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Updated: June 12, 2025
The plan of sealing up the cornfields of Europe from Riga to Trieste would have been feasible, at least for a few weeks; French troops held Danzig and Stettin; Russia, Prussia, and Denmark were at his beck and call; and an imperial decree forbidding the export of corn from France and her allied States to the United Kingdom could hardly have failed to reduce us to starvation and surrender in the very critical winter of 1810-11.
One unquiet political care excepted, all the rest must be pleasant for him to remember the rising with the dawn, the hurried little breakfast with the Empress, the pawing horses of the adjutants and escort in the courtyard of the palace; the constant travelling in and far beyond the Empire; the incessant speech-making, with its appeals to the past and its promises, nobly realized, of "splendid days" in the future its calls to the people to arms, to the sea, to the workshop, to school, to church, to anything praiseworthy, provided only it was action for the common good; the dockyards in Kiel and Danzig, with their noise of "busy hammers closing rivets up"; the ever-swelling trade statistics; and the proud feeling that at last his country was coming into her own.
The front between Gommecourt and Frise in the latter part of June was covered in this manner. Covering the road to Péronne south of the river were the One Hundred and Twenty-first Division, the Eleventh Division, and the Thirty-sixth Division belonging to the Seventeenth Danzig Corps.
And be it remembered that they were able to achieve this because many of the North-Netherland towns were themselves members of the Hanse League, and possessed therefore the same rights and privileges commercially as their rivals, Hamburg, Lübeck or Danzig.
Eugène Beauharnais, who commanded the relics of the Grand Army, after suffering a reverse at Mockern, had retired to the line of the Elbe; and French garrisons were thus left isolated in Danzig, Modlin, Zamosc, Glogau, Küstrin, and Stettin.
For a week or more earthquakes of a less violent character occurred hourly. Besides the Variag we found in port the Russian brig Poorga and the Prussian brig Danzig, the latter having an American captain, crew, hull, masts, and rigging. Two old hulks were rotting in the mud, and an unseaworthy schooner lay on the beach with one side turned upward as if in agony.
The wherries sent from Danzig to the Niemen were often snapped up by British cruisers, and the carriage of stores from the Niemen entailed so frightful a waste of horseflesh that only the most absolute necessaries could keep pace with the army in its rapid advance. The men were thus left without food except such as marauding could extort. In this art Napoleon's troops were experts.
The loss of Germany and Spain had really added to his power. No longer were his veterans shut up in the fortresses of Europe from Danzig to Antwerp, from Hamburg to Ragusa; and the Peninsular War no longer engulfed great armies of his choicest troops. In the eyes of Frenchmen he was not beaten in 1814; he was only tripped up by a traitor when on the point of crushing his foes.
To all promptings of prudence Napoleon was deaf. His instincts and his experience of the Kings prevented him yielding on any important point. He determined to carry on the war from the Tagus to the Vistula, to bolster up Joseph in Spain, to keep his garrisons fast rooted in every fortress as far east as Danzig. Russia and Prussia, he said, had more need of peace than France.
As long as it would not have gained possession of Danzig, Thorn, and West Prussia, and I know not what else the excitable Polish mind might crave, it would always be the ally of our enemies.
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