We are now about to begin the campaign of miracles; but before relating
the events which I witnessed on this campaign, during which I, so to
speak, never left the Emperor, it is necessary that I here inscribe some
souvenirs which may be considered as a necessary introduction. It is
well known that the Swiss cantons had solemnly declared to the Emperor
that they would not allow their territory to be violated, and that they
would do everything possible to oppose the passage of the allied armies
who were marching on the frontiers of France by way of the Breisgau. The
Emperor, in order to stop them on their march, relied upon the
destruction of the bridge of Bale; but this bridge was not destroyed,
and Switzerland, instead of maintaining her promised neutrality, entered
into the coalition against France. The foreign armies passed the Rhine
at Bale, at Schaffhausen, and at Mannheim. Capitulations made with the
generals of the confederated troops in regard to the French garrisons of
Dantzic, Dresden, and other strong towns had been, as we have seen,
openly violated. Thus Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr and his army corps had
been, contrary to the stipulations contained in the treaties, surrounded
by superior forces, disarmed, and conducted as prisoners to Austria; and
twenty thousand men, the remains of the garrison of Dantzic, were thus
arrested by order of the Emperor Alexander, and conveyed to the Russian
deserts. Geneva opened its gates to the enemy in the following January.
Vesoul, Epinal, Nancy, Langres, Dijon, Chalons-sur-Saone, and Bar-sur-
Aube were occupied by the allies.
The Emperor, in proportion as the danger became more pressing, displayed
still more his energy and indefatigable activity. He urged the
organization of new levies, and in order to pay the most urgent expenses
drew thirty millions from his secret treasury in the vaults of the
pavilion Marsan. The levies of conscripts were, however, made with
difficulty; for in the course of the year 1813 alone, one million forty
thousand soldiers had been summoned to the field, and France could no
longer sustain such enormous drains. Meanwhile veterans came from all
parts to be enrolled; and General Carnot offered his services to the
Emperor, who was much touched by this proceeding, and confided to him the
defense of Antwerp. The zeal and courage with which the general
acquitted himself of this important mission is well known. Movable
columns and corps of partisans placed themselves under arms in the
departments of the east, and a few rich proprietors levied and organized
companies of volunteers, while select cavalry formed themselves into
corps, the cavaliers of which equipped themselves at their own expense.
In the midst of these preparations the Emperor received news which moved
him deeply,--the King of Naples had just joined the enemies of the
French. On a previous occasion, when his Majesty had seen the Prince
Royal of Sweden, after having been marshal and prince of the Empire,
enter into a coalition against his native country, I heard him break
forth into reproaches and exclamations of indignation, although the King
of Sweden had more than one reason to offer in his own defense, being
alone in the north, and shut in by powerful enemies against whom he was
entirely unable to struggle, even had the interests of his new country
been inseparable from those of France. By refusing to enter into the
coalition he would have drawn on Sweden the anger of her formidable
neighbors, and with the throne he would have sacrificed and fruitlessly
ruined the nation which had adopted him. It was not to the Emperor he
owed his elevation. But King Joachim, on the contrary, owed everything
to the Emperor; for it was he who had given him one of his sisters as a
wife, who had given him a throne, and had treated him as well as, and
even better than, if he had been a brother. It was consequently the duty
of the King of Naples as well as his interest not to separate his cause
from that of France; for if the Emperor fell, how could the kings of his
own family, whom he had made, hope to stand? Both King Joseph and Jerome
had well understood this, and also the brave and loyal Prince Eugene, who
supported courageously in Italy the cause of his adopted father. If the
King of Naples had united with him they could together have marched on
Vienna, and this audacious but at the same time perfectly practicable
movement would have infallibly saved France.
These are some of the reflections I heard the Emperor make in speaking of
the treachery of the King of Naples, though in the first moments,
however, he did not reason so calmly. His anger was extreme, and with it
was mingled grief and emotions near akin to pity: "Murat !" cried he,
"Murat betray me! Murat sell himself to the English! The poor creature!
He imagines that if the allies succeed in overthrowing me they would
leave him the throne on which I have seated him. Poor fool! The worst
fate that can befall him is that his treachery should succeed; for he
would have less pity to expect from his new allies than from me."
