We are now approaching a critical moment. The French had maintained their positions during the three days which the battle had lasted, but this success had only been obtained at the cost of much bloodshed, for they had had nearly 40,000 men disabled. The enemy had, it is true, lost 60,000, a difference which must be attributed to their persistency in attacking villages which we had entrenched, but as the number of their troops was infinitely greater than ours, our army was proportionately far more weakened by its losses than theirs. It must be added that as the French artillery had in the three days fired 220,000 rounds our reserves were exhausted, and we had only 16,000 rounds left—enough, that is, for two hours' fighting. This lack of ammunition, which ought to have been foreseen before engaging superior forces at a distance from our frontier, rendered Napoleon incapable of giving battle again, and he was compelled to make up his mind to order a retreat.

It was no easy matter to carry this out. The ground which we occupied, being damp meadows with brooks between them and intersected by three streams, offered a number of small valleys, and these we had to pass close under the eyes of the enemy, who would find it easy to throw our march into disorder. There was only one way to secure our retreat: namely, the provision of a number of plank roads across the meadows, ditches, and watercourses, and of larger bridges across the three streams, especially the Elster, into which the others flow at the very gates of Leipzig. Nothing was easier to effect, since any amount of planks, beams, nails, &c., were close at hand in the town and suburbs.

The whole army was under the impression that all this had been done on its first arrival, and the work added to on the 17th when there was no fighting. But by a series of unfortunate circumstances, and by inconceivable neglect, no steps had been taken. Among the documents which are extant about the battle, there is absolutely no official statement to show that any measures had been taken, if a retreat was necessary, to facilitate the outflow of the columns from either the river valleys or the streets of Leipzig. No officer among the survivors, no author who has written on the battle, has been able to show that the chiefs of the army did anything to increase the number or the efficiency of the existing ways of communication. Only General Pelet, who pushed his admiration for Napoleon sometimes to the point of extravagance, wrote, fifteen years after the battle, than he had heard more than once from M. Odier, sub-intendant of the imperial guard, that he was present in the morning (he does not say of what day) when the Emperor gave a general on the staff orders to attend to the construction of the bridges, specially charging him with that duty. General Pelet does not mention the name of the general officer to whom the Emperor gave that order—rather an important detail. Napoleon's secretary, M. Fain, says in his 'Memoirs' that the Emperor ordered several new passages across the marshes to be constructed in order to facilitate the crossing. How far posterity will admit the truth of these assertions, made long after date, I know not; but even supposing them accurate, many writers think that the head of the French army should not have been satisfied with 'giving orders' to a general, who, perhaps, had neither sappers nor materials at his disposal; but that several officers, at least one per regiment in every corps, should have been charged with the duty. One thing is certain—no one carried it out. The real reason, which at the time very few people knew, was as follows.

The Emperor's chief of the headquarters staff was Prince Berthier, who had been with him since the Italian campaign of 1796. He was a man of capacity, accuracy, and devotion to duty, but he had often felt the effects of the imperial wrath,' and had acquired such a dread of Napoleon's outbreaks that he had vowed in no circumstance to take the initiative or ask any question, but to confine himself to executing orders which he received in writing. This system, while keeping the chief-of-the-staff on good terms with his master, was injurious to the interests of the army; for great as were the Emperor's activity and talents, it was physically impossible for him to see to everything, and thus, if he overlooked any important matter, it did not get attended to.

So it seems to have been at Leipzig. Nearly all the marshals and generals commanding army corps pointed out to Berthier, over and over again, the necessity of providing many passages to secure the retreat in the event of a reverse but he always answered: ‘The Emperor has given no orders.' Nothing could be got out of him, so that when, on the night of the 18th the Emperor gave the order to retreat on Weissenfels and the Saale, there was not a beam or a plank across a single brook.

The losses of the allies had been so great that they did not venture to attack afresh, and they were themselves on the point of withdrawing when they saw our heavy baggage being taken towards Weissenfels by way of Lindenau. Then they understood that Napoleon was preparing to retreat, and made their dispositions to profit by any chance in their favour which might result from his movement.

