The Lieutenant had already seen from Roger’s rank badges that he was a Colonel, so did not demur. One of his men produced a lanyard, tied one end of it to the stout branch of a tree that protruded about seven feet above the road. The struggling peasant was pushed up the bank and the other end knotted round his neck. His legs were then kicked from under him, and he swung out above the road.
His shouts ended abruptly, his little eyes bulged, and his limbs began to jerk like those of a puppet on a string. His neck had not been broken by a drop of several feet and, as the noose was loose, it would not immediately choke him. It could be anything up to a quarter of an hour before the strain of the weight of his body on his neck caused his torture to end in oblivion. Roger was not by nature cruel, but he had suffered such agony, both physical and mental, inflicted on him in this terrible encounter, that he felt fully justified in exacting vengeance.
By this time the head of a column of wagons had appeared round the bend of the road, and Roger learned that it consisted of supplies being sent up to the Emperor’s army. On hearing that the Emperor was on his way back to Dresden, the Lieutenant agreed that it was pointless to proceed further, and ordered his column to turn about. He also called up a sergeant to whom Roger gave the despatch he had been taking to St. Cyr, and ordered him to ride off ahead at full speed with it.
Meanwhile, two of the soldiers had cut Roger’s riding boot away and pried his injured leg from it. As the bullet had gone right through his calf, he was spared the probing needed for extraction, but the muscles had been torn to pieces and, although he was nearly fainting with pain as they bound up the pulpy mess with a field dressing, his vanity was piqued by the gloomy thought that never again would fair ladies comment on the perfection of his legs when wearing silk stockings. He had, as he had feared, lost a lot of blood, so was very weak and now unable to stand unless supported. As several of the wagons were loaded with hay, they were able to make him fairly comfortable in one of them and he was conveyed to a nobleman’s palace in Dresden that had been turned into a hospital for officers.
There they gave him opium to dull the pain of his wounds, then stripped him of his filthy clothes and bathed him thoroughly. The thickness of his tunic had prevented the hound’s teeth from biting deeply into his left forearm but, after his leg had been properly dressed, he had to submit to the further ordeal of having the bites cauterised.
Next morning he gradually roused from a heavily-drugged sleep to contemplate the extremely worrying situation in which he had landed himself by his hasty decision to set off without an orderly. Failing to take that precaution had led to his coming within an ace of losing his life; but he endeavoured to console himself with the thought that although, had he been accompanied by an armed companion, the peasant would never have dared attempt to finish him off, that could not have prevented the man from shooting him through the leg in the first place.
When the surgeon made his rounds, Roger asked anxiously how soon he would be able to ride again. The reply was not for a month or, at the least, three weeks, and then only for a mile or two at a time at walking pace. That was what he had feared, and his heart sank. If Georgina’s visions had been true foresight, young Charles was due to die with the fall of the leaves, and it was already September 13th.
Fate, Roger thought bitterly, had been against him all the time in this nebulous mission, about the success of which he had, from the beginning, considered the odds greatly against him. Georgina had seen Charles in her crystal actually about to be hanged, and for his would-be rescuer to take steps in time to prevent that now seemed most improbable.
Yet for Georgina’s sake he had felt it imperative to do his utmost to render her vision false by finding the boy and getting him back to England before the autumn. To do that there should have been ample time; but again and again he had been thwarted, first by Charles having left Spain, next by learning that he was not held prisoner in France, but was somewhere in Davout’s command based on Hamburg, thus necessitating the long ride up to Dresden. And Hamburg lay to the north-east, over two hundred and fifty miles away. How, now that he was crippled, could he possibly hope to cover that distance before every tree in north Germany was bare of leaves?
17
The Battle of the Nations
That afternoon the Emperor sent to enquire after Roger. From time to time, his friends on the Staff came to visit him and he learned something from them of the progress of the war, although it had again become a most complicated picture.
