The advices which arrived at Dresden from the north of Germany, were no balm to the bad tidings from Bohemia. We must necessarily treat with brevity the high deeds of arms performed at a considerable distance from Napoleon's person, great as was their influence upon his fortunes.

MarÉchal Blucher, it will be remembered, retreated across the river Katzbach, to avoid the engagement which the Emperor of France endeavoured to press upon him. The Crown Prince of Sweden, on the other hand, had his headquarters at Potsdam. Napoleon, when departing to succour Dresden, on the 21st of August, left orders for Oudinot to advance on Berlin, and for Macdonald to march upon Breslau, trusting that the former had force enough to conquer the Crown Prince, the latter to defeat Blucher.

Oudinot began to move on Berlin by the road of Wittenberg, on the very day when he received the orders. On the other hand, the Crown Prince of Sweden, concentrating his troops, opposed to the French general a total force of more than 80,000 men, drawn up for the protection of Berlin. The sight of that fair city, with its towers and steeples, determined Oudinot to try his fortune with his ancient comrade in arms. After a good deal of skirmishing, the two armies came to a more serious battle on the 23d August, in which General Regnier distinguished himself. He commanded a corps which formed the centre of Oudinot's army, at the head of which he made himself master of the village of Gross-Beeren, which was within a short distance of the centre of the allies. The Prussian general, Bulow, advanced to recover this important post, and with the assistance of Borstal, who attacked the flank of the enemy, he succeeded in pushing his columns into the village. A heavy rain having prevented the muskets from being serviceable, Gross-Beeren was disputed with the bayonet. Yet, towards nightfall, the two French divisions of Fournier and Guilleminot again attacked the village, took it, and remained in it till the morning. But this did not re-establish the battle, for Regnier having lost 1500 men and eight guns, Oudinot determined on a general retreat, which he conducted in the face of the enemy with great deliberation. The Crown Prince obtained other trophies; Luckau, with a garrison of a thousand French, submitted to his arms on 28th August.[280]

Besides these severe checks on the Prussian frontier, General Girard, in another quarter, had sustained a defeat of some consequence. He had sallied from the garrison of Magdeburg, after the battle of Gross-Beeren, with five or six thousand men. He was encouraged to this movement by the removal of the blockading brigade of Herschberg, who, in obedience to orders, had joined the Crown Prince to oppose the advance of Oudinot. But, after the battle of Gross-Beeren, as the Prussian brigade was returning to renew the blockade of Magdeburg, they encountered Girard and his division near Leitzkau, on 27th August. The French were at first successful, but Czernicheff having thrown himself on them with a large body of Cossacks, Girard's troops gave way, losing six cannons, fifteen hundred prisoners, and all their baggage.

During this active period, war had been no less busy on the frontiers of Silesia than on those of Bohemia and Brandenburg. MarÉchal Macdonald, as already mentioned, had received orders from Napoleon to attack Blucher and his Prussians, who had retired beyond the Katzbach, and occupied a position near a town called Jauer. In obedience to this order, the marÉchal had sent General Lauriston, who commanded his right wing, to occupy a position in front of Goldberg, with orders to despatch a part of his division under General Puthod, to march upon Jauer, by the circuitous route of Schonau. The eleventh corps, which formed the centre of Macdonald's force, crossed the Katzbach at break of day, under his own command, and advanced towards Jauer, up the side of a torrent called the Wuthende (i. e. raging) Niesse. The third corps, under Souham, destined to form the left wing, was to pass the Katzbach near Liegnitz, and then moving southward, were to come upon the marÉchal's left. With this left wing marched the cavalry, under Sebastiani.[281]

It chanced that, on this very 26th of August, Blucher, aware that Buonaparte was engaged at Dresden by the descent of the allies from Bohemia, thought it a good time to seek out his opponent and fight him. For this purpose, he was in the act of descending the river in order to encounter Macdonald, when the marÉchal, on his part, was ascending it, expecting to find him in his position near Jauer.