The most terrible moment of a retreat, especially for a commanding officer, is when he has to leave his wounded to the mercy of the enemy, who often have none, but plunder or put an end to the unhappy men who are unable to follow their comrades. However, as the worst thing of all is to be left lying on the ground, I had all my wounded taken up under cover of night and collected in two neighbouring houses, both to remove them from the first fury of the enemy, who would be flushed with wine, and to enable them to aid each other, and keep up each other's courage. M. Bordenave, assistant-surgeon, offered to remain with them. At the peace I got the Legion of Honour for that estimable doctor, by whose care many men's lives were saved.

Meanwhile, the troops were marching from that field which had witnessed their prowess and been watered by so much of their blood. The Emperor left his bivouac at 8 P.M., and took up his position in the town at the 'Prussian Arms' in the horsemarket. After giving his orders, he visited the King of Saxony, whom he found making arrangements to follow him. The King, a model friend, expected that, to punish him for his fidelity to the Emperor of the French, the allied sovereigns would deprive him of his crown, but he was most afflicted by the thought that his army had disgraced itself. Napoleon could not console the good old man, and only with difficulty persuaded him to stay at Leipzig and send one of his ministers to make terms with the Coalition. The Emperor then took leave of the King, the Queen, and their daughter. The parting was the more touching by the fact of news having come that the allies declined to enter into any engagement as to the course they meant to take with regard to the Saxon monarch. He would, therefore, be at their mercy, and in his rich provinces they had strong motives for severity.

About eight o'clock in the evening the corps of Victor and Augereau, the ambulances, part of the artillery, the cavalry, and the imperial guard began to retreat. While they were passing through Lindenau, Ney, Marmont, and Reynier guarded the suburbs of Halle and Rosenthal. Lauriston, Macdonald, and Poniatowski entered the town and established themselves behind the gates, the walls of which had battlements. Thus all was ready for an obstinate resistance by the rear-guard, and the army was free to retreat in good order. Still, Napoleon, wishing to spare the town the horrors of street fighting, had allowed the magistrates to petition the allied sovereigns for an armistice of a few hours that the evacuation might be conducted with order. This humane proposal was rejected, and the allies, in hope of profiting by any disorder which might arise in the French rear-guard, scrupled not to expose one of the largest towns in Germany to total destruction. Then, in their indignation, several generals proposed to the Emperor to secure the retreat of his army by concentrating it within the town, and setting fire to all the suburbs except that of Lindenau. I think that the refusal to allow us to retreat unmolested justified us in employing all possible means of defence, and that as fire was the most effective we should have made use of it; but Napoleon could not make up his mind to it. This excessive magnanimity lost him his crown, for the fight, which I am going to relate cost us nearly as many men as the three days' battle. Indeed, it was more disastrous, for it demoralized the army, which would otherwise have reached France in considerable strength; and the fine way in which our weak remnant opposed the allies for three months shows pretty well what we could have done if the survivors of the great battle had recrossed the Rhine without losing their arms and their organization. France would probably have repelled the invaders.

But it was not to be so; for while Napoleon, with a too chivalrous generosity—mistaken, as I think—was refusing to burn an enemy's town and thus secure without a blow the safe retreat of his army, Bernadotte, the unworthy Crown Prince of Sweden, blaming the lack of zeal which his allies showed in the destruction of his fellow-countrymen, launched all his troops against the suburb of Taucha, captured it, and entered the town. Following his example, Blucher with his Prussians, the Russians, and the Austrians attacked the rear of the French columns in their retreat towards the Lindenau bridge over the Elster; and finally, to fill our cup full, a smart musketry-fire opened near that bridge, the only way of retreat open to our troops. This fire came from the battalions of the Saxon guard, who had been left in the town with their King. Regretting that they had not been able to desert with the rest of their army, and wishing to testify their German patriotism, they attacked the French in rear, before the palace of their sovereign. In vain did the unfortunate prince, appearing on the balcony, where the bullets were flying, exclaim to his officers and men, 'Cowards! kill me, your sovereign, and spare me the sight of your dishonour.' The scoundrels continued to assassinate the French, and the King, returning to his apartments, seized the colours of his guard and flung them into the fire.

