The Irish Witch by Wheatley Dennis

Author:Wheatley Dennis [Dennis, Wheatley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-07-10T05:37:14+00:00

15

The War Reopens

As Roger had had good reason to expect that Charles had been sent south to a camp somewhere in France or, at the worst, in the Rhine Provinces, General Clarke's letter was a grievous disappointment. Not only did it mean another journey of at least six hundred and fifty miles, but the Prince d'Eckmuhl was Marshal Davout, a dour man who had no liking for Roger, so it would be useless to go direct to him. The only course was to go first to the Emperor and obtain from him an order to the Marshal to release Charles.

All that was known in Paris of the situation in the north was that the French were holding the line of the Elbe and that the Emperor's headquarters were somewhere in the neighbourhood of Dresden. So, on the morning of August 24th, Roger took leave of his charming host and set off in that direction.

Again averaging fifty miles a day, he travelled by way of Chalons, Nancy, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Nurnberg, Plauen and Chemnitz.

At officers' Messes in garrison towns through which he passed he picked up news of the conflict that had reopened when Austria entered the war. On the 18th Marshal Macdonald's army in Silesia had been defeated by Blucher and forced back over the river Katzbach; but on the 21st the Emperor had arrived on the scene and restored the situation. Two days later he hurried back to Dresden. Macdonald was said to have believed that the allies were retiring, but they were not, so the two armies, this time unexpectedly, again came into collision. Blucher's Prussians were severely handled, but the Russian cavalry broke through the French flank and drove the centre of Macdonald's army in great confusion down into the flooded river Neisse. After further severe fighting, by September 1st the allies had driven die French out of Silesia, so could claim their first substantial victory.

In the meantime, on August 22nd, Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, who had been nominated Generalissimo of the Allied forces, had invaded Saxony with his Austrians, and advanced on Dresden. As the Emperor had by then gone to the assistance of Macdonald in Silesia, the city was covered only by St. Cyr's corps. Schwarzenberg, presumably unaware of this, and at all times a hesitant General with an obsessive fear of Napoleon, decided to await further reinforcements; so he did not open the attack until the morning of the 26th, and then only halfheartedly.

But for this dilatoriness he could almost certainly have taken the Saxon capital. As things turned out, St. Cyr's three divisions proved staunch enough to hold off the first assaults and, that very morning, Napoleon returned. Halting on the bridge over the Elbe, he swiftly deployed the army he had brought back with him from Silesia, and despatched General Vandamme with a strong force to Pima, from where he could fall on the Allies' rear.

Early on the 27th Napoleon launched a full-scale attack and, although the Allied army exceeded the French by

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