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Updated: May 9, 2025
Farther on we met some peasants, who scowled at us from the road-side. We must have had ill-looking faces, especially Buche with his head bound up, and his beard eight days old, thick and hard as the bristles of a boar. About one o'clock in the afternoon we re-crossed the Sambre, by the bridge of Chatelet, but as the Prussians were still in pursuit we did not halt there.
Blücher's army, comprising 90,000 men, also covered a great stretch of country. The first corps, that of Ziethen, held the bridges of the Sambre at and near Charleroi; but the corps of Pirch I. and Thielmann were at Namur and Ciney; while, owing to a lack of stringency in the orders sent by Gneisenau, chief of the staff, to Bülow, his corps of 32,000 men was still at Liège.
The Imperial Guard remained in Paris until the 8th of June, when it marched towards Belgium, and reached Avesnes on the 13th; and in the course of the same and the following day, the five corps d'armee with the cavalry reserves which have been mentioned, were, in pursuance of skilfully combined orders, rapidly drawn together, and concentrated in and around the same place, on the right bank of the river Sambre.
So rapid was the retreat that upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at Lunéville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put Nancy in peril.
They opposed them in the most vigorous manner in order to give the baggage and artillery time to get over the bridge at Namur. Fortunately the whole army corps had escaped from the village except the 4th battalion which, through a mistake of the commandant, had turned off the road at the left, and was obliged to throw itself into the Sambre in order to escape being cut off.
Villeroy, who lay encamped at Gemblours, was no sooner apprised of this event by a triple discharge of all the artillery, and a running fire along the lines of the confederate army, than he passed the Sambre near Charleroy with great precipitation; and having reinforced the garrison of Dinant, retreated towards the lines in the neighbourhood of Mons.
In order not to encumber themselves with the spoil which they had heretofore collected, they left it behind under the protection of a division of 6000 men, which after many wanderings subsequently gave rise to the tribe of the Aduatuci on the Sambre.
At last, when Edward almost despaired of a meeting, he was told that the French were arrayed at Buironfosse, on the plateau between the Oise and the upper Sambre, and that Philip was ready to fight the next day, Saturday, October 23. Edward once more chose a suitable field of action in a plain between La Flamangrie and Buironfosse, a league and a half from the French.