f that day, the Emperor
maintained a stolid composure, but observers saw that he was bathed in
sweat. Towards evening, he turned and rode away westwards; and from
the weary famished files, many a fierce glance and muttered curse shot
forth as he passed by. Men remembered that it was exactly a year since
the Grand Army broke up from Moscow.

Yet, despite the ravages of typhus, the falling away of the German
States and the assaults of the allied horse, the retreating host
struggled stoutly on towards the Rhine. At Hanau it swept aside an
army of Bavarians and Austrians that sought to bar the road to France;
and, early in November, 40,000 armed men, with a larger number of
unarmed stragglers, filed across the bridge at Mainz. Napoleon had not
only lost Germany; he left behind in its fortresses as many as 190,000
troops, of whom nearly all were French; and of the 1,300 cannon with
which he began the second part of the campaign, scarce 200 were now at
hand for the defence of his Empire.

The causes of this immense disaster are not far to seek. They were
both political and military. In staking all on the possession of the
line of the Elbe, Napoleon was engulfing himself in a hostile land. At
the first signs of his overthrow, the national spirit of Germany was
certain to inflame the Franconians and Westphalians in his rear, and
imperil his communications. In regard to strategy, he committed the
same blunder as that perpetrated by Mack in 1805. He trusted to a
river line that could easily be turned by his foes. As soon as Austria
declared against him, his position on the Elbe was fully as perilous
as Mack's lines of the Iller at Ulm.

And yet, in spite of the obvious danger from the great mountain
bastion of Bohemia that stretched far away in his rear, the Emperor
kept his troops spread out from Koenigstein to Hamburg, and ventured on
long and wearying marches into Silesia, and north to Dueben, which left
his positions in Saxony almost at the mercy of the allied Grand
Army.[384] By emerging from the mighty barrier of the Erzgebirge, that
army compelled him three times to give up his offensive moves and
hastily to fall back into the heart of Saxony.

The plain truth is that he was out-generalled by the allies. The
assertion may seem to savour of profanity. Yet, if words have any
meaning, the phrase is literally correct. His aim was primarily to
maintain himself on the line of the Elbe, but also, though in the
second place,