The evening before his departure for the army, the Emperor received the
corps of officers of the National Parisian Guard, and the reception was
held in the great hall of the Tuileries. This ceremony was sad and
imposing. His Majesty presented himself before the assembly with her
Majesty the Empress, who held by the hand the King of Rome, aged three
years lacking two months. Although his speech on this occasion is
doubtless already well known, I repeat it here, as I do not wish that
these beautiful and solemn words of my former master should be wanting in
my Memoirs:
"GENTLEMEN, Officers of the National Guard,--It is with much
pleasure I see you assembled around me. I leave to-night to place
myself at the head of the army. On leaving the capital I place with
confidence in your care my wife and my son on whom rests so many
hopes. I owe you this proof of my confidence, in return for all the
innumerable proofs you have repeatedly given me in the important
events of my life. I shall depart with my mind free from anxiety,
since they will be under your faithful protection. I leave with you
what is dearest to me in the world, next to France, and I freely
commit it to your care.
"It may occur that in consequence of the maneuvers I am about to
make, the enemy may find the opportunity of approaching your walls.
If this should take place, remember that it will be an affair of
only a few days, and I will soon come to your assistance. I
recommend to you to preserve unity among yourselves, and to resist
all the insinuations by which efforts will be made to divide you.
There will not be wanting endeavors to shake your fidelity to duty,
but I rely upon you to repel these perfidious attempts."
At the end of this discourse, the Emperor bent his looks on the Empress
and the King of Rome, whom his august mother held in her arms, and
presenting both by his looks and gestures to the assembly this child
whose expressive countenance seemed to reflect the solemnity of the
occasion, he added in an agitated voice, "I confide him to you,
Messieurs; I confide him to the love of my faithful city of Paris!" At
these words of his Majesty innumerable shouts were heard, and innumerable
arms were raised swearing to defend this priceless trust. The Empress,
bathed in tears and pale with the emotion by which she was agitated,
would have fallen if the Emperor had not supported her in his arms. At
this sight the enthusiasm reached its height, tears flowed from all eyes,
and there was not one present who did not seem willing as he retired to
shed his blood for the Imperial family. On this occasion I again saw for
the first time M. de Bourrienne at the palace; he wore, if I am not
mistaken, the uniform of captain in the National Guard.
On the 25th of January the Emperor set out for the army, after conferring
the regency on her Majesty the Empress; and that night we reached
Chalons-sur-Marne. His arrival stopped the progress of the enemy's army
and the retreat of our troops. Two days after he, in his turn, attacked
the allies at Saint-Dizier. His Majesty's entrance into this town was
marked by most touching manifestations of enthusiasm and devotion. The
very moment the Emperor alighted, a former colonel, M. Bouland, an old
man more than seventy years old, threw himself at his Majesty's feet,
expressing to him the deep grief which the sight of foreign bayonets had
caused him, and his confidence that the Emperor would drive them from the
soil of France. His Majesty assisted the old veteran to rise, and said
to him cheerfully that he would spare nothing to accomplish such a
favorable prediction. The allies conducted themselves in the most
inhuman manner at Saint-Dizier: women and old men died or were made ill
under the cruel treatment which they received; and it may be imagined
what a cause of rejoicing his Majesty's arrival was to the country.
The enemy having been repulsed at Saint-Dizier, the Emperor learned that
the army of Silesia was being concentrated on Brienne, and immediately
set out on the march through the forest of Deo, the brave soldiers who
followed him appearing as indefatigable as he. He halted at the village
of Eclaron, where his Majesty paid a certain sum to the inhabitants to
repair their church, which the enemy had destroyed. The surgeon of this
town advanced to thank the Emperor; and his Majesty examining him
attentively said to him, "You have served in the army, Monsieur?"--"Yes,
Sire; I was in the army of Egypt."--"Why have you no cross?"--"Sire,
because I have never asked for it."--"Monsieur, you are only the more
worthy of it. I hope you will wear the one I shall give you." And in a
few moments his certificate was signed by the Emperor, and handed to the
new chevalier, whom the Emperor recommended to give the most careful
attention to the sick and wounded of our army who might be committed to
his care.
[It is known that the Emperor was not lavish in the distribution
of the Cross of Honor. Of this fact I here give an additional
proof. He was much pleased with the services of M. Veyrat,
inspector general of police, and he desired the Cross. I presented
petitions to this effect to his Majesty, who said to me one day,
"I am well satisfied with Veyrat. He serves me well, and I will
give him as much money as he wishes; but the Cross, never!"
--CONSTANT.]
