foreseen it all, of course, directed his artillery to play upon the
struggling mass. There was Jena, where so many of Prussia's bravest
found a grave; at first the red flames of musketry flashing through
the October mists, and Ney's impatience, near spoiling all until
Augereau comes wheeling into line and saves him; the fierce charge
that tore the enemy's center in twain, and finally panic, the headlong
rout of their boasted cavalry, whom our hussars mow down like ripened
grain, strewing the romantic glen with a harvest of men and horses.
And Eylau, cruel Eylau, bloodiest battle of them all, where the maimed
corpses cumbered the earth in piles; Eylau, whose new-fallen snow was
stained with blood, the burial-place of heroes; Eylau, in whose name
reverberates still the thunder of the charge of Murat's eighty
squadrons, piercing the Russian lines in every direction, heaping the
ground so thick with dead that Napoleon himself could not refrain from
tears. Then Friedland, the trap into which the Russians again allowed
themselves to be decoyed like a flock of brainless sparrows, the
masterpiece of the Emperor's consummate strategy; our left held back
as in a leash, motionless, without a sign of life, while Ney was
carrying the city, street by street, and destroying the bridges, then
the left hurled like a thunderbolt on the enemy's right, driving it
into the river and annihilating it in that _cul-de-sac_; the slaughter
so great that at ten o'clock at night the bloody work was not
completed, most wonderful of all the successes of the great imperial
epic. And Wagram, where it was the aim of the Austrians to cut us off
from the Danube; they keep strengthening their left in order to
overwhelm Massena, who is wounded and issues his orders from an open
carriage, and Napoleon, like a malicious Titan, lets them go on
unchecked; then all at once a hundred guns vomit their terrible fire
upon their weakened center, driving it backward more than a league,
and their left, terror-stricken to find itself unsupported, gives way