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But Hohenlohe had received orders to retire northwards in the rear of Brunswick, as soon as he had rallied the detachment of Rüchel near Weimar, and was therefore indisposed to venture on the bold offensive which now was his only means of safety. The respite thus granted was used by the French to hurry every available regiment up the slopes north and west of Jena.
The battle of Jena was a double battle, if one may use the expression, for neither the French nor the Prussian armies were united at Jena, they were each divided into two parts and fought two different battles: so that while the Emperor, at the head of the corps of Augereau, Lannes, Soult and Ney, his guard and the cavalry of Murat, was defeating the corps of Prince Hohenlohe and General Ruchel.
The French, therefore, had a vast mass of seasoned fighters, a good base of operations, and a clear plan of attack. The Prussians, on the contrary, could muster barely 128,000 men, including the Saxons, for service in the field; and of these 27,000 with Rüchel were on the frontier of Hesse-Cassel seeking to assure the alliance of the Elector.
They advanced their reserves, but we received a powerful reinforcement. Marshal Ney's corps and Murat's cavalry which had been held up in the pass, burst out into the plain and took part in the action. However a Prussian army corps commanded by General Ruchel stopped our columns for a time; but charged by French cavalry it was almost entirely wiped out and General Ruchel was killed.
And yet there were able generals who could have acted with effect, even if they fell short of the opinion hopefully bruited by General Rüchel, that "several were equal to M. de Bonaparte."
If we understand that the oblique order is to be applied in the rigid and precise manner inculcated by General Ruchel at the Berlin school.
At that time the thin Prussian lines were spread out over a front of eighty-five miles, the Saxons being near Gera, the chief army, under Brunswick, at Erfurth, while Rüchel was so far distant on the west that he could only come up at Jena just one hour too late to avert disaster. And yet with these weak and scattered forces, Prince Hohenlohe proposed a bold move forward to the Main.
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