prenzlow, without provisions, forage, or ammunition. Surrender became unavoidable; and at Prenzlow and Passewalk, nearly twenty thousand Prussians laid down their arms.
The rear of Prince Hohenloe's army did not immediately share this calamity. They were at Boitzenburg when the surrender took place, and amounted to about ten thousand men, the relics of the battle in which Prince Eugene of Wirtemberg had engaged near Weimar, and were under the command of a general whose name hereafter was destined to sound like a war trumpet – the celebrated Blucher.
In the extremity of his country's distresses, this distinguished soldier showed the same indomitable spirit, the same activity in execution and daringness of resolve, which afterwards led to such glorious results. He was about to leave Boitzenburg on the 29th, in consequence of his orders from Prince Hohenloe, when he learned that general's disaster at Prenzlow. He instantly changed the direction of his retreat, and, by a rapid march towards Strelitz, contrived to unite his forces with about ten thousand men, gleanings of Jena and Auerstadt, which, under the Dukes of Weimar and of Brunswick Oels, had taken their route in that direction. Thus reinforced, Blucher adopted the plan of passing the Elbe at Lauenburg, and reinforcing the Prussian garrisons in Lower Saxony. With this view he fought several sharp actions, and made many rapid marches. But the odds were too great to be balanced by courage and activity. The division of Soult which had crossed the Elbe, cut him off from Lauenburg, that of Murat interposed between him and Stralsund, while Bernadotte pressed upon his rear. Blucher had no resource but to throw himself and his diminished and dispirited army into Lubeck. The pursuers came soon up, and found him like a stag at bay. A battle was fought on the 6th of November, in the streets of Lubeck, with extreme fury on both sides, in which the Prussians were overpowered by numbers, and lost many slain, besides four thousand prisoners. Blucher fought his way out of the town, and reached Schwerta. But he had now retreated as far as he could, without violating the neutrality of the Danish territory, which would only have raised up new enemies to his unfortunate master.
On the 7th November, therefore, he gave up his good sword, to be resumed under happier auspices, and surrendered with the few thousand men which remained under his command.241 But the courage which he had manifested, like the lights of St. Elmo amid the gloom of the tempest, showed that there was at least one pupil of the Great Frederick worthy of his master, and afforded hopes, on which Prussia long dwelt in silence, till the moment of action arrived.
SURRENDER OF FORTRESSES.
The total destruction, for such it might almost be termed, of the Prussian army, was scarcely so wonderful, as the facility with which the fortresses which defend that country, some of them ranking among the foremost in Europe, were surrendered by their commandants, without shame, and without resistance, to the victorious enemy. Strong towns, and fortified places, on which the engineer had exhausted his science, provided too with large garrisons, and ample supplies, opened their gates at the sound of a French trumpet, or the explosion of a few bombs. Spandau, Stettin, Custrin, Hamelen, were each qualified to have arrested the march of invaders for months, yet were all surrendered on little more than a summons. In Magdeburg was a garrison of twenty-two thousand men, two thousand of them being artillerymen; and nevertheless this celebrated city capitulated with Mareschal Ney at the first flight of shells. Hamelen was garrisoned by six thousand troops, amply supplied with provisions, and every means of maintaining a siege. The place was surrendered to a force scarcely one-third in proportion to that of the garrison. These incidents were too gross to be imputed to folly and cowardice alone. The French themselves wondered at their conquests, yet had a shrewd guess at the manner in which they were rendered so easy. When the recreant governor of Magdeburg was insulted by the students of Halle for treachery as well as cowardice, the French garrison of the place sympathized, as soldiers, with the youthful enthusiasm of the scholars, and afforded the sordid old coward but little protection against their indignation. From a similar generous impulse, Schoels, the commandant of Hamelen, was nearly destroyed by the troops under his orders. In surrendering the place, he had endeavoured to stipulate, that, in case the Prussian provinces should pass by the fortune of war to some other power, the officers should retain their pay and rank. The soldiers were so much incensed at this stipulation, which carried desertion in its front, and a proposal to shape a private fortune to himself amid the ruin of his country, that Schoels only saved himself by delivering up the place to the French before the time stipulated in the articles of capitulation.
It is believed that, on several of these occasions, the French constructed a golden key to open these iron fortresses, without being themselves at the expense of the precious metal which composed it. Every large garrison has of course a military chest, with treasure for the regular payment of the soldiery; and it is said, that more than one commandant was unable to resist the proffer, that, in case of an immediate surrender, this deposit should not be inquired into by the captors, but left at the disposal of the governor, whose accommodating disposition had saved them the time and trouble of a siege.242
While the French army made this uninterrupted progress, the new King of Holland, Louis Buonaparte, with an army partly composed of Dutch and partly of Frenchmen, possessed himself with equal ease of Westphalia, great part of Hanover, Emden, and East Friesland.243
Oct. 25.
