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Updated: May 26, 2025
This contrite admission disarmed the critics, and everyone buckled to in order to help save the army, which retreated towards the Elbe via Bautzen. Fate now seemed to be against us; for a few days after Marshal Oudinot had lost the battle of Gross-Beeren, Macdonald that of the Katzbach and Vandamme that of Kulm, the French forces suffered another major reverse.
Despair urged us, and the wish to revenge our deaths before yielding up our lives. The pride of boasting that they once defeated Napoleon incited the Prussians; for they are the proudest of men, and their victories at Gross-Beeren and Katzbach had made them fools. But the river swept away them and their pride! Three times they crossed and rushed at us.
The battle of Dresden, as well as the combats of Gross-Beeren, Katzbach, and Kulm were, as I need scarcely observe, the immediate consequences of the termination of the armistice in August, 1813. Napoleon, weary of the war, had yielded to the demands of the Prussians, and, evacuating Breslau, and abandoning the line of the Oder, had fallen back upon Liegnitz. He himself declared, that he made these sacrifices, for such they unquestionably were, in the hope that, out of the armistice, a treaty of peace would spring, and there is no great cause to doubt that he spoke sincerely. What could he hope to gain by a continuance of the struggle? France was exhausted in every pore; the best and ablest of her warriors were slain, such as survived longed for rest, and were ready to sacrifice even their national vanity in order to obtain it. On the other hand, the strength of the Allies seemed to accumulate from day to day; and Austria assumed such an attitude as to render her neutrality less than doubtful. I think, then, that we may give Napoleon credit for having spoken the truth once in his life, when he said, that he yielded much, by the evacuation of Silesia, from an earnest desire for peace; but his desire was not to be gratified. The Allies judged, and judged wisely, that a season of repose would, by him, be employed only to gather means for creating fresh troubles, and they determined, the counsels of England prevailing with them, to wage war
However he lost a major battle at Gross-Beeren and was forced to retire via Wittemberg, having suffered heavy losses.
Napoleon inflicted a crushing defeat on the Austrians before Dresden on the 27th, but, while preparing to cut off their retreat, was disturbed by the news of Gross-Beeren and the Katzbach and by sudden illness, and at Kulm lost Vandamme with 20,000 men.
Five or six miles farther on is Gross-Beeren, a Napoleonic battlefield where Bülow won a victory over the French in 1813; and about an hour and a half from Berlin, in the same direction, is the little city of Jüterbok, with interesting old edifices.
He told me how Marshal Oudinot and Marshal Ney had been beaten: the first at Gross-Beeren, and the other at Dennewitz. This was sad indeed, for in these retreats the conscripts died from exhaustion, sickness and every kind of hardship. The veterans of Spain and Germany, hardened by bad weather, could alone resist such fatigue.
A murderous conflict took place, on the 23d of August, at Gross-Beeren between the Prussian division under General von Bulow and the French. The Swedes, a troop of horse artillery alone excepted, were not brought into action, and the Prussians, unaided, repulsed the greatly superior forces of the French.
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