After his return to Dresden, on the 24th September, Napoleon did not leave it till the period of his final departure; and the tenacity with which he held the place, has been compared by some critics to the wilful obstinacy which led to his tarrying so long at Moscow. But the cases were different. We have formerly endeavoured to show, that Napoleon's wisdom in the commencement of this campaign would have been to evacuate Germany, and, by consenting to its liberation, to have diminished the odium attached to his assumption of universal power. As, however, he had chosen to maintain his lofty pretensions at the expense of these bloody campaigns, it was surely prudent to hold Dresden to the last moment. His retreat from it, after so many losses and disappointments, would have decided the defection of the whole Confederation of the Rhine, which already was much to be dreaded. It would have given the allied armies, at present separated from each other, an opportunity to form a junction on the left side of the Elbe, the consequences of which could hardly fail to be decisive of his fate. On the other hand, while he remained at Dresden, Napoleon was in a condition to operate by short marches upon the communications of the allies, and might hope to the last that an opportunity would be afforded him of achieving some signal success against one or other of them, or perhaps of beating them successively, and in detail. The allied sovereigns and their generals were aware of this, and, therefore, as we have seen, acted upon a plan of extreme caution, for which they have been scoffed at by some French writers, as if it were the result of fear rather than of wisdom. But it was plain that the time for more decisive operations was approaching, and, with a view to such, each party drew towards them such reinforcements as they could command.
Buonaparte's soldiers had suffered much by fatigue and skirmishes, though no important battle had been fought; and he found himself obliged to order Augereau, who commanded about 16,000 men in the neighbourhood of Wurtzberg, to join him at Dresden. He might, however, be said to lose more than he gained by this supply; for the Bavarians, upon whose inclinations to desert the French cause Augereau's army had been a check, no sooner saw it depart, than an open and friendly intercourse took place betwixt their army and that of Austria, which lay opposed to them; negotiations were opened between their courts, without much affectation of concealment; and it was generally believed, that only some question about the Tyrol prevented their coming to an immediate agreement.
The allies received, on their side, the reinforcement of no less than 60,000 Russians, under the command of Bennigsen. The most of them came from the provinces eastward of Moscow; and there were to be seen attending them tribes of the wandering Baskirs and Tartars, figures unknown in European war, wearing sheep-skins, and armed with bows and arrows. But the main body consisted of regular troops, though some bore rather an Asiatic appearance. This was the last reinforcement which the allies were to expect; being the arriere-ban of the almost boundless empire of Russia. Some of the men had travelled from the wall of China to this universal military rendezvous.
OPERATIONS OF THE ALLIES.
Their utmost force being now collected, in numbers greatly superior to that of their adversary, the allies proceeded to execute a joint movement by means of which they hoped to concentrate their forces on the left bank of the Elbe; so that if Napoleon should persist in remaining at Dresden, he might be cut off from communication with France. With this view Blucher, on the 3d October, crossed the Elbe near the junction of that river with the Schwarze Elster, defeated Bertrand, who lay in an entrenched camp to dispute the passage, and fixed his headquarters at Duben. At the same time, the Crown Prince of Sweden in like manner transferred his army to the left bank of the Elbe, by crossing at Roslau, and entered into communication with the Silesian army. Thus these two great armies were both transferred to the left bank, excepting the division of Tauentzein, which was left to maintain the siege of Wittenberg. Ney, who was in front of these movements, having no means to resist such a preponderating force, retreated to Leipsic.
Simultaneously with the entrance of the Crown Prince and Blucher into the eastern division of Saxony from the north-west, the grand army of the allies was put in motion towards the same district, advancing from the south by Sebastians-Berg and Chemnitz. On the 5th October, the headquarters of Prince Schwartzenberg were at Marienberg.
These movements instantly showed Buonaparte the measures about to be taken by the allies, and the necessity of preventing their junction. This he proposed to accomplish by leaving Dresden with all his disposable force, attacking Blucher at Duben, and, if possible, annihilating that restless enemy, or, at least, driving him back across the Elbe. At the same time, far from thinking he was about to leave Dresden for ever, which he had been employed to the last in fortifying yet more strongly, he placed a garrison of upwards of 15,000 men in that city under St. Cyr. This force was to defend the city against any corps of the allies, which, left in the Bohemian mountains for that purpose, might otherwise have descended and occupied Dresden, so soon as Napoleon removed from it. The King of Saxony, his Queen and family, preferred accompanying Napoleon on his adventurous journey, to remaining in Dresden, where a siege was to be expected, and where subsistence was already become difficult.
The same alertness of movement, which secured Blucher on other occasions, saved him in the present case from the meditated attack on Duben. On the 9th of October, hearing of Napoleon's approach, he crossed the Mulda, and formed a junction with the army of the Crown Prince, near Zoerbig, on the left bank of that river. Napoleon, once more baffled, took up his headquarters at Duben on the 10th. Here he soon learned that the Crown Prince and Blucher, apprehensive that he might interpose betwixt them and the grand army of Schwartzenberg, had retreated upon the line of the Saale during the night preceding the 11th. They were thus still placed on his communications, but beyond his reach, and in a situation to communicate with their own grand army.
But this movement to the westward, on the part of the allies, had this great inconvenience, that it left Berlin exposed, or inadequately protected by the single division of Tauentzein at Dessau. This did not escape the falcon eye of Napoleon. He laid before his maréchals a more daring plan of tactics than even his own gigantic imagination had (excepting in the Moscow campaign) ever before conceived. He proposed to recross the Elbe to the right bank, and then resting his right wing on Dresden, and his left on Hamburgh, there to maintain himself, with the purpose of recrossing the Elbe on the first appearance of obtaining a success over the enemy, dashing down on Silesia, and raising the blockade of the fortresses upon the Oder. With this purpose he had already sent Regnier and Bertrand across the Elbe, though their ostensible mission had nothing more important than to raise the siege of Wittenberg.
The counsellors of the Emperor were to a man dissatisfied with this plan. It seemed to them that remaining in Germany was only clinging to the defence of what could no longer be defended. They appealed to the universal disaffection of all the Germans on the Rhine, and to the destruction of the kingdom of Westphalia, recently effected by no greater force than Czernicheff, with a pulk of Cossacks. They noticed the almost declared defection of all their former friends, alluded to their own diminished numbers, and remonstrated against a plan which was to detain the army in a wasted country inhabited by a population gradually becoming hostile, and surrounded with enemies whom they could not defeat, because they would never fight but at advantage, and who possessed the means of distressing them, while they had no means of retorting the injuries they received. This, they said, was the history of the last three months, only varied by the decisive defeats of Gross-Beeren, Katzbach, and Dennewitz.