To complete the picture of general disorder which Prussia now exhibited, it is only necessary to add, that the unfortunate King, whose personal qualities deserved a better fate, had been obliged, after the battle, to fly into East Prussia, where he finally sought refuge in the city of Königsberg. L'Estocq, a faithful and able general, was still able to assemble out of the wreck of the Prussian army a few thousand men, for the protection of his sovereign. Buonaparte took possession of Berlin on the 25th October, eleven days after the battle of Jena. The mode in which he improved his good fortune, we reserve for future consideration.
FALL OF PRUSSIA.
The fall of Prussia was so sudden and so total, as to excite the general astonishment of Europe. Its prince was compared to the rash and inexperienced gambler, who risks his whole fortune on one desperate cast, and rises from the table totally ruined. That power had, for three quarters of a century, ranked among the most important of Europe; but never had she exhibited such a formidable position as almost immediately before her disaster, when, holding in her own hand the balance of Europe, she might, before the day of Austerlitz, have inclined the scale to which side she would. And now she lay at the feet of the antagonist whom she had rashly and in ill time defied, not fallen merely, but totally prostrate, without the means of making a single effort to arise. It was remembered that Austria, when her armies were defeated, and her capital taken, had still found resources in the courage of her subjects, and that the insurrections of Hungary and Bohemia had assumed, even after Buonaparte's most eminent successes, a character so formidable, as to aid in procuring peace for the defeated Emperor on moderate terms. Austria, therefore, was like a fortress repeatedly besieged, and as often breached and damaged, but which continued to be tenable, though diminished in strength, and deprived of important outworks. But Prussia seemed like the same fortress swallowed up by an earthquake, which leaves nothing either to inhabit or defend, and where the fearful agency of the destroyer reduces the strongest bastions and bulwarks to crumbled masses of ruins and rubbish.
The cause of this great distinction between two countries which have so often contended against each other for political power, and for influence in Germany, may be easily traced.
The empire of Austria combines in itself several large kingdoms, the undisturbed and undisputed dominions of a common sovereign, to whose sway they have been long accustomed, and towards whom they nourish the same sentiments of loyalty which their fathers entertained to the ancient princes of the same house. Austria's natural authority therefore rested, and now rests, on this broad and solid base, the general and rooted attachment of the people to their prince, and their identification of his interests with their own.
Prussia had also her native provinces, in which her authority was hereditary, and where the affection, loyalty, and patriotism of the inhabitants were natural qualities, which fathers transmitted to their sons. But a large part of her dominions consist of late acquisitions, obtained at different times by the arms or policy of the great Frederick; and thus her territories, made up of a number of small and distant states, want geographical breadth, while their disproportioned length stretches, according to Voltaire's well-known simile, like a pair of garters across the map of Europe. It follows as a natural consequence, that a long time must intervene betwixt the formation of such a kingdom, and the amalgamation of its component parts, differing in laws, manners, and usages, into one compact and solid monarchy, having respect and affection to their king, as the common head, and regard to each other as members of the same community. It will require generations to pass away, ere a kingdom, so artificially composed, can be cemented into unity and strength; and the tendency to remain disunited, is greatly increased by the disadvantages of its geographical situation.
These considerations alone might explain, why, after the fatal battle of Jena, the inhabitants of the various provinces of Prussia contributed no important personal assistance to repel the invader; and why, although almost all trained to arms, and accustomed to serve a certain time in the line, they did not display any readiness to exert themselves against the common enemy. They felt that they belonged to Prussia only by the right of the strongest, and therefore were indifferent when the same right seemed about to transfer their allegiance elsewhere. They saw the approaching ruin of the Prussian power, not as children view the danger of a father, which they are bound to prevent at the hazard of their lives, but as servants view that of a master, which concerns them no otherwise than as leading to a change of their employers.
There were other reasons, tending to paralyse any effort at popular resistance, which affected the hereditary states of Prussia, as well as her new acquisitions. The power of Prussia had appeared to depend almost entirely upon her standing army, established by Frederick, and modelled according to his rules. When, therefore, this army was at once annihilated, no hope of safety was entertained by those who had so long regarded it as invincible. The Prussian peasant, who would gladly have joined the ranks of his country while they continued to keep the field, knew, or thought he knew, too much of the art of war, to have any hope in the efforts which might be made in a desultory guerilla warfare; which, however, the courage, devotion, and pertinacity of an invaded people have rendered the most formidable means of opposition even to a victorious army.
The ruin of Prussia, to whatever causes it was to be attributed, seemed, in the eyes of astonished Europe, not only universal, but irremediable. The King, driven to the extremity of his dominions, could only be considered as a fugitive, whose precarious chance of restoration to the crown depended on the doubtful success of his ally of Russia, who now, as after the capture of Vienna, had upon his hands, strong as those hands were, not the task of aiding an ally, who was in the act of resistance to the common enemy, but the far more difficult one of raising from the ground a prince who was totally powerless and prostrate. The French crossed the Oder – Glogau and Breslau were invested. Their defence was respectable; but it seemed not the less certain that their fall involved almost the last hopes of Prussia, and that a name raised so high by the reign of one wise monarch, was like to be blotted from the map of Europe by the events of a single day.