The stormy weather, so often referred to, with mist and heavy rain, concealed from each other the movements of the two armies, until they met in the fields. They encountered in the plains which extend between Wahlstadt and the Katzbach, but under circumstances highly unfavourable to the French marÉchal. His right wing was divided from his centre; Lauriston being at Goldberg, and fiercely engaged with the Russian General Langeron, with whom he had come into contact in the front of that town; and Puthod at a much greater distance from the field of battle. Macdonald's left wing, with the cavalry, was also far in the rear. Blucher allowed no leisure for the junction of these forces. His own cavalry being all in front, and ready for action, charged the French without permitting them leisure to get into position; and when they did, their right wing indeed rested on the Wuthende-Niesse, but the left, which should have been covered by Sebastiani's cavalry, was altogether unsupported.

Message on message was sent to hasten up the left wing; but a singular fatality prevented both the cavalry and infantry from arriving in time. Different lines of advance had been pointed out to Souham and Sebastiani; but Souham, hearing the firing, and impatient to place himself on the road which he thought likely to lead him most speedily into action, unluckily adopted that which was appointed for the cavalry. Thus 5000 horse, and five times the number of infantry, being thrown at once on the same line of march, soon confused and embarrassed each other's motions, especially in passing the streets of a village called Kroitsch, a long and narrow defile, which the troops presently crowded to such a degree with foot and horse, baggage and guns, that there was a total impossibility of effecting a passage.

Macdonald, in the meanwhile, supported his high reputation by the gallantry of his resistance, though charged on the left flank, which these mistakes had left uncovered, by four regiments of cavalry, and by General Karpoff, with a whole cloud of Cossacks. But at length the day was decidedly lost. The French line gave way, and falling back on the Wuthende-Niesse, now doubly raging from torrents of rain, and upon the Katzbach, they lost a great number of men. As a last resource, Macdonald put himself at the head of the troops, who were at length debouching from the defile of Kroitsch; but they were driven back with great slaughter, and the skirmish in that quarter concluded the battle, with much loss to the French.

The evil did not rest here. Lauriston being also under the necessity of retreating across the Katzbach, while Puthod, who had been detached towards Schonau, was left on the right-hand side of that river, this corps was speedily attacked by the enemy, and all who were not killed or taken remained prisoners. The army which Buonaparte destined to act in Silesia, and take Breslau, was, therefore, for the present, completely disabled. The French are admitted to have lost 15,000 men, and more than a hundred guns.

Though the battles of Gross-Beeren and Katzbach were severe blows to Buonaparte's plan of maintaining himself on the Elbe, he continued obstinate in his determination to keep his ground, with Dresden as his central point of support, and attempted to turn the bad fortune which seemed to haunt his lieutenants (but which in fact arose from their being obliged to attempt great achievements with inadequate means,) by appointing Ney to the command of the Northern army, with strict injunctions to plant his eagles on the walls of Berlin. Accordingly, on the 6th September, Ney took charge of the army which Oudinot had formerly commanded, and which was lying under the walls of Wittenberg, and, in obedience to the Emperor's orders, determined to advance on the Prussian capital. The enemy (being the army commanded by the Crown Prince) lay rather dispersed upon the grounds more to the east, occupying Juterbock, Belzig, and other villages. Ney was desirous to avoid approaching the quarters of any of them, or to give the least alarm. That marÉchal's object was to leave them on the left, and, evading any encounter with the Crown Prince, to throw his force on the road from Torgua to Berlin, and enter into communication with any troops which Buonaparte might despatch from Dresden upon the same point.

On examining the plan more closely, it was found to comprehend the danger of rousing the Prince of Sweden and his army upon one point, and that was at Dennewitz, the most southern village held by the allies. It was occupied by Tauentzein with a large force, and could not be passed without the alarm being given. Dennewitz might, however, be masked by a sufficient body of troops, under screen of which the marÉchal and his main body might push forward to Dahme, without risking an engagement. It was concluded, that the rapidity of their motions would be so great as to leave no time for the Crown Prince to concentrate his forces for interrupting them.

