66 declare, in allusion to the passage of the Danube effected by the French troops many leagues in the rear of the Austrians, whose numerous detachments were constantly securing all the approaches to Ulm, that they had the permission of the general's head to manœuvre upon his heels."-It is therefore believed in France, that his escape from Paris, at a moment when his exchange was assured, and without doubt known to him, was an effect of the refined policy of Napoleon, contrived for the purpose of inducing the Court of Vienna to confide in the plans suggested to them by Mack, &c.' Then follow a variety of military reasons to shew that the choice of such a position as Ulm, under Mack's circumstances, could only be explained by attributing to him a degree of ignorance utterly inconsistent with his able writings on military subjects, or by admitting the corrupt motives which France and all Europe have imputed to him. We have not the means of estimating the degree of credit due to this anecdote. That Buonaparte should really have told it would obviously be no assurance of its truth :-still less can it be established by the report, avowedly fictitious, of such a narrative in the mouth of Buonaparte. Its authenticity therefore rests solely on General Sarrazin's belief of it; and on that of the officers of the French army who garrisoned Ulm, after Mack's scandalous capitulation;' for we presume General Sarrazin can hardly intend to insinuate that when the captors indiscreetly declared' that they had the permission,' &c. they were declaring that which had been actually confided to them. A piece of treachery negotiated between Mack and Buonaparte would hardly be communicated by the latter to his whole staff. Such a communication, if it had been made, would rather suggest a suspicion that Buonaparte had some reason for wishing to impute treachery to Mack, than induce us to rely on the reality of the transaction. In fact, we know nothing to which there is a greater proneness in the present day, than to the solving of every unexpected occurrence by some hidden and mysterious motive. In all operations of war, one or other of the two contending parties must gain the advantage; and that advantage is to be gained, and is generally to be accounted for, by skill, by presence of mind, or by perseverance on one side, by the want of those qualities on the other side,— or by good luck, which goes for more in human affairs than is often fairly set down to its account. We confess ourselves inclined to believe that the occasions in which deliberate treachery has been called in to aid the operations of these natural and efficient causes are much fewer than is generally supposed; and that the sudden and apparently unaccountable failure, in men of high and deserved reputation, of some one of the qualities necessary to conduct great enterprizes to a favourable result, is of much more fre quent occurrence than the pride of human understanding is willing to allow. We believe that many Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,' must be admitted into the calculation of chances, military and political; and that there are many oversights of those who are habitually most circumspect, many blunders of those who are characteristically most prudent, and many hesitations of those who are constitutionally most daring, which candour itself might be led hastily to attribute to a corruption of their integrity, but which had nevertheless no other origin than a temporary disturbance of their faculties: we are, in short, rather more disposed in this as in other instances, to suspect that Mack (according to the homely but significant phrase) had lost his head, than that he had bargained away his honour or his conscience. We must admit, that it is perfectly natural for General Sarrazin to incline to the other alternative. He is himself a living instance of the possibility of a general officer passing into the service of an enemy; and, if we are to give implicit credit to his own assertion, that he did not take this step till he was assured of a more advantageous condition in this country than he had enjoyed in France, (see Preface, pp. vi, vii,) we must not quarrel with him for suspecting the operation of those motives in others, which he acknowledges to have influenced his own conduct. But in proportion to General Sarrazin's peculiar aptitude to give credit to such transactions, must be our caution in receiving them as true upon the authority of his belief, unsupported by other evidence. This caution will not appear the less necessary, when we observe in a farther part of his work, the capacity as well as the readiness of this faculty in the General: when, in p. 151, we find him convinced, that the Emperor of Austria had stipulated before hand to fight, and to LOSE the battle of Wagram; and to sacrifice to a mere punctilio of Buonaparte the lives of many thousands of his bravest soldiers, and most faithful subjects. For a time,' General Sarrazin admits-he refused to believe the story: he