The last kick was given to our troops by a Baden battalion which, being notorious for cowardice, had been left in the town during the battle to chop wood for the bakehouses. These miscreants, from the shelter of the windows of the great bakery, also fired on our soldiers, killing a great number. The French, meanwhile, made a brave resistance, defending themselves in the houses, and, in spite of their losses, disputing the ground foot by foot with the allied armies, while, they retired in good order towards the bridge of Lindenau.

The Emperor had with difficulty got out of the town, and reached the suburb. At the last bridge, called the Mill-bridge, he dismounted, and not till then gave orders to charge the mine under the main bridge. Further, he sent orders to Ney, Macdonald, and Poniatowski to hold the town twenty-four hours longer, so as to allow the artillery and baggage time to get through the suburb and across the bridges. Then he remounted; but he had hardly ridden a thousand paces along the road to Lutzen when a fearful explosion was heard. The great bridge over the Elster had blown up. And the troops under Macdonald, Lauriston, Reynier, and Poniatowski, with more than 200 guns, were still in Leipzig, and their retreat was wholly cut off. It was a climax to our disasters.

To explain this catastrophe, people said afterwards that Prussian and Swedish skirmishers had slipped along to the neighbourhood of the bridge, and, joining the Saxon guards, had taken possession of some houses, and begun to fire on the French columns; and that the sapper who had to fire the mine was misled into thinking that the enemy was coming up, and that the moment had come to blow up the bridge, and had therefore set fire to the powder. Others attributed the deplorable mistake to Colonel Montfort of the engineers, alleging that he had given the order in consequence of seeing the enemy's skirmishers. This version was adopted by the Emperor, who made a scapegoat of M. de Montfort, and ordered him to be brought to trial; but it was proved later on that he had nothing to do with it. Whatever the truth may have been, the army accused the chief-of-the-staff of neglect; and it was said with reason that he ought to have entrusted the guardianship of the bridge to an entire brigade, making the general personally responsible for giving the order to fire the mine at the proper moment. But Berthier defended himself with his usual answer: 'The Emperor had given no orders.'

After the destruction of the bridge, some of the French threw themselves into the Elster, in the hope of swimming across. Some succeeded, including Marshal Macdonald; but the greater number, Prince Poniatowski among them, were drowned, because when they had crossed the river they could not get up the muddy banks, which were lined, moreover, with the enemy's skirmishers. Those of our men who remained in the town, thinking only how to sell their lives dearly, barricaded themselves behind the houses, and fought valiantly all the day and part of the night; but their ammunition failed, their hastily-raised entrenchments were forced, and nearly all were slain. The slaughter did not cease till two in the morning.

All this time the allied sovereigns, Bernadotte among them, assembled in the chief square, were relishing their victory, and deliberating how best to make sure of its results. The number of French massacred in the houses is reckoned at 13,000, and 25,000 were made prisoners. The enemy took also 250 guns.

After this general account of the events which followed the battle of Leipzig, I ought to tell you what specially befell my regiment, and Sébastiani's corps, to which it belonged. As we had for three days beaten off the enemy and held our part of the field, the troops were much astonished and grieved to hear on the evening of the 18th that for want of ammunition we were going to retreat. We hoped (and it seems to have been the Emperor's design) that he would at least go no further than beyond the Saale; where we might, in the neighbourhood of the fortress of Erfurt, replenish our powder wagons and recommence hostilities. We mounted then at 8 P.M. on October 18, and quitted the field where we had fought for three days, and where so many of our comrades had fallen with honour. Hardly were we out of our bivouac, when we felt the inconvenience arising from the neglect of the imperial staff to prepare for the retreat of so large an army. Every minute the columns were stopped by broad ditches, by marshes and brooks, which might so easily have been bridged. Horses and wheels stuck in the mud; and as the night was dark there were blocks everywhere. Our march was, therefore, very slow, and my regiment, being at the head of Exelmans', the leading division, did not reach the Lindenau bridge till 4 A.M. on the 10th. As we crossed it, we were far from foreseeing the frightful catastrophe which it was in a few hours to witness.