On the 5th, Ney marched from Wittenberg. On the 6th, the division of Bertrand, destined to mask Dennewitz, formed the left flank of the army. When they approached the village, Tauentzein, who commanded there, took the alarm, and drew up between Dennewitz and the French division. If Bertrand had only had to maintain himself for a short interval in that dangerous position, it would have been well, and he might have made head against Tauentzein, till the last file of Ney's army had passed by; but by some miscalculation (which began to be more common now than formerly among the French officers of the staff,) the corps of Bertrand was appointed to march at seven in the morning, while the corps which were to be protected by him did not move till three hours later. Bertrand was thus detained so long in face of the enemy, that his demonstration was converted into an action, his false attack into a real skirmish. Presently after the battle became sharp and serious, and the corps on both sides advancing to sustain them were engaged. Bulow came to support Tauentzein—Regnier advanced to repel Bulow—Guilleminot hastened up on the French side—and Borstel came to support the Russians. However unpremeditated, the battle became general, as if by common consent.

The Prussians suffered heavily from the French artillery, but without giving way. The Swedes and Russians at length came up, and the line of Ney began to yield ground. That general, who had hardly, though all his forces were engaged, made his post good against the Russians alone, despaired of success when he saw these new enemies appear. He began to retreat; and his first movement in that direction was a signal of flight to the 7th corps, composed chiefly of Saxons not over well inclined to the cause of Napoleon, and who therefore made it no point of honour to fight to the death in his cause. A huge blank was created in the French line by their flight; and the cavalry of the allies rushing in at the gap, the army of Ney was cut into two parts; one of which pushed forwards to Dahme with the marÉchal himself; the other, with Oudinot, retreated upon Scharnitz. Ney afterwards accomplished his retreat on Torgau. But the battle of Dennewitz had cost him 10,000 men, forty-three pieces of cannon, and abundance of warlike trophies, relinquished to the adversary, besides the total disappointment of his object in marching towards Berlin.[282]

These repeated defeats, of Gross-Beeren, Katzbach, and Dennewitz, seemed to intimate that the French were no longer the invincibles they had once been esteemed; or at least, that when they yet worked miracles, it was only when Buonaparte was at their head. Others saw the matter in a different point of view. They said that formerly, when means were plenty with Buonaparte, he took care that his lieutenants were supplied with forces adequate to the purposes on which they were to be employed. But it was surmised that now he kept the guard and the Élite of his forces under his own immediate command, and expected his lieutenants to be as successful with few and raw troops as they had formerly been with numbers, and veterans. It cannot, however, be said that he saved his own exertions; for during the month of September, while he persisted in maintaining the war in Saxony, although no affair of consequence took place, yet a series of active measures showed how anxious he was to bring the war to a decision under his own eye.[283]

In perusing the brief abstract of movements which follows, the reader will remember, that it was the purpose of Buonaparte to bring the allies to a battle on some point, where, by superior numbers or superior skill, he might obtain a distinguished victory; while, on the other hand, it was the policy of the allies, dreading at once his talents and his despair, to avoid a general action; to lay waste the ground around the points he occupied; restrict his communications; raise Germany in arms around him; and finally, to encompass and hem him in when his ranks were grown thin, and the spirit of his soldiers diminished. Keeping these objects in his eye, the reader, with a single glance at the map, will conceive the meaning of the following movements on either side.

Having deputed to Ney, as we have just seen, the task of checking the progress of the Crown Prince, and taking Berlin if possible, Buonaparte started in person from Dresden on the 3d September, in hopes of fetching a blow at Blucher, whose Cossacks, since the battle of the Katzbach, had advanced eastward, and intercepted a convoy even near Bautzen. But agreeably to the plan adopted at the general headquarters of the allies, the Prussian veteran fell back and avoided a battle. Meanwhile, Napoleon was recalled towards Dresden by the news of the defeat of Ney at Dennewitz, and the yet more pressing intelligence that the allies were on the point of descending into Saxony, and again arraying themselves under the walls of Dresden. The advanced guard of Witgenstein had shown itself, it was said, at Pirna, and the city was a prey to new alarms. The French Emperor posted back towards the Elbe, and on the 9th came in sight of Witgenstein. But the allied generals, afraid of one of those sudden strokes of inspiration, when Napoleon seemed almost to dictate terms to fate, had enjoined Witgenstein to retreat in his turn. The passes of the Erzgebirge received him, and Buonaparte, following him as far as Peterswald, gazed on the spot where Vandamme met his unaccountable defeat, and looked across the valley of Culm to Toplitz, where his rival Alexander still held his headquarters. With the glance of an eye, the most expert in military affairs, he saw the danger of involving himself in such impracticable defiles as the valley of Culm, and the roads which communicated with it, and resolved to proceed no farther.

