w.

Ambition was, at that time, completely unshackled; every thing inspired
the passion for glory; they had been launched into a boundless career.
How was it possible to measure the ascendancy, which a powerful emperor
must have acquired, or the strong impulse which he had given them?--an
emperor, capable of telling his soldiers after the victory of
Austerlitz, "I will allow you to name your children after me; and if
among them there should prove one worthy of us, I will leave him every
thing I possess, and name him my successor."

CHAP. III.

The junction of the two wings of the Russian army, in the direction of
Smolensk, had compelled Napoleon also to approximate his various
divisions. No signal of attack had yet been given, but the war involved
him on all sides; it seemed to tempt his genius by success, and to
stimulate it by reverses. On his left, Wittgenstein, equally in dread of
Oudinot and Macdonald, remained between the two roads from Polotsk and
Duenabourg, which meet at Sebez. The Duke of Reggio's orders had been to
keep on the defensive. But neither at Polotsk nor at Witepsk was there
any thing found in the country, which disclosed the position of the
Russians. Tired of feeling nothing of them on any side, the marshal
determined to go in quest of them himself. On the 1st of August,
therefore, he left general Merle and his division on the Drissa, to
protect his baggage, his great park of artillery, and his retreat; he
pushed Verdier towards Sebez, and made him take a position on the
high-road, in order to mask the movement which he was meditating. He
himself, turning to the left with Legrand's infantry, Castex's cavalry,
and Aubrey's light artillery, advanced as far as Yakoubowo, on the road
to Osweia.

As chance would have it, Wittgenstein, at the same moment, was marching
from Osweia to Yakoubowo; the hostile armies unexpectedly met each
other in front of that village. It was late in the day; the shock was
violent, but of short duration: night put an end to the combat, and
postponed its decision.

The marshal found himself engaged, with a single division, in a deep and
narrow pass, surrounded with woods and hills, all the declivities of
which were opposed to us. He was hesitating, however, whether he should
quit that contracted position, on which all the enemy's fire was about
to be concentrated, when a young Russian staff-officer, scarcely emerged
from boyhood, came dashing heedlessly into our