The 7th Hussars forwarded to Napoleon as their spoils from a three days’ chase, 7 Prussian cavalry standards; those of the Anspach and Bayreuth Dragoons; the Queen of Prussia’s regiment; and 4 standards of the Light Cavalry of the Guard. Marshal Lannes sent Napoleon 40 Prussian standards taken between Jena and Berlin. Bernadotte and Soult presented 82 more trophies, the spoils of Blücher’s army, forced to surrender at Lübeck after a forlorn-hope fight in the course of which the city was stormed.
“THE FINEST FEAT OF ARMS”
Marshal Ney took the fortress of Magdeburg without having a single siege-gun, and with only 11,000 men at hand to deal with 24,000 in the garrison and 700 guns on the ramparts, some of these being the heaviest artillery of the time. It was perhaps the most surprising event of the war. The taking of Magdeburg, wrote Junot, “is the finest feat of arms that has illustrated this campaign.” Ney had been ordered to blockade Magdeburg until a sufficient army was available for the siege of the fortress, which Napoleon expected would be a long and difficult affair. But so tedious a task as a blockade was not at all to Ney’s taste. To hasten matters he sent for half a dozen mortars, taken at Erfurt, and began throwing shells into the suburbs on the side nearest him. The bombardment caused a scare among the townsfolk. Panic-stricken at seeing their houses set on fire and destroyed by the bursting shells, they hastened to General Kleist, the governor of Magdeburg, an elderly and nervous old gentleman of between seventy and eighty years of age, and implored him to ask terms of the French marshal. Dismayed himself at the prospect of a siege, with disorder rampant among the military—nearly half the garrison was made up of fragments of fugitive regiments from Jena who had fled to Magdeburg for shelter from the pursuing French—Kleist, losing his nerve in the face of the alarming situation, agreed to negotiate for terms. Ney’s reply was a demand for instant surrender, whereupon the wretched governor, although he had more than enough good troops at disposal, without counting the Jena fugitives, to have made a stubborn defence, tamely hoisted the white flag.
The march out of the garrison of Magdeburg was a repetition of the Austrian humiliation of Ulm on a lesser scale. The standards of the Black Eagle in their turn had at Magdeburg publicly to acknowledge defeat before the Eagles of Napoleon.
THE GARRISON LAYS DOWN ARMS
Ney drew up his 11,000 men in a great hollow square outside the Ulrich gate of the fortress. His troops were drawn up along three sides of the square; the fourth side, that nearest the city, being left open. In front of the regiments stood their Eagles, all paraded as at Ulm, the Eagle-guards beside them, and the regimental officers standing in line with their swords at the carry. The Prussians marched out and, to the music of the French bands, passed in procession along the three inner sides of the square, and in front of Marshal Ney and his staff. The miserable Kleist led them, and then took his stand beside Ney, to answer the marshal’s questions as to who and what the various regiments were, as each set of downcast Prussians trailed past. They tramped by, with their muskets on their shoulders unloaded and without bayonets, and with their colours furled. The hapless prisoners, after they had defiled past, were at once marched away under escort on the road to Mayence. Twenty generals, 800 other officers, 22,000 infantry, and 2,000 artillerymen, with 59 standards, underwent the humiliation of the defilade.[14] There were several painful scenes at the laying down of the arms. “Their soldiers openly insulted their officers,” describes one of the French lookers-on. “Most of them looked terribly ashamed of themselves; the faces of not a few were streaming with tears.”
At Magdeburg, as in the other surrenders elsewhere, it was not the personal courage of the officers and soldiers that was wanting—there were men by thousands in the various garrisons ready to give their lives for the honour of their country; it was the generals in command whose nerve lacked. The generals were men past their prime, and mostly physically incapable of enduring hardships. They had been appointed to their posts, in accordance with the system in vogue in Prussia, for the sake of the emoluments.
“The overthrow of Jena,” to use the words of a modern writer, “had been caused by faults of generalship, and cast no stain upon the courage of the officers; the surrender of the Prussian fortresses, which began on the day when the French entered Berlin, attached the utmost personal disgrace to their commanders. Even after the destruction of the army in the field, Prussia’s situation would not have been hopeless if the commanders of the fortresses had acted on the ordinary rules of military duty. Magdeburg and the strongholds upon the Oder were sufficiently armed and provisioned to detain the entire French army, and to give time to the King to collect upon the Vistula a force as numerous as that which he had lost. But whatever is weakest in human nature—old age, fear, and credulity—seemed to have been placed at the head of the Prussian defences.” Küstrin on the Oder, “in full order for a long siege, was surrendered by the older officers, amidst the curses of the subalterns and the common soldiers: the artillerymen had to be dragged from their guns by force.”
At Magdeburg, indeed, before the march out, the younger officers of the garrison mobbed General Kleist, hooting at him and cursing him to his face; some of them, further, being with difficulty stopped from acts of personal violence.
There yet remained one day more for the Eagles. The triumphal parade of the victorious Eagles through Berlin was the crowning humiliation that Napoleon imposed on vanquished Prussia.