Day broke; the broad road was covered with troops of all arms in great number, which showed that the army would be still strong when it reached the Saale. The Emperor came by; but as he galloped along the flank of the column he heard none of the acclamations which were wont to proclaim his presence. The army was ill-content with the little care which had been taken to secure its retreat; but what would the troops have said if they had known with how little foresight the passage of the Elster had been arranged? They had crossed it; but many of their comrades were about to find their deaths there. We were halting at Markranstadt, a little town three leagues from Leipzig, when we heard the explosion of the mine; but instead of being grieved, all rejoiced, for we doubted not that it had been fired to prevent the passage of the enemy after all our columns were safe across.

During the few hours' rest which we took at Markranstadt I was able to look at our squadrons in detail, and learn the losses of the regiment in the three days' fighting. I was horrified to find that they amounted to 149, of which sixty, including two captains, three lieutenants, and eleven non commissioned officers, were killed; a terrible proportion out of 700, which had been the strength of the regiment on the morning of the 16th. Nearly all the wounds were caused by grape or round shot, which unhappily allowed small hope of recovery. But my losses would, perhaps, have been two-fold if I had not taken the precaution of keeping my regiment as much as possible out of artillery-fire. To explain this, I may point out that there are positions in which the most humane general finds himself under the painful necessity of exposing his men to the fire of cannon; but it also often happens that they are exposed quite unnecessarily, especially in the case of cavalry, who are able to move quickly from place to place. It is just in the case of large bodies of cavalry and on great battle-fields that precautions are most needed, but least taken. Now on October 16, at Leipzig, General Sébastiani having placed his three divisions between the villages of Wachau and Liebertvolkwitz, and indicated to each divisional commander approximately the ground which his division should take up, it fell to that of Exelmans to be posted on undulating ground, broken into small mounds and hollows. The enemy's cavalry was a long way off, and therefore could not surprise us; and I took advantage of the hollows in the ground to cover my regiment. Thus sheltered from artillery-fire, and at the same time all ready to act, we had the satisfaction of seeing a great part of the day go by without our having a single man hit, while the regiments in our neighbourhood were losing pretty heavily.

I was congratulating myself on having placed my men so well when General Exelmans, on the plea that everyone should take his share of danger, ordered me, in spite of the remonstrances of my brigadier, to advance my regiment a hundred paces. I obeyed, and in a short time lost Captain Bertin killed and a score of men disabled. Then I tried a new plan, namely, to send troopers, well apart, to fire at the enemy's gunners with their carbines. This made the enemy also send out skirmishers, and when skirmishing was thus going on between the lines the enemy's guns could not fire on us for fear of hitting their own people. Ours were of course similarly hampered; but to get the artillery silenced on even a small part of the line was all in our favour, as the enemy was far superior in that arm. Moreover, our infantry was just then at close quarters with that of the enemy in the villages, and the cavalry on both sides had nothing to do but await the issue; so it was of no use for either side to be smashing up the other with cannon-balls. A skirmishing engagement, in which for the most part more powder is burnt than damage done, was a much better way of spending the time. Accordingly, all the colonels followed my example, and much bloodshed was saved. Still more would have been, if General Exelmans had not given the order to recall the skirmishers: which was the signal to the enemy to pour a hail of shot on our squadrons. Luckily it was near the end of the day.

This was the evening of the 16th. All the cavalry colonels of the 2nd corps approved so highly this plan of economizing human life that we all agreed to employ it on the 18th. When the enemy's guns opened we sent out skirmishers; and as these would have captured the guns had they been left undefended, our opponents had also to send out skirmishers, thus paralysing their artillery. The commander of the enemy's cavalry, probably divining our motive, did the same, with the result that on that day the artillery attached to the cavalry on both sides was much less employed. None the less we met in vigorous charges, but these had always a definite object, and in that case one must not spare oneself. But an artillery duel between two cavalry corps only leads to the useless slaughter of brave men. That was what Exelmans would not see, but as he was always rushing from one wing to another, as soon as he was a little way from a regiment the colonel would send out his skirmishers and the artillery would cease to speak. So persuaded were Sébastiani and all the cavalry generals of the merit of this plan, that Exelmans at last got orders to leave off teasing the enemy's gunners by firing at them when our squadrons were merely in observation. Two years later I employed the same system with the English artillery at Waterloo, and lost much less heavily than I otherwise should have done.