only yielded at length to a mass of the most unexceptionable testimony. If even General Sarrazin could not at once give cre dit to a tale so monstrously improbable, he must pardon us for continuing to withhold our belief from it ;-at least till some part of that mass of testimony' for the existence of which we have at present his word, shall be actually laid before us. It is a received rule, that in proportion as a charge is atrocious, the evidence must be convincing and it will not escape the most inattentive observer, that General Sarrazin's assurance that he has 'unexceptionable testimony,' is stili to us General Sarazin's assurance only. If de non apparentibus & de & de non existentibus eadem est ratio, if evidence not produced is the same as no evidence at all, in matters of light moment, how much more so in a question where the character of a sovereign and the allegiance of a whole people are concerned? We proceed, however, to extract the narrative of this most revolting and unheard-of atrocity. The recital is put into the mouth of Berthier, and begins (p. 149) with an account of the second day's battle of Essling: On the 22d of May, at day-break, our army rushed on the enemy's columns. The Archduke received us with firmness, repulsed us, and pursued us at the point of the sword, as far as our lines, of which the right was at Essling, and our left at Aspern. Our rear was closed by the Danube. Our troops were faint with fatigue. Our loss, which amounted to about 9,000 killed, and 22,000 wounded, will convey a general idea of this bloody engagement, which had now lasted two days. During the 22d, from noon till six in the evening, Buonaparte appeared more dead than alive. He was behind a tree, at some distance from the tête-de-pont, which was yet unfinished. He expected that the enemy, by means of a vigorous attack on Essling, would compel all our troops who were on the left of the Danube, to lay down their arms. When the fire of the enemy ceased, he turned to me with a smile, and said, "We are saved. I will never again make an attack but with my large masses. My cousin has given me a good lesson, which I hope to repay him with interest. Remember that, if we now retire, it is only that we may take a longer leap." I pretended, according to my custom, to participate in his hopes, though internally convinced that the obstacles in our way were such as we could not force. When he became more calm, I ventured some remarks on the state of the Austrian army, which was much improved. I represented to him the posture of our affairs in Spain, and in the Tyrol; the danger to be apprehended from the expedition which was then preparing in England; the languor with which the Prussians took part with us against Austria; the very doubtful affection and loyalty of the Parisians; and concluded by expressing my opinion, that the Emperor Francis was very desirous of peace; that the affair of the Marquis de Chasteller might furnish a good excuse for sounding his intentions; that favourable terms ought to be offered to him; and that after one victory on the left of the Danube, which he might permit us to gain, we should become the best friends in the world. Buonaparte replied, that the same idea had occurred to him on the day of the battle; that he not only intended to make peace with Francis, but eveu to become his son-inlaw; and he authorized me to take proper measures for the success of his projects. A deputation was sent to Wolkersdorf, and the Emperor readily consented to every proposal but that of the conventional battle. Feeling himself the father of his subjects, he was unwilling to sacrifice the flower of his army, either with the view of satisfying the vanity of his enemy, or with that of obtaining payment of his subsidy from Great Britain. Buonaparte, whose feelings were equally warm, though less D 4 paternal, paternal, steadily refused any accommodation until he should have washed away the stain fixed on his reputation at Essling, by as much blood as was shed on the 21st and 22d of May. A single fact will be sufficient to give an estimate of the carnage which took place on the 6th of July. Macdonald attacked, at noon, the centre of the Austrian army. At two o'clock he had lost 14,000, killed or wounded, out of 18,000 with which he went into action. Our left wing, commanded by Massena, had taken flight. Davoust, indeed, had gained some ground; because the reserve, commanded by Rosenberg, which supported that wing of the Austrians, was not permitted to advance. It was necessary to execute the convention, without which the House of Lorraine would have been driven from the throne. We should, indeed, have been compelled to repass the Danube; but, by means of the conscription, Buonaparte must have been able, within a year or two, to realize his threats. For the purpose of saving the credit of the Archduke Charles, large detachments were sent off into Bohemia, and it was agreed that the Archduke John should remain, during two days, at Presburgh. In fact, he did not