Napoleon, therefore, returned towards Dresden, where he arrived on the 12th September. In his retreat, a trifling skirmish occurred, in which the son of Blucher was wounded, and made prisoner. A victory was claimed on account of this affair, in the bulletin. About the same period, Blucher advanced upon the French troops opposed to him, endangered their communications with Dresden, and compelled them to retreat from Bautzen, and Neustadt, towards Bischoffswerder and Stolpen. While Buonaparte thought of directing himself eastward towards this indefatigable enemy, his attention was of new summoned southward to the Bohemian mountains. Count Lobau, who was placed in observation near Gieshubel, was attacked by a detachment from Schwartzenberg's army. Napoleon hastened to his relief, and made a second attempt to penetrate into these mountain recesses, from which the eagles of the allies made such repeated descents. He penetrated, upon this second occasion, beyond Culm, and as far as Nollendorf, and had a skirmish with the allies, which was rather unfavourable to him. The action was broken off by one of the tremendous storms which distinguished the season, and Buonaparte again retreated towards Gieshubel. On his return to Dresden, he met the unpleasant news, that the Prince-Royal was preparing to cross the Elbe, and that Bulow had opened trenches before Wittenberg; while Blucher, on his side, approached the right bank of the river, and neither Ney nor Macdonald had sufficient force to check their progress.

On the 21st September, Napoleon once again came in person against his veteran enemy, whom he met not far from Hartha; but it was once more in vain. The Prussian field-marÉchal was like the phantom knight of the poet. Napoleon, when he advanced to attack him, found no substantial body against which to direct his blows.

The Emperor spent some hours at the miserable thrice-sacked village of Hartha, deliberating, probably, whether he should press on the Crown Prince or Blucher, and disable at least one of these adversaries by a single blow; but was deterred by reflecting, that the time necessary for bringing either of them to action would be employed by Schwartzenberg in accomplishing that purpose of seizing Dresden, which his movements had so frequently indicated.

Thus Napoleon could neither remain at Dresden, without suffering the Crown Prince and Blucher to enter Saxony, and make themselves masters of the valley of the Elbe, nor make any distant movement against those generals, without endangering the safety of Dresden, and, with it, of his lines of communication with France. The last, as the more irreparable evil, he resolved to guard against, by retreating to Dresden, which he reached on the 24th. His marÉchals had orders to approach closer to the central point, where he himself had his headquarters; and all the right side of the Elbe was abandoned to the allies. It is said by Baron Odeleben,[284] that the severest orders were issued for destroying houses, driving off cattle, burning woods, and rooting up fruit-trees, reducing the country in short to a desert (an evil reward for the confidence and fidelity of the old King of Saxony,) but that they were left unexecuted, partly owing to the humanity of Napoleon's lieutenants, and partly to the rapid advance of the allies. There was little occasion for this additional cruelty; for so dreadfully had these provinces been harassed and pillaged by the repeated passing and repassing of troops on both sides, that grain, cattle, and forage of every kind, were exhausted, and they contained scarce any other sustenance for man or beast, except the potato crop, then in the ground.

