“Ordener is worn out,” Napoleon remarked at Austerlitz. “One has but a short time for war. I am good for another six years, and then I shall have to stop.”
Austerlitz was fought at the close of 1805; Leipsic toward the end of 1813: the great captain had already gone two years beyond his limit.
The lean, wiry, tireless young general of the Italian campaign, who had fought Alvinczy five days without closing his eyes or taking off his boots, could never be identified in the dull-faced, slow-moving, corpulent, and soon-wearied Emperor of 1813.
Next morning, October 19, the Allies discovered that the French were in retreat, and this attack was renewed at all points with passionate energy. Napoleon left his bivouac, came into Leipsic, took up quarters in the hotel called The Prussian Arms. He went to the palace to take leave of the King and Queen of Saxony, who wished to follow his fortunes still. He advised them to stay and make the best terms possible with the Allies. He released his remaining Saxon troops. All day the retreat went on, the battle raging at the same time, the French rear-guard maintaining itself with superb courage.
The magistrates of the town, fearing its utter destruction, begged the Allies to suspend the cannonade till the French could get away. “Let Leipsic perish,” answered the “Saviors of Germany”; and the guns continued to roar.
To protect his rear while the retreat was in progress, Napoleon was urged to fire the suburbs next to the allied lines. He nobly refused.
What a horrible day it must have been! The steady thunder of a thousand cannon; the crackle of four hundred thousand muskets; the shouts of onset; the shrieks of the wounded; the fierce crash of caissons and wagons; the stormlike hurly-burly of countless men and horses, all wild with passion, all excited to the highest pitch of action, all crowding desperately toward the maddened town, the gorged, blood-stained streets—to reach the all-important bridge!
The world seemed ablaze with hatred for the fleeing French. The very body-guard of the Saxon king whirled upon their stricken allies, and poured deadly volleys into the retreating ranks. Even the cowardly Baden troop, which had been left in Leipsic by the French, to chop wood for the bakehouses, now laid aside their axes, and from the shelter of the bakeries shot down the French soldiers as they passed.
The Emperor with difficulty had crossed the river, and given personal direction to the reunion of the various corps. The rear-guard was making heroic efforts to save the army; and all was going as well as defeats and retreats can be expected to go, when suddenly there came a deafening explosion which, for a moment, drowned the noise of battle. It roused Napoleon, who had fallen asleep; and when Murat and Augereau came running to tell him that the bridge had been blown up and the rear-guard cut off, he seized his head convulsively in his hands, stunned by the awful news.
The French officer, charged with the duty of destroying the bridge when the rear-guard should have passed, had touched off the mine too soon.