Men looked upon this astonishing calamity with various sentiments, according as they considered it with relation to the Prussian administration alone, or as connected with the character of the King and kingdom, and the general interests of Europe. In the former point of view, the mind could not avoid acknowledging, with a feeling of embittered satisfaction, that the crooked and selfish policy of Prussia's recent conduct, – as shortsighted as it was grasping and unconscientious, – had met in this present hour of disaster with no more than merited chastisement. The indifference with which the Prussian Cabinet had viewed the distresses of the House of Austria, which their firm interposition might probably have prevented – the total want of conscience and decency with which they accepted Hanover from France, at the moment when they meditated war with the power at whose hand they received it – the shameless rapacity with which they proposed to detain the Electorate from its legal owner, at the very time when they were negotiating an alliance with Britain – intimated that contempt of the ordinary principles of justice, which, while it renders a nation undeserving of success, is frequently a direct obstacle to their attaining it. Their whole procedure was founded on the principles of a felon, who is willing to betray his accomplice, providing he is allowed to retain his own share of the common booty. It was no wonder, men said, that a government setting such an example to its subjects, of greediness and breach of faith in its public transactions, should find among them, in the hour of need, many who were capable of preferring their own private interests to that of their country. And if the conduct of this wretched administration was regarded in a political instead of a moral point of view, the disasters of the kingdom might be considered as the consequence of their incapacity, as well as the just remuneration of their profligacy. The hurried and presumptuous declaration of war, after every favourable opportunity had been suffered to escape, and indeed the whole conduct of the campaign, showed a degree of folly not far short of actual imbecility, and which must have arisen either from gross treachery, or something like infatuation. So far, therefore, as the ministers of Prussia were concerned, they reaped only the reward due to their political want of morality, and their practical want of judgment.
Very different, indeed, were the feelings with which the battle of Jena and its consequences were regarded, when men considered that great calamity in reference not to the evil counsellors by whom it was prepared, but to the prince and nation who were to pay the penalty. "We are human," and, according to the sentiment of the poet, on the extinction of the state of Venice,244 "must mourn, even when the shadow of that which has once been great passes away." But the apparent destruction of Prussia was not like the departure of the aged man, whose life is come to the natural close, or the fall of a ruined tower, whose mouldering arches can no longer support the incumbent weight. These are viewed with awe indeed, and with sympathy, but they do not excite astonishment or horror. The seeming fate of the Prussian monarchy resembled the agonizing death of him who expires in the flower of manhood. The fall of the House of Brandenburgh was as if a castle, with all its trophied turrets strong and entire, should be at once hurled to the earth by a superhuman power. Men, alike stunned with the extent and suddenness of the catastrophe, were moved with sympathy for those instantly involved in the ruin, and struck with terror at the demolition of a bulwark, by the destruction of which all found their own safety endangered. The excellent and patriotic character of Frederick William, on whose rectitude and honour even the misconduct of his ministers had not brought any stain; the distress of his interesting, high-spirited, and beautiful consort; the general sufferings of a brave and proud people, accustomed to assume and deserve the name of Protectors of the Protestant Faith and of the Liberties of Germany, and whose energies, corresponding with the talents of their leader, had enabled them in former times to withstand the combined force of France, Austria, and Russia – excited deep and general sympathy.
Still wider did that sympathy extend, and more thrilling became its impulse, when it was remembered that in Prussia fell the last state of Germany, who could treat with Napoleon in the style of an equal; and that to the exorbitant power which France already possessed in the south of Europe, was now to be added an authority in the north almost equally arbitrary and equally extensive. The prospect was a gloomy one; and they who felt neither for the fallen authority of a prince, nor the destroyed independence of a kingdom, trembled at the prospect likely to be entailed on their own country by a ruin, which seemed as remediless as it was extensive and astounding.
"But yet the end was NOT." —
Providence, which disappoints presumptuous hopes by the event, is often mercifully pleased to give aid when human aid seems hopeless. Whatever may be thought of the doctrine of an intermediate state of sufferance and purification in an after stage of existence, it is evident from history, that in this world, kingdoms, as well as individuals, are often subjected to misfortunes arising from their own errors, and which prove in the event conducive to future regeneration. Prussia was exposed to a long and painful discipline in the severe school of adversity, by which she profited in such a degree as enabled her to regain her high rank in the republic of Europe, with more honour perhaps to her prince and people, than if she had never been thrust from her lofty station. Her government, it may be hoped, have learned to respect the rights of other nations, from the sufferings which followed the destruction of their own – her people have been taught to understand the difference between the dominion of strangers and the value of independence. Indeed, the Prussians showed in the event, by every species of sacrifice, how fully they had become aware, that the blessing of freedom from foreign control is not to be secured by the efforts of a regular army only, but must be attained and rendered permanent by the general resolution of the nation, from highest to lowest, to dedicate their united exertions to the achievement of the public liberty at every risk, and by every act of self-devotion. Their improvement under the stern lessons which calamity taught them, we shall record in a brighter page. For the time, the cloud of misfortune sunk hopelessly dark over Prussia, of which not merely the renown, but the very national existence seemed in danger of being extinguished for ever.