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If the Emperor had had with him all the troops which he brought from Leipzig, a vigorous attack would have made him master of the Lamboy bridge, and General de Wrède would have paid dearly for his temerity, but Marshals Mortier and Marmont and General Bertrand, as well as the artillery, were held up by various passes, mainly that of Gelnhausen, and had not yet arrived.
The rearguard was at first commanded by Ney, then, after the 3rd. of December, by Marshal Victor; after the dissolution of Victor's corps at Smorgoni and Krapowna, by Loison and, finally, near Wilna, by Wrede with his Bavarians.
Napoleon had sent Beauharnois into Italy, to be ready in case of any Austrian demonstration in that quarter; and General Wrede, with the Bavarian army, guarded his rear. An Austrian army, 60,000 strong, was now ready to pass the Alps; and, to watch Wrede, another corps of 40,000, under the Prince of Reuss, had taken their station. These were minor arrangements.
Some time towards the end of the summer the remnants of her unit were in Rumania and finally came apart. She was left with but a few sisters and her assistant chief, a friend of hers, a Finnish gentleman, Baron Wrede. At a certain moment she sent him with some of the personnel and equipment from Rumania over the border back into Russia.
This fatal decision had hardly been taken, when a second letter from the King of Wurtemburg informed the Emperor that the King of Bavaria, having suddenly changed sides had made a pact with the allies, and that the two armies, the Austrian and the Bavarian, in cantonment on the banks of the Inn, had joined into a single unit under the command of General de Wrède and were marching to the Rhine; and finally that, to his regret, he was compelled by force to join his army to theirs.
General de Wrède, who did not know that the troops which we had fought at Leipzig, though following us were a long way behind, had become very bold and believed he could trap us between two fires.
But hardly had they begun their work, when a shower of bullets from unseen marksmen swept the bridge. Several were killed; the rest took to flight; the Tyrol was in revolt. News of this outbreak was borne to Colonel Wrede, in command of the Bavarians, who hastened with a force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery to the spot. He found the peasants out in numbers.
The Bavarians held the Tyrol as allies of the French, and the movement against the bridges had been directed by Napoleon, to prevent the Austrians from reoccupying the country, which had been wrested from their hands. Wrede in his retreat was joined by a body of three thousand French, but decided, instead of venturing again to face the daring foe, to withdraw to Innsbruck.
On the 15th of August, the Emperor's birthday, 2nd Corps arrived dejectedly at Polotsk, where we met with 6th Corps, formed of the two fine Bavarian divisions of General Wrède, which had a French general, Gouvion Saint-Cyr in overall command.
Afterwards, under pretence of better serving the common cause by covering the line of operations from Wilna to Witepsk, which the Emperor had abandoned, he separated himself from the second corps, retreated by Klubokoe on Vileika, and made himself useless. The discontent of De Wrede had existed ever since the 19th of August.
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