The three armies opposed to the French now greatly outnumbered them, but the weakness of the Allies was that their forces, which roughly formed a semi-circle east of the Elbe, were widely separated. One army covered Berlin, while the others were in Silesia and Bohemia. Napoleon, in accordance with his habitual strategy, aimed to concentrate his army and defeat each in turn before they could join forces against him; but his plans were seriously bedevilled by the fact that since he was operating in hostile country he could secure no reliable information about the whereabouts of his enemies.
His strongest card was that, owing to his unique reputation as a General, all the Allied Commanders were frightened of him. Bernadotte had been one of the ablest Marshals, yet he had no confidence at all in his own ability to defeat his old master, so kept his Swedes well to the rear of the battle zone. Schwarzenberg, who was technically Commander-in-Chief of all the Allied forces, was an able diplomat but a craven soldier, and became scared out of his wits every time he heard that Napoleon was approaching. Barclay de Tolly had, again and again, perhaps wisely, scurried off with his army rather than stand and fight during the French advance to Moscow in the previous year; and the other Russian Generals were equally cagey about taking on the redoubtable Corsican. Old Blücher and his Prussians alone showed a determination to lose no opportunity of attacking the enemy, but the veteran was too shrewd to take the offensive with his limited forces unless he could be assured of the support of the Russians and Austrians.
This fear of Napoleon by the majority of the Allied Generals did not prove altogether to his advantage, since although it enabled him to move the bulk of his army wherever he wished, every time he advanced against one of the enemy armies it withdrew. The result was that he was constantly exhausting his troops by long marches in most evil weather, without being able to bring any of his opponents to engage in a pitched battle. For the remainder of September, during which there was hardly a day upon which it did not rain, he forced the pace in desperate efforts to catch up with and defeat one of the Allied forces, only to hear that another was again threatening Dresden, so was forced to break off the pursuit and change direction in order to protect his base.
By the end of the month Roger was able to get about on crutches, but for him to have ridden any distance would have been certain to re-open his wound, so he began to contemplate the possibility of hiring a coach and leaving the city clandestinely one night. But once more his plans were frustrated. The Emperor’s Chief-of-Staff, Marshal Berthier, Prince de Neufchâtel, happened to hear that he was able to get about again, so sent for him.
As Roger was that comparatively rare product, a beau sabreur who also had brains, during periods when Napoleon had not been engaged in active operations he had of tent lent him for a while to Berthier; so he was well acquainted with the Chief-of-Staff, and the complicated work for which he was responsible.
The Prince, an ugly little man with an enormous head that held a card index brain; he was most unpopular and ill-tempered but, recognising Roger’s capabilities, had always been polite to him, and he now explained that he was in the devil of a mess.
The constant changes of direction by the Emperor and the other widely scattered French forces, were making it near-impossible to carry out his task of re-routing supply columns and keeping a record of units available, together with their whereabouts; so Roger’s help would prove invaluable. His request, as the senior Marshal in the Emperor’s army, was tantamount to an order so, for the ten days that followe
d, Roger had to labour for hours on end, working out statistics from maps and schedules.
Meanwhile, Blücher, inspired by Gneisenau and encouraged by both his King and the Czar, had determined on a flank march which would enable him to join up with Schwarzenberg’s Austrians, south of Leipzig. A few days later the Emperor, hearing that the Prussians had crossed the Elbe, charged Murat with the defence of Leipzig and St. Cyr once more with that of Dresden, then hurried north-west, hoping to crush his most inveterate enemy while on the march and encumbered by his baggage. Having sent Ney forward to fall on the rear of Blücher’s army, Napoleon waited further news for four days in the dank, fogbound castle of Duben. When it came he learned that Blücher had turned westward, thus disclosing his intention of joining Schwarzenberg.
