musketry-fire: you advanced without a halt; your bayonets drove them
down the steep ridge of the valley of the raging Neisse and Katzbach.
Afterwards you waded through rivers and brooks swollen with rain. You
passed nights in mud. You suffered for want of provisions, as the
impassable roads and want of conveyance hindered the baggage from
following. You struggled with cold, wet, privations, and want of
clothing; nevertheless you did not murmur,--with great exertions you
pursued your routed foe. Receive my thanks for such laudable conduct.
The man alone who unites such qualities is a true soldier. One hundred
and three cannons, two hundred and fifty ammunition-wagons, the enemy's
field-hospitals, their field-forges, their flour-wagons, one general of
division, two generals of brigade, a great number of colonels, staff
and other officers, eighteen thousand prisoners, two eagles, and other
trophies, are in your hands. The terror of your arms has so seized upon
the rest of your opponents, that they will no longer bear the sight of
your bayonets. You have seen the roads and fields between the Katzbach
and the Bober: they bear the signs of the terror and confusion of your
enemy." The bluff old General, who at seventy had more "dash" than all
the rest of the leaders of the Allies combined, and who did most of the
real fighting business of "those who wished and worked" Napoleon's fall,
knew how to talk to soldiers, which is a quality not always possessed
by even eminent commanders. Soldiers love a leader who can take them to
victory, and then talk to them about it. Such a man is "one of them."

Napoleon never recovered from the effects of the losses he experienced
at Kulm and on the Katzbach,--losses due entirely to the wetness of the
weather. He went downward from that time with terrible velocity, and was
in Elba the next spring, seven months after having been on the Elbe. The
winter campaign of 1814, of which so much is said, ought to furnish
some matter for a paper on weather in war; but the truth is, that that