Part 38 (2/2)

However Macdonald, Marmont and Bertrand, ith their troops had occupied Hanau during the night, having allowed the Bavarians to attack the, received them with their bayonets, overwhelmed and massacred them General de Wrede was seriously injured, and his son-in-law, Prince d'Oettingen was killed

The command of the enemy army then devolved onto the Austrian General Fresnel who ordered a retreat, and the French army continued on its way peacefully towards the Rhine We recrossed the river on the 2nd and 3rd of Noven which included brilliant victories and disasterous defeats, the main cause of which, as I have said, was thepeace in June, following the victories of Lutzen and Bautzen, he quarreled with Austria, which involved the Confederation of the Rhine, that is to say all of Gerainst him

After we had returned to France, the Emperor spent only six days at Mainz, and then went to Paris, preceded by twenty-six flags taken from our enemies The army disapproved of this rapid departure on the part of Napoleon It was accepted that there were important political reasons which called hiht that he should have divided his tianise his arone froe the activity of each, for he should have learned by experience that in his absence little or nothing was done

The last cannon shots which I heard in 1813 were fired at the battle of Hanau, where I nearly spent the last day of es, two on infantry squares, one on artillery and two on Bavarian cavalry; but the greatest danger I ran hen an aht fire and exploded close to me I have told how, on the Emperor's order, all the cavalry were in action at a particularly difficult ood enough for a unit co I have seen done on several occasions, but he round over which his squadrons are about to pass, in case he sends thes and marshes

I was therefore, a few paces ahead, followed by iiven conal to the various squadrons the obstacles which they would find in their way Although the trees idely spaced, the passage through the forest was difficult for the cavalry because the ground was littered with dead and wounded ons, abandoned by the Bavarians You can understand that in these conditions when one is galloping through shot and shell to reach the enereatly on the intelligence and suppleness of roup which followed rape-shot which had wounded several of my orderlies and I had besidethe line, cries of ”Look out, Colonel!” And I saw ten paces away Bavariana aon which one of our shells had set on fire

A huge tree which had been knocked down by cannon-balls barred

I shouted to the trued hih to clear all the leafy branches in which his legs becaon was now in flaht I was done for when er, started bounding four or five feet into the air, getting always further froalloped off with such speed that he really seemed to be ”Ventre a terre”

I was shaken when the explosion occurred, but it see shells for neither I nor my horse were touched

Sadly it was not so fortrumpeter, for e resumed our march after the explosionhis body, ments, and his horse also cut to pieces

My brave Azolan had already saved my life at the Katzbach I noed him my life for the second time I made much of him, and as if to show his pleasure he whinnied at the top of his voice It is at times like these that one has to believe that soht

I greatly regretted the death of e and his behaviour had ie in Toulouse, and had had a good education He delighted in producing Latin quotations, and an hour before his death, the poor lad, having noticed that almost all the trees in the forest of Hanau were beeches, whose branches stretched out to ht it a suitable occasion to declai:

”tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegreatly a and who exclaimed, ”There's a jolly lad whose s; I'll bet it's the first tiil to the sound of enemy cannon fire!”

”Those who live by the sword, perish by the sword” says the scripture, and if this is not applicable to every soldier, it was to a great many under the Empire For example, M Guindet, who killed Prince Louis of Prussia in the fighting at Saalefeld, was himself killed at the battle of Hanau It was no doubt the fear ofa similar fate which led the Russian General Czernicheff to run away froer

You may remember that in the first months of 1812, this officer, then a colonel, an aide-de-camp and favourite of the Emperor Alexander, came to Paris where he abused his position to corrupt two poor e sold to him situation reports on the French army, and that the Russian Colonel only escaped the penalty of the law by secretly fleeing the country On his return to Russia, Mde Czernicheff, although he was a courtier rather than a soldier, was given the rank of general officer and the command of a division of 3000 Cossacks, the only Russian troops who appeared at Hanau where their leader played a role whichthe Austrians and Bavarians ere present at this engagement

Czernicheff, as hethat he had to face only soldiers ere sick and disorganised; but he changed his tune when he saw hiorous troops returning froreat difficulty in persuading him to enter the line, and as soon as he heard the fearsome cannonade of our artillery, he and his 3000 Cossacks trotted bravely off the field, to the cat-calls of the Austro-Bavarian troops, itnessed this shameful conduct When General de Wrede went personally toobservations, M de Czernicheff replied that his regi thearded as so ridiculous that for soes were decorated by caricatures of M de Czernicheff feeding his horses with bunches of laurels gathered in the forest of Hanau

Once across the Rhine, the soldiers who made up the remains of the French army expected to see an end to their hardshi+ps as soon as they set foot on the soil of their overnment, and the Emperor himself, had so much counted on success, and had so little foreseen that wehad been anise the troops So, from the very day of our arrival at Mainz, the one short of food if we had not spread thees and hamlets; but since the first wars of the revolution, they had lost the habit of feeding soldiers, and complained vociferously, and it is true that the expense was too great for the couard, or at least to watch over the i frontier formed by the Rhine from Basle to Holland, we settled, as best we could the numerous sick and wounded in the hospitals of Mainz All fit iments, and the various units of the army, which for thethe river My regiether as left of Sebastiani's cavalry corps, went down the Rhine by short h the weather was perfect and the countryside char, ere all deeply unhappy, for one could foresee that France was going to lose possession of this fine land, and that her iht in the little town of Urdingen, and then went on to Ni this sad journey ere painfully affected by the sight of the inhabitants on the opposite bank, the Ger fros of their forlooanise the few troops which re, equipment or replacement of arms?

The need to provide food for the army coanise it would require the creation of large centres of concentration We were therefore in a vicious circle However, the allies, who should have crossed the Rhine a few days after us, to prevent our re-organisation, felt themselves still so weakened as a result of the hard bloe had delivered during the last can, that they needed time to recover

They left us in peace for the reater part of which I spent on the bank of the Rhine, in the ghost of the army corps commanded by Marshal Macdonald

I was eventually ordered, as were the other cavalry colonels, to take all i up new squadrons The depot of the 23rd was still at Mons, in Belgium, and that is where I went It was there that I saw the end of the year 1813, so filled with great events and in which I had had encountered one so many trials

Before I end ht to sun of 1813