Promptly the Emperor devised a new plan to disconcert his enemies. The great fortresses on the Elbe were all still in his hands; he would march to the Elbe and cross it. But the whole of his Staff considered this so reckless that they confronted him in a body and begged him to abandon this idea. Reluctantly he agreed, but only to substitute the still more venturesome design of first crushing Bernadotte, then crossing the Elbe at Torgan and circling round to strike at Schwarzenberg near Leipzig.
Had his men been tireless machines, this might have been possible, but for two months they had been marching and counter-marching, for a good part of the time in pouring rain. Their uniforms were sodden, their boots worn out and, owing to insufficient supplies to feed them, they were suffering from semi-starvation.
The Emperor had gained a great victory at Dresden, but his Marshals had been defeated in five major battles: at Grossbeeren, Hagelsberg, Katzbach, Kulm and Dennewitz. At the beginning of the campaign he had commanded half a million men but, mainly through his own ill-conceived strategy, frittered away over half of them. The hospitals were crammed, tens of thousands were suffering from minor wounds. Utter weariness and a spirit of despair now permeated the whole army.
By October 10th he had been forced to the conclusion that he dared take no further risks and now, if he were to save Leipzig, even abandon the middle Elbe in order to concentrate all his forces in the neighbourhood of that city. On the 11th, Berthier received orders to move the Imperial Headquarters to Leipzig, and a frantic packing of documents began.
During each of the past few days Roger had spent from a quarter to half an hour on a quiet horse, but he had not yet dared trot, and it was obviously out of the question for him to make the eighty-mile journey on horseback. In consequence he arranged to travel in one of the Mess carts, a small, two-wheeled, covered wagon.
All through the night and the following day the long columns of silent, depressed troops made their way westward and, late in the evening of the 12th, Roger reached the city to find that Berthier had taken over a Saxon noble’s palace as a headquarters. Knowing that his leg wound pained him when going upstairs, one of Roger’s brother officers had kindly reserved for him a large clothes closet on the first floor, and had a bed put in it. Tired out after his long journey, he pulled off his clothes, tumbled into bed and was almost instantly asleep.
On the 14th the Emperor arrived, bringing with him the unfortunate King and Queen of Saxony, whom for so long he had dragged at his chariot wheels while almost totally destroying what had once been their fair realm. With him, too, he brought the worst of news, which he had received a few days earlier. His hitherto most loyal ally, the King of Bavaria, had defected and entered into a pact with Austria that, in exchange for his putting thirty-six thousand troops at her disposal, she would guarantee a continuance of his sovereignty.
Having left the Saxon sovereigns at their palace, Napoleon pressed on to Wachau, a village about three miles to the south-west of the city, at which Murat had his headquarters. It was the central point opposite the arc from east to south where the allies had massed their main forces. Murat was superior to them only in cavalry, and his gloomy report conveyed the fact that he had not used it with his old dash and ability. The fact was that he was utterly sick of the war, and thought only of how soon he could get back to his Kingdom of Naples.
A similar spirit was displayed that evening by the other Marshals when the Emperor summoned them to a conference at the village of Reudnitz. Among others he bitterly reproached Augereau for no longer being the intrepid leader he had been at the battle of Castiglione; to which the Marshal replied with equal bitterness, ‘Give me back the old soldiers of our Italian campaign, and I’ll show you that I am.’
But Napoleon himself was not the man he had been, otherwise he would not have let the 15th drift by without taking any action, thus giving the Allies an extra day to complete their concentration. During that time Schwarzenberg was able to send a Corps across the rivers Pleisse and Elster in order to threaten Leipzig from the direction of Lindenau on the south-west and also, with new divisions that came up, extend the right of his semicircle.
That night Marmont, whose corps was stationed in the northern suburbs, reported watchfires, indicating that yet another enemy army was mustered there. Actually it was Blücher’s Prussians, but the Emperor refused to believe his Marshal’s warning of this new threat and, continuing to suppose that his only serious danger lay in the south-east, ordered Marmont to be ready to march his troops through Leipzig to support the attack he intended to launch against Schwarzenberg.
