United States or Japan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Despite his confidence in relation to the crossing, Napoleon, when he heard of the Russian occupation of Minsk, ordered Oudinot to proceed by forced marches to Borisoff; but we arrived there too late, because General Bronikovski who was in command of the fort, seeing himself surrounded by a numerous enemy, thought it would be a praiseworthy act to save his garrison.
General Oudinot, who was present, informed Davoust, and Donnadieu, imprisoned in the Temple, made revelations. Measures were at once taken to scatter the conspirators, who were all sent away more or less farther off; some were arrested and others exiled, among them General Mounier, who had commanded one of Desaix's brigades at Marengo.
Leaving him for a time, we turn to glance at the fortunes of the war in Brandenburg and Silesia. Napoleon had bidden Oudinot, with his own corps and those of Reynier and Bertrand, in all about 70,000 men, to fight his way to Berlin, disperse the Landwehr and the "mad rabble" there, and, if the city resisted, set it in flames by the fire of fifty howitzers.
To a miraculous accident, the arrival of Corbineau, the noble devotedness of Eble, the desperate resistance of Victor and his soldiers, to the energy of Oudinot, Ney, Legrand, Maison, Zayonchek, Doumerc, and, finally, to his own sure and profound decision, his recognition of the true steps to be taken, Napoleon owed the possibility that he could escape after a bloody scene, the most humiliating, the most crushing disaster.
Oudinôt had just sent to inform him of his determination to overthrow Lambert; this he approved of, and he also urged him to make himself master of a passage, either above or below Borizof. He expressed his anxiety, that by the 24th this passage should be fixed on, and the preparations begun, and that he should be apprised of it, in order to make his march correspond.
At No. 27, Rue Oudinot, where Les Ambulances de la Presse have their Head-Quarters, the bodies of 52 persons thus despatched are now deposited. On one, which is dressed in the uniform of a National Guard, bank notes to the amount of 150,000f. were found. Viard, a member of the Commune, was arrested in the Rue de l'Université yesterday.
And when, on the 3rd, or perhaps earlier, offers came from the royalists, the Marshal promised to help them in the way that will shortly appear. Napoleon's last overtures to the Czar came late on the following day. On that morning he had a long and heated discussion with Berthier, Ney, Oudinot, and Lefebvre. Caulaincourt and Maret were present as peacemakers.
He had left fifteen thousand men before that bridge; he might therefore have returned in person to that point, rejoined Tchaplitz at Stakhowa, on the same day made an attack, or at least made preparations for it, and on the following day, the 27th, overthrown with eighteen thousand men the seven thousand soldiers of Oudinôt and Dombrowski; and finally resumed, in front of the Emperor and of Studzianka, the position which Tchaplitz had quitted the day before.
Singularly enough, however, the chief of staff, although he made ten copies of the famous decree, did not observe that by mistake the bridge of the center had been assigned to Davoust, who had the right wing, whilst the bridge on the right was assigned to Oudinot, who was in the center.
Nor must we omit from the list of Garibaldi's bodyguard Forbes, the Englishman, and Anghiar, the devoted negro, who followed his master like a dog. Oudinot formally disavowed all Lesseps' proceedings from first to last, and announced, on the 1st of June, that he had orders to take Rome as soon as possible.
Word Of The Day