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Updated: June 1, 2025
The battle of Aspern was fought on the 22d of May, to-day is the 3d of July; and in the mean time nothing has been done. The enemy remained quietly on the island of Lobau, nursing his wounded, reorganizing his troops, erecting TETES-DE-PONT, and building bridges; and the generalissimo stood with his whole army on the bank of the Danube, and took great pains to watch in idleness the busy enemy.
On again mounting his horse, the emperor inspected the island of Lobau in detail, and satisfied himself that the position could be easily defended by a large body of troops well equipped and well commanded.
This was the attack of the first Prussian corps. We heard afterward that the Emperor had sent Lobau with ten thousand men to turn them back. The battle had begun, but the Old and the Young Guard, the cuirassiers of Milhaud and of Kellerman, and the chasseurs of Lefebvre-Desnoëttes; in fact the whole of our magnificent cavalry remained in position. The great, the real battle was with the English.
On retiring into Lobau Island he put forth to the utmost his extraordinary powers of organization. Boats brought vast supplies of stores and ammunition from Vienna, which the French still held. The menacing front of Masséna and Davoust imposed on the enemy. Reinforcements were hurried up from Bavaria.
"We will conquer or die!" was the shout with which the Austrians, for the twenty-first time, had begun the battle against the enemy, who pressed forward across three bridges from the island of Lobau in the middle of the Danube, and whom the Austrians hated doubly that day, because another painful wound had been dealt by the occupation of their capital beautiful, beloved Vienna the expulsion of the emperor and his family, and the possession of the German city.
On leaving that town he followed the course of the Estrau, and as he did not care to pass through the locks, in order to cross the Swine, entered a fishing-boat in company with the Duke of Vicenza, his grand equerry, Count Lobau, one of his aides-de-camp, and two chasseurs of the guard.
Masséna had better success at the other end, and succeeded in gathering sufficient material without great difficulty; his bridges between the two shores by the island of Lobau were ready on May twentieth. In this interval Charles advanced, and occupied a line farther forward in the great plain, stretching from hamlet to hamlet from Korneuburg, Enzersfeld, and Gross-Ebersdorf to Strebersdorf.
On the thirteenth the Archduke John, having turned and advanced toward Raab, was attacked, defeated, and driven back into Hungary by Eugène, who had learned, if not generalship, at least obedience, and having carefully obeyed his stepfather's injunctions, had thus won an important victory. Meantime all was activity on the Lobau. A new and solid bridge was built across the main stream.
Jean Valjean had just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed no civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes.
At the island of Lobau, which was the point chosen for the passage, the bed of the Danube was broad and deep; and the island not being in the middle of the stream, the branch separating it from the bank was comparatively narrow. The emperor gave orders to construct bridges.
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