against the allies, commanded by Benningsen and Lestocq. At the town
of Eylau, about twenty miles from Königsberg, a great but indecisive
battle was fought, in which each army suffered a loss of nearly
eighteen thousand men. The Russians and Prussians fell back about four
miles to Friedland, and both armies were reinforced, the French to
about eighty thousand, and the allies to approximately the same
number.

Here for a season the two great camps were pitched against each other.
The shock of Eylau and the inclemency of the spring, no less than the
political complications that thickened on every horizon, held back the
military movements until the beginning of summer. But at length the
crisis came. On the fourteenth of June was fought the great battle of
Friedland and the allied army was virtually destroyed. The loss of the
Russians and Prussians was more than twenty-five thousand men, while
the French loss was not quite eight thousand. Napoleon commanded in
person, and his triumph was prodigious.

Let not the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum fail to look long and
attentively on the picture of the scene which represents the beginning
of the battle on the side of the French. There on a slight elevation,
in the wheatfield of June, sitting on his white horse, with his
triangular hat lifted in silent salutation, surrounded by the princes
and marshals of his Empire, sits the sardonic somnambulist, while
before him on the left the Cuirassiers of the Guard, on their
tremendous horses gathered out of Normandy, plunging at full gallop,
bearing down through the broken wheat, with buglers in the van and
sabers flashing high and bearded mouths wide open with yellings that
resound through the world till now, charge wildly, irresistibly onward
against the unseen enemy, reckless alike of life and death, but