After his return to Dresden, on the 24th September, Napoleon did not leave it till the period of his final departure; and the tenacity with which he held the place, has been compared by some critics to the wilful obstinacy which led to his tarrying so long at Moscow. But the cases were different. We have formerly endeavoured to show, that Napoleon's wisdom in the commencement of this campaign would have been to evacuate Germany, and, by consenting to its liberation, to have diminished the odium attached to his assumption of universal power. As, however, he had chosen to maintain his lofty pretensions at the expense of these bloody campaigns, it was surely prudent to hold Dresden to the last moment. His retreat from it, after so many losses and disappointments, would have decided the defection of the whole Confederation of the Rhine, which already was much to be dreaded. It would have given the allied armies, at present separated from each other, an opportunity to form a junction on the left side of the Elbe, the consequences of which could hardly fail to be decisive of his fate. On the other hand, while he remained at Dresden, Napoleon was in a condition to operate by short marches upon the communications of the allies, and might hope to the last that an opportunity would be afforded him of achieving some signal success against one or other of them, or perhaps of beating them successively, and in detail. The allied sovereigns and their generals were aware of this, and, therefore, as we have seen, acted upon a plan of extreme caution, for which they have been scoffed at by some French writers, as if it were the result of fear rather than of wisdom. But it was plain that the time for more decisive operations was approaching, and, with a view to such, each party drew towards them such reinforcements as they could command.

Buonaparte's soldiers had suffered much by fatigue and skirmishes, though no important battle had been fought; and he found himself obliged to order Augereau, who commanded about 16,000 men in the neighbourhood of Wurtzberg, to join him at Dresden. He might, however, be said to lose more than he gained by this supply; for the Bavarians, upon whose inclinations to desert the French cause Augereau's army had been a check, no sooner saw it depart, than an open and friendly intercourse took place betwixt their army and that of Austria, which lay opposed to them; negotiations were opened between their courts, without much affectation of concealment; and it was generally believed, that only some question about the Tyrol prevented their coming to an immediate agreement.

The allies received, on their side, the reinforcement of no less than 60,000 Russians, under the command of Bennigsen. The most of them came from the provinces eastward of Moscow; and there were to be seen attending them tribes of the wandering Baskirs and Tartars, figures unknown in European war, wearing sheep-skins, and armed with bows and arrows. But the main body consisted of regular troops, though some bore rather an Asiatic appearance. This was the last reinforcement which the allies were to expect; being the arriere-ban of the almost boundless empire of Russia. Some of the men had travelled from the wall of China to this universal military rendezvous.

Their utmost force being now collected, in numbers greatly superior to that of their adversary, the allies proceeded to execute a joint movement by means of which they hoped to concentrate their forces on the left bank of the Elbe; so that if Napoleon should persist in remaining at Dresden, he might be cut off from communication with France. With this view Blucher, on the 3d October, crossed the Elbe near the junction of that river with the Schwarze Elster, defeated Bertrand, who lay in an entrenched camp to dispute the passage, and fixed his headquarters at Duben. At the same time, the Crown Prince of Sweden in like manner transferred his army to the left bank of the Elbe, by crossing at Roslau, and entered into communication with the Silesian army. Thus these two great armies were both transferred to the left bank, excepting the division of Tauentzein, which was left to maintain the siege of Wittenberg. Ney, who was in front of these movements, having no means to resist such a preponderating force, retreated to Leipsic.

Simultaneously with the entrance of the Crown Prince and Blucher into the eastern division of Saxony from the north-west, the grand army of the allies was put in motion towards the same district, advancing from the south by Sebastians-Berg and Chemnitz. On the 5th October, the headquarters of Prince Schwartzenberg were at Marienberg.

These movements instantly showed Buonaparte the measures about to be taken by the allies, and the necessity of preventing their junction. This he proposed to accomplish by leaving Dresden with all his disposable force, attacking Blucher at Duben, and, if possible, annihilating that restless enemy, or, at least, driving him back across the Elbe. At the same time, far from thinking he was about to leave Dresden for ever, which he had been employed to the last in fortifying yet more strongly, he placed a garrison of upwards of 15,000 men in that city under St. Cyr. This force was to defend the city against any corps of the allies, which, left in the Bohemian mountains for that purpose, might otherwise have descended and occupied Dresden, so soon as Napoleon removed from it. The King of Saxony, his Queen and family, preferred accompanying Napoleon on his adventurous journey, to remaining in Dresden, where a siege was to be expected, and where subsistence was already become difficult.

