The main object was to prevail upon Austria to declare herself openly; and here Napoleon was guilty of many faults. In the situation assumed by the cabinet of Vienna, a good deal was naturally exacted, and with perfect justice, for upon them depended the strength, and we may almost say the success, of the coalition. In offering herself as a mediator, Austria was desirous of regaining the position she had lost during the struggle with Napoleon, and the law was now in her own hands, for she could throw the weight of 300,000 men into either scale. Napoleon committed the great oversight of not acceding to the offers of the cabinet of Vienna: he went farther still; he deeply offended the minister who directed the fates of that cabinet--Prince Metternich, a man of extraordinary ability and consideration, and whose inclinations had previously tended towards France. I have elsewhere related the stormy and imprudent scene which broke up the conference between Buonaparte and the Austrian minister.[19]
The allied sovereigns awaited the decision of the cabinet of Vienna with indescribable anxiety. It was eleven o'clock at night, and they were all assembled in a barn; the ministers, Count Nesselrode, Pozzo di Borgo, and Hardenburg, in the lower apartment; the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia on the first floor: the rain descended in torrents, and it was one of those stormy nights which add even to the horrors of war, when all at once a courier arrived, bearing a letter for Count Nesselrode, which contained merely these words,--"Austria has decided, and four armies will be at the disposal of the Alliance." Imagination may picture the shouts of joy, the transports of the coalition, on thus receiving the support of 300,000 men, who were to join the rest of the army by the mountains of Bohemia. The chances of war were now clearly against Napoleon; and General Pozzo di Borgo, for he had lately been raised to the rank of major-general, was again despatched, in the character of commissioner, from the Emperor Alexander to the Crown Prince of Sweden, who at this time covered Berlin at the head of an army, composed of 40,000 Prussians, 30,000 Russians, and 20,000 Swedes.
The most glorious events recorded in the military history of France have nothing that can bear a comparison with the admirable defence of Dresden by Napoleon, when all the armies of the coalition went successively to try their strength under its walls. They were repulsed with considerable loss, and Moreau was mortally wounded on the field of battle; but this admirable manœuvre of concentration was followed by a very great fault--the division of the main body of his army, one portion being intrusted to General Vandamme, the other to some marshals upon whose deeds the star of Napoleon's fortune did not shine. At Gross Beeren, Bernadotte broke the brilliant line of the French, at the same time that the corps of Vandamme was cut to pieces or taken prisoner by the coalesced enemy, and the Emperor was obliged to retreat beyond the Elbe. I cast a veil over the mournful catastrophe of Leipsic, where so many faults were committed, and so much want of foresight exhibited, both on the part of Napoleon, and also of those who were charged with the execution of his orders; the sad disorder, the horrible confusion that prevailed, when the soldiers were decimated at once by sickness in the hospital, the steel of the enemy, and the hordes of peasants raised by Blucher along his path, and which swallowed up the French army, already perishing with hunger, without guns, and barefooted, in the midst of the cold rains of October.