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But while he threw garrisons into every tenable place, he reduced his own diminished army to inactivity; and one after another his scattered troops were either defeated or dispersed. The forces of the League, in command of the Weser, spread themselves along the Elbe and Havel, and everywhere drove the Danes before them.
Their villa at Norderney, and their home life there, were unknown to him, though he had landed once at the harbour himself. Further, he had heard vaguely of a stepmother, absent at Hamburg. They were to have joined her on their arrival at that city, which, be it noted, stands a long way up the Elbe, forty miles and more above Cuxhaven, the town at the mouth.
He accordingly evacuated Hamburg on the 29th of May, taking with him his Hanseatic legions, which had not held out an hour in the islands of the Elbe, and accompanied by the Swedish Doctor Von Hess, whose imprudent advice was the chief cause of all the disasters to which the unfortunate city lied been exposed.
Their rulers were burgraves, or city counts. In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of these two frontier counties, or marches. The first, called the Northern March, or March of Brandenburg, was the religious centre of the Slays, and was situated in the midst of forests and marshes just beyond the Elbe.
Finding his reception too chilly for endurance, and being again menaced by the Russian advance, he fell back thence beyond the Elbe, and early in March had established his headquarters at Leipsic.
In the principality of Halberstadt the Prince of Wurtemberg had a rencounter with a detachment of the Duke, his brother, which was entirely destroyed. The Duke returned with all speed through Merseburg and Leipsic to Naumburg. The right of the King passed the Elbe on the 26th, and joined Hulsen and the Prince near Dessau.
It became manifest to all that Dresden had ceased to be the key of Napoleon's defence: yet he clung to the Elbe, as he had done to the Kremlin.
The successive colonies which issued, in the period of a century, from the mouths of the Elbe, the Weser, and the Rhine, were principally composed of three valiant tribes or nations of Germany; the Jutes, the old Saxons, and the Angles.
In fine, if the army, after their fatigues at sea and their tedious marches by land, longed for an utter end of their labour, by this battle they might gain it. The Elbe was now nearer than the Rhine; and if they would make him a conqueror in those countries where his father and his uncle had conquered, the war was concluded."
The three soldiers who swam the Elbe, with their swords in their mouths; to bring him the boats with which he passed to the victory of Muhlberg, received from his imperial bounty a doublet, a pair of stockings, and four crowns apiece.
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