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Updated: May 3, 2025
I have no distinct recollection of that day, the third after Valeria's funeral, and which, as my first experience of a battle, assumed to me the magnificent proportions of an Austerlitz or Waterloo.
To avoid unpleasant encounters with the old man, the natural method was to do what had been done with him at Austerlitz and with Barclay at the beginning of the Russian campaign to transfer the authority to the Emperor himself, thus cutting the ground from under the commander in chief's feet without upsetting the old man by informing him of the change.
And then full of admiration for his soldiers, he exclaimed; "I am satisfied with you; you have covered your eagles with undying glory." From a military point of view Austerlitz was Napoleon's greatest triumph. War, which he loved with all its risks and emotions, then showed him its most tempting side. He was always tempting fate, and fate had always favored him.
When Francis humiliated himself before his conqueror after Austerlitz, his mien was distant and his salute haughty; the miserable King of Prussia was, like him, dignified and severe even in his beggary. The Czar was too close to the crime which had set him on his throne to assume any airs of superiority with the French Cæsar.
This wonderful old man of ninety, gayly stooping to kiss the hand of a lady to-night in his hospitable palace, like the young man that he is, has a memory stretching from the battle of Austerlitz across the gigantic struggles of the century to the battle of Sedan, all of which he has seen, and a part of which he has been!
You will find a perfect type in the first grenadier put by Gerard at one side of his picture of the battle of Austerlitz. At the time of this fete, that is to say, in the middle of the month of July, the First Consul could not have imagined that the moderate conditions he had proposed after the victory would not be accepted by Austria.
And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded!
The following calculation has been made and proportion established: loss of men, at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent.; Russian, thirty per cent.; Austrian, forty-four per cent.; at Wagram, French, thirteen per cent.; Austrian, fourteen per cent.; at Moscow, French, thirty-seven per cent.; Russian, forty-four per cent.; at Bautzen, French, thirteen cent.; Russian and Prussian, fourteen per cent.; at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent.; allies, thirty-one per cent. total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent., or out of one hundred and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed.
I'm more afraid of a boy with a bean-snapper that I ever was of you!" and followed up his remark by pulling Bonaparte's camp-chair from under him, and letting the conqueror of Austerlitz fall to the floor with a thud which I have since heard described as dull and sickening. The effect was instantaneous.
On the 2d of December 1851 the anniversary of the establishment of the first empire and of the battle of Austerlitz he got rid of his opponents by means of the memorable COUP D'ETAT, and seized the supreme power of the state.
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