The same alertness of movement, which secured Blucher on other occasions, saved him in the present case from the meditated attack on Duben. On the 9th of October, hearing of Napoleon's approach, he crossed the Mulda, and formed a junction with the army of the Crown Prince, near Zoerbig, on the left bank of that river. Napoleon, once more baffled, took up his headquarters at Duben on the 10th. Here he soon learned that the Crown Prince and Blucher, apprehensive that he might interpose betwixt them and the grand army of Schwartzenberg, had retreated upon the line of the Saale during the night preceding the 11th. They were thus still placed on his communications, but beyond his reach, and in a situation to communicate with their own grand army.

But this movement to the westward, on the part of the allies, had this great inconvenience, that it left Berlin exposed, or inadequately protected by the single division of Tauentzein at Dessau. This did not escape the falcon eye of Napoleon. He laid before his marÉchals a more daring plan of tactics than even his own gigantic imagination had (excepting in the Moscow campaign) ever before conceived. He proposed to recross the Elbe to the right bank, and then resting his right wing on Dresden, and his left on Hamburgh, there to maintain himself, with the purpose of recrossing the Elbe on the first appearance of obtaining a success over the enemy, dashing down on Silesia, and raising the blockade of the fortresses upon the Oder. With this purpose he had already sent Regnier and Bertrand across the Elbe, though their ostensible mission had nothing more important than to raise the siege of Wittenberg.

The counsellors of the Emperor were to a man dissatisfied with this plan. It seemed to them that remaining in Germany was only clinging to the defence of what could no longer be defended. They appealed to the universal disaffection of all the Germans on the Rhine, and to the destruction of the kingdom of Westphalia, recently effected by no greater force than Czernicheff, with a pulk of Cossacks. They noticed the almost declared defection of all their former friends, alluded to their own diminished numbers, and remonstrated against a plan which was to detain the army in a wasted country inhabited by a population gradually becoming hostile, and surrounded with enemies whom they could not defeat, because they would never fight but at advantage, and who possessed the means of distressing them, while they had no means of retorting the injuries they received. This, they said, was the history of the last three months, only varied by the decisive defeats of Gross-Beeren, Katzbach, and Dennewitz.

Napoleon remained from the 11th to the 14th of October at Duben, concentrating his own forces, waiting for news of the allies' motions, and remaining in a state of uncertainty and inactivity, very different from his usual frame of mind and natural habits. "I have seen him at that time," says an eyewitness,[285] "seated on a sofa beside a table, on which lay his charts, totally unemployed, unless in scribbling mechanically large letters on a sheet of white paper." Consultations with his best generals, which ended without adopting any fixed determination, varied those unpleasing reveries. The councils were often seasons of dispute, almost of dissension. The want of success had made those dissatisfied with each other, whose friendship had been cemented by uniform and uninterrupted prosperity. Great misfortunes might have bound them together, and compelled them to regard each other as common sufferers. But a succession of failures exasperated their temper, as a constant drizzling shower is worse to endure than a thunder-storm.

Napoleon, while the marÉchals were dissatisfied with each other and with him, complained, on his part, that fatigue and discouragement had overpowered most of his principal officers; that they had become indifferent, lukewarm, awkward, and therefore unfortunate. "The general officers," he said, "desired nothing but repose, and that at all rates."

On the other hand, the marÉchals asserted that Napoleon no longer calculated his means to the ends which he proposed to attain—that he suffered himself to be deceived by phrases about the predominance of his star and his destiny—and ridiculed his declaration that the word Impossible was not good French. They said that such phrases were well enough to encourage soldiers; but that military councils ought to be founded on more logical arguments. They pleaded guilty of desiring repose; but asked which was to blame, the horse or the rider, when the over-ridden animal broke down with fatigue?

At length Napoleon either changed his own opinion, or deferred to that of his military advisers; the orders to Regnier and Bertrand to advance upon Berlin were annulled, and the retreat upon Leipsic was resolved upon. The loss of three days had rendered the utmost despatch necessary, and Buonaparte saw himself obliged to leave behind him in garrison, Davoust at Hamburgh, Lemarrois at Magdeburg, Lapoype at Wittenberg, and Count Narbonne at Torgau. Still he seems to have anticipated some favourable chance, which might again bring him back to the line of the Elbe. "A thunderbolt," as he himself expressed it, "alone could save him; but all was not lost while battle was in his power, and a single victory might restore Germany to his obedience."