On entering Mezieres his Majesty was received by the authorities of the
city, the clergy, and the National Guard. "Messieurs," said the Emperor
to the National Guard who pressed around him, "we fight to day for our
firesides; let us defend them in such a manner that the Cossacks may not
come to warm themselves beside them. They are bad guests, who will leave
no place for you. Let us show them that every Frenchman is born a
soldier, and a brave one!" His Majesty on receiving the homage of the
curate, perceiving that this ecclesiastic regarded him with extreme
interest and agitation, consequently considered the good priest more
attentively, and soon recognized in him one of the former regents of the
college of Brienne. "What! is it you, my dear master?" cried the
Emperor. "You have, then, never left your retirement! So much the
better, since for that reason you will be only the better able to serve
the cause of your native land. I need not ask if you know the country
around here."--"Sire," replied the curate, "I could find my way with my
eyes shut."--"Come with us, then; you will be our guide, and we will
converse." The worthy priest immediately saddled his well-broken horse,
and placed himself in the center of the Imperial staff.
The same day we arrived before Brienne. The Emperor's march had been so
secret and so rapid that the Prussians had heard nothing of it until he
suddenly appeared before their eyes. A few general officers were made
prisoners; and Blucher himself, who was quietly coming out of the
chateau, had only time to turn and fly as quickly as he could, under a
shower of balls from our advance guard. The Emperor thought for a moment
that the Prussian general had been taken, and exclaimed, "We have got
that old swash-buckler. Now the campaign will not be long." The
Russians who were established in the village set it on fire, and an
engagement took place in the midst of the flames. Night arrived, but the
combat still continued; and in the space of twelve hours the village was
taken and retaken many times. The Emperor was furious that Blucher
should have escaped. As he returned to headquarters, which had been
established at Mezieres, his Majesty narrowly escaped being pierced
through with the lance of a Cossack; but before the Emperor perceived the
movement of the wretch, the brave Colonel Gourgaud, who was marching
behind his Majesty, shot the Cossack dead with his pistol.
The Emperor had with him only fifteen thousand men, and they had waged an
equal struggle with eighty thousand foreign soldiers. At the close of
the combat the Prussians retreated to Bar-sur-Aube; and his Majesty
established himself in the chateau of Brienne, where he passed two
nights. I recalled during this stay the one that I had made ten years
before in this same chateau of Brienne, when the Emperor was on his way
to Milan with the intention of adding the title of King of Italy to that
of Emperor of the French. "To-day," I said to myself, "not only is Italy
lost to him, but here in the center of the French Empire, and a few
leagues from his capital, the Emperor is defending himself against
innumerable enemies!" The first time I saw Brienne, the Emperor was
received as a sovereign by a noble family who fifteen years before had
welcomed him as a protege. He had there revived the happiest
remembrances of his childhood and youth; and in comparing himself in 1805
with what he had been at the Ecole Militaire had spoken with pride of the
path he had trod. In 1814, on the 31st of January, the end to which this
path was tending began to be seen. It is not that I wish to announce
myself as having foreseen the Emperor's fall, for I did not go so far as
that. Accustomed to see him trust to his star, the greater part of those
who surrounded him trusted it no less than he; but nevertheless we could
not conceal from ourselves that great changes had taken place. To delude
ourselves in this respect it would have been necessary to close our eyes
that we might neither see nor hear this multitude of foreigners, whom we
had until now seen only in their own country, and who, in their turn,
were now in our midst.
At each step, in fact, we found terrible proofs of the enemy's presence.
After taking possession of the towns and villages, they had arrested the
inhabitants, maltreated them with saber-strokes and the butt ends of
their guns, stripping them of their clothing, and compelling those to
follow them whom they thought capable of serving as guides on their
march; and if they were not guided as they expected they killed with the
sword or shot their unfortunate prisoners. Everywhere the inhabitants
were made to furnish provisions, drink, cattle, forage, in a word,
everything that could be useful to an army making enormous requisitions;
and when they had exhausted all the resources of their victims, they
finished their work of destruction by pillage and burning. The
Prussians, and above all the Cossacks, were remarkable for their brutal
ferocity. Sometimes these hideous savages entered the houses by main
force, shared among themselves everything that fell into their hands,
loaded their horses with the plunder, and broke to pieces what they could
not carry away. Sometimes, not finding sufficient to satisfy their
greed, they broke down the doors and windows, demolished the ceiling in
order to tear out the beams, and made of these pieces and the furniture,
which was too heavy to be carried away, a fire, which being communicated
to the roofs of neighboring houses consumed in a moment the dwellings of
the unhappy inhabitants, and forced them to take refuge in the woods.