Thus, on the morning of October 16th, when the Battle of the Nations opened, one hundred and fifty thousand weary and dispirited troops—all that remained to Napoleon—were opposed to three hundred thousand enemies determined to destroy him and ready to advance simultaneously from the south, east and north of the city.
The Emperor’s forces were disposed on a convex front centred on Liebertwolkwitz, immediately to the east of the city. The enemy were stretched over a much wider arc, so he counted on being able to equal their numbers at any point; and, having driven Schwarzenberg’s army from the field in disruption, deal later with Blücher and Bernadotte about whose positions he was still in ignorance.
Berthier and the rest of the Staff had left the city to join Napoleon at his battle headquarters. As Roger was still unable to ride either fast or for any distance, he would have been useless as an A.D.C.; so, considerably relieved at having a valid excuse to escape the hazards of the battle, he remained behind.
Having breakfasted, he painfully climbed the stairs to the attics of the palace, found a skylight and crawled through on to the roof. From that height, with his spy glass he could get a good view of the greater part of the country surrounding the city.
At nine o’clock the opening shots were fired by the Allies from the heights they held opposite Liebertwolkwitz, and these were followed by a furious artillery duel that lasted for six hours. The Emperor then launched the two cavalry corps of Latour-Maubourg and Pajol. Led by Murat, these twelve thousand charging horsemen provided an amazing spectacle. They scaled the muddy slopes, sabred the gunners and enveloped the Russian squares. So deep was their penetration that the three Allied sovereigns who had been watching the battle from an eminence were forced to beat a hasty retreat. But Murat had forced the pace too early. His horses and men had not the stamina left to resist the counter charges by Pahlen’s Cossacks and the Silesian Curassiers. The French were driven back in confusion, with the loss of both their Corps commanders.
Meanwhile, an Austrian attack on Lindenau had been beaten off, but on the west side of the city, at Möckern, the French received a most unpleasant surprise. In accordance with Napoleon’s orders, Marmont had begun to move south when he was suddenly attacked by Yorck’s Prussians. Ney’s corps should have supported Marmont, but was also on the move. Berthier sent a confused order for Ney to turn about, with the result that his fifteen thousand men spent the greater part of the day marching to and fro without participating in the battle, and arrived too late to help Marmont. He defended Möckern with great determination, and it proved the most bloody engagement of the whole war, ending by the French being driven out and left with gre
atly reduced numbers to endeavour to check Blücher’s advance from the north.
During the day the French had inflicted more casualties on the enemy than they had sustained, but they had lost at least twenty thousand men and had no means of replacing them. St. Cyr’s corps of twenty-seven thousand men was far away at Dresden, and Davout’s army, which had been strained to the limit in holding down north-west Germany, was still further away in Hanover; whereas Bennigsen was now rapidly approaching with the Russian Army of Reserve, numbering forty-one thousand men, and the ultra-cautious Bernadotte had belatedly begun to march south from Halle with his sixty thousand Swedes.
On the following day, a Sunday, the general gloom in Leipzig was added to by the Saxons and other German troops, under General Reynier, becoming disaffected and threatening to desert; also by pouring rain. Experience had shown during this awful autumn campaign that in such weather infantry became almost useless, because the powder for their muskets could not be kept dry. This may have been one reason why the battle was not renewed but, in Napoleon’s case, the malaise and indecision which had recently afflicted him played a part. Instead of planning a break-out, he spent most of his time dozing, then decided to send the captured Austrian General, Merveldt, to his Emperor with proposals for an armistice. But at last the Allies were beginning to realise that Napoleon was not invincible, and that now was their chance to make an end of him; so no reply was sent.
On learning that Blücher had now advanced far enough from the north-west to threaten the only French line of retreat, the Emperor instead of taking time by the forelock and ordering a retreat to start that night, merely directed that his drenched and famished troops should withdraw nearer the city. He then fell asleep.
The Irish Witch Page 24