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After crossing the Saale, Napoleon thanked and dismissed those officers and soldiers of the Confederation of the Rhine, who either from some sense of honour or from lack of opportunity were still in our ranks.
The town of Jena is dominated by a height called the Landgrafenberg, at the foot of which runs the Saale River.
Flying through the dismal plain past Halle, Kothen, and other towns, of which I could only discern groups of houses, we hurriedly recognised the Saale and the Elbe; and towards 10 o'clock in the morning arrived at Magdeburg, having travelled seventy miles in three hours and a quarter. As the steamer for Hamburgh was not to start until 3 o'clock, I had ample time to look at the town.
At this unexpected news, Napoleon thought he should return to the project of retiring behind the Saale and the mountains of Thuringia; but it was too late, for already the main forces of the allies were in contact with the French army, and too close for it to be possible to carry out a retreat without being attacked in the course of this difficult operation.
In the heart of Germany, in the peat-bogs of Laybach and Worbzig on the banks of the Saale, have been found earthenware spoons of the shape of modern spatulae; at Geraffin on Lake Bienne, a finely shaped spoon made of the wood of a yew tree; and at Lagozza, another in shining black earthenware.
It is true that this situation did not last for more than half an hour, but would Napoleon not have been wiser to avoid all the consequences which might have arisen from such an event by taking shelter behind the mountains of Thuringia and the river Saale before all the enemy forces could combine to surround him?
The fortresses were to be kept stored with provisions. The oldest towns of Saxony and of Thuringia are of this date. Then he disciplined his soldiers, and trained them to fight, like the Hungarians, on horseback. He conquered the Slavonian Wends who dwelt east of the Elbe and the Saale, and established the margraviate of Meissen to repel their attacks.
Napoleon quitted Paris in the middle of April, and on the 18th reached the banks of the Saale; where the troops he had been mustering and organising in France had now been joined by Eugene Beauharnois and the garrison of Magdeburg.
Several of them lie in ashes just then; plundered, replundered, and at last set fire to; so busy have Soubise's hungry people been, of late, in the Country they came to "deliver." The Freiburg road, the Naumburg road, both towards Merseburg, cross this Height; straight like the string, Saale by Weissenfels being the bow.
He had encamped at Obschutz, short way from the field itself. French Army, Reichs Army, all was gone to staves, to utter chaotic wreck. Hildburghausen went by Naumburg; crossed the Saale there; bent homewards through the Weimar Country; one wild flood of ruin, swift as it could go; at Erfurt "only one regiment was in rank, and marched through with drums beating."
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