Sometimes the more wealthy inhabitants gave them what they demanded,
especially brandy, of which they drank eagerly, thinking by this
compliance to escape their ferocity; but these barbarians, heated by
drink, then carried their excesses to the last degree. They seized
girls, women, and servants, and beat them unmercifully, in order to
compel them to drink brandy until they fell in a complete state of
intoxication. Many women and young girls had courage and strength to
defend themselves against these brigands; but they united three or four
against one, and often to avenge themselves for the resistance of these
poor creatures mutilated and slew them, after having first violated them,
or threw them into the midst of the bivouac fires. Farms were burned up,
and families recently opulent or in comfortable circumstances were
reduced in an instant to despair and poverty. Husbands and old men were
slain with the sword while attempting to defend the honor of their wives
and daughters; and when poor mothers attempted to approach the fires to
warm the children at their breasts, they were burned or killed by the
explosion of packages of cartridges, which the Cossacks threw
intentionally into the fire; and the cries of pain and agony were stifled
by the bursts of laughter from these monsters.
I should never end if I attempted to relate all the atrocities committed
by these foreign hordes. It was the custom at the time of the
Restoration to say that the complaints and narrations of those who were
exposed to these excesses were exaggerated by fear or hatred. I have
even heard very dignified persons jest pleasantly over the pretty ways of
the Cossacks. But these wits always kept themselves at a distance from
the theater of war, and had the good fortune to inhabit departments which
suffered neither from the first nor second invasion. I would not advise
them to address their pleasantries to the unfortunate inhabitants of
Champagne, or of the departments of the east in general. It has been
maintained also that the allied sovereigns and the general officers of
the Russian and Prussian army severely forbade all violence in their
regular troops, and that the atrocities were committed by undisciplined
and ungovernable bands of Cossacks. I have been in a position to learn,
on many occasions, especially at Troves, proofs to the contrary. This
town has not forgotten, doubtless, how the Princes of Wurtemberg and
Hohenlohe and the Emperor Alexander himself justified the burnings,
pillage, violations, and numerous assassinations committed under their
very eyes, not only by the Cossacks, but also by regularly enlisted and
disciplined soldiers. No measures were taken by the sovereigns or by
their generals to put an end to such atrocities, and nevertheless when
they left a town there was needed only an order from them to remove at
once the hordes of Cossacks who devastated the country.
The field of the La Rothiere was, as I have said, the rendezvous of the
pupils of the military school of Brienne. It was there that the Emperor,
when a child, had foreshadowed in his engagement with the scholars his
gigantic combats. The engagement at La Rothiere was hotly contested; and
the enemy obtained, only at the price of much blood, an advantage which
they owed entirely to their numerical superiority. In the night which
followed this unequal struggle, the Emperor ordered the retreat from
Troves. On returning to the chateau after the battle, his Majesty
narrowly escaped an imminent danger. He found himself surrounded by a
troop of uhlans, and drew his sword to defend himself. M. Jardin,
junior, his equerry, who followed the Emperor closely, received a ball in
his arm. Several chasseurs of the escort were wounded, but they at last
succeeded in extricating his Majesty. I can assert that his Majesty
showed the greatest self-possession in all encounters of this kind. On
that day, as I unbuckled his sword-belt, he drew it half out of the
scabbard, saying, "Do you know, Constant, the wretches have made me cut
the wind with this? The rascals are too impudent. It is necessary to
teach them a lesson, that they may learn to hold themselves at a
respectful distance."
It is not my intention to write the history of this campaign in France,
in which the Emperor displayed an activity and energy which excited to
the highest point the admiration of those who surrounded him.
Unfortunately, the advantages which he had obtained gradually exhausted
his own troops, while only creating losses in the enemy's, which they
easily repaired. It was, as M. Bourrienne has well said, a combat of an
Alpine eagle with a flock of ravens: "The eagle may kill them by
hundreds. Each blow of his beak is the death of an enemy; but the ravens
return in still greater numbers, and continue their attack on the eagle
until they at last overcome him." At Champ-Aubert, at Montmirail, at
Nangis, at Montereau, and at Arcis, and in twenty other engagements, the
Emperor obtained the advantage by his genius and by the courage of our
army; but it was all in vain. Hardly had these masses of the enemy been
scattered, before fresh ones were formed again in front of our soldiers,
exhausted by continuous battles and forced marches. The army, especially
that which Blucher commanded, seemed to revive of itself, and whenever
beaten reappeared with forces equal, if not superior, to those which had
been destroyed or dispersed. How can such an immense superiority of
numbers be indefinitely resisted?