easy matter to tell why one nation received a beating in
preference to another, but beaten they all were in the end, inevitably
beaten from the very commencement, in a whirlwind of genius and heroic
daring that swept great armies like chaff from off the earth. There
was Marengo, the classic battle of the plain, with the consummate
generalship of its broad plan and the faultless retreat of the
battalions by squares, silent and impassive under the enemy's terrible
fire; the battle, famous in story, lost at three o'clock and won at six,
where the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard withstood the
onset of the entire Austrian cavalry, where Desaix arrived to change
impending defeat to glorious victory and die. There was Austerlitz, with
its sun of glory shining forth from amid the wintry sky, Austerlitz,
commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending with
the frightful catastrophe on the frozen lake, where an entire Russian
corps, men, guns, horses, went crashing through the ice, while Napoleon,
who in his divine omniscience had 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 annihilatin