arrive on the field till four hours after the commencement of the retreat. The battle of Wagram cost the two armies not less than 50,000 men. Our loss, howeyer, was greater than that of the enemy, in consequence of a mistake which occurred during a night attack on the village of Wagram, when two of our columns fired on each other, and suffered dreadfully on both sides. Upon the whole, the Austrians certainly fought better than we did on the 5th and 6th of July. Had it not been for our preliminary arrange ments, we must have been crushed, and in spite of the good fortune and confidence of Buonaparte, I believe that we should have found it very difficult to make good our retreat to the banks of the Rhine. The Archduke Charles, faithfully conforming himself to the wishes of his brother, made no opposition to our passage, though it was executed within a league of the left of his army. For form's sake, he ought to have incommoded us, at least, by marching a few columns against us; but such was the extent of his complaisance, that he suffered us to deploy without honouring us even by a single cannonade.. I felt ashamed, and Buonaparte was evidently uneasy; fearing, with some reason, that the truth might be suspected; in which case he would have lost the glory which he so much coveted, of having revenged the loss sustained at Essling.' Our readers will probably be of opinion, that the united asseverations of the whole French army, would be utterly insufficient to establish the truth of this most defamatory and incredible anecdote. Perhaps the astonishment excited in France by the marriage of Buonaparte, and by the apparent cordiality with which the whole Imperial family acquiesced in such a strange alliance, may have given currency, amongst the gossips of Paris, to such a silly and detestable fable; but we cannot suppress the disgust with which we turn from it, when presented by General Sarrazin, as a rational and plausible explanation of the conduct of the Austrian generals at the close of the campaign campaign of 1809. Nor is this the only remark which we have to make upon the publication by a person in General Sarrazin's situation and circumstances of a tale of which it is difficult to say whether it be more disgraceful to those of whom it is related, if true, or to those who give currency to it, if false. We have hinted at the effect which such a story, if circulated and believed in the Emperor of Austria's dominions, must have upon the feelings of his subjects. . It is true, we may be considered as at war with Austria: but hostility like this was never permitted among nations imbued with any just sense of civilization; and if Buonaparte has, by commencing, justified the transgression of the limits by which the asperities of war have hitherto been bounded, he has justified them with respect to himself only, and not with respect to other nations unwillingly our enemies and his allies. General Sarrazin, as he himself informs us, is in the pay of our government;-for what services, he does not specify; nor is it fit that he should: but at least let not Buonaparte have to say to the Emperor of Austria, that it is for relating such anecdotes as this. A foreigner paid by a government owes some decent observance to what may be the interest and what must be the wish of that government: he is not at liberty, under the cloak of the protection which he receives from it, to exasperate the auimosities of war by imputations upon other governments, calculated to excite against them the moral feelings of mankind; and such as no one has a right to repeat, who is not prepared to prove them. We do not doubt that General Sarrazin is what he represents himself to be but if a person had been employed by Buonaparte to disseminate discontent in Austria, and to widen and make irreconcileable the breach between that country and Great Britain, what more effectual course could he have taken than to send here one of his Generals, who, under the disguise of hostility to himself, should obtain the apparent sanction of the British government to a calumny against the Emperor of Austria so outrageous to all candid belief, and at the same time so impossible to be disproved, as the conventional defeat of Wagram? For the rest, we are disposed to believe, that the description of the two battles, which the author professes to have received from eye-witnesses, are truly and fairly stated. We will not venture on any farther quotations,* because we are The following passage from p. 215 shews that the new Empress has some turn for humour, the operation of which upon the gloomy and acrid temper of her imperial spouse must be, at times, singularly amusing. During Buonaparte's late tour through the Belgic provinces, Maria Louisa would not allow him a moment's rest, till he had consented to bestow the cross of the Legion of Honour on the Mayor of a small town between Mons and Brussels, who had placed the following inscription on a triumphal arch of turf erected on the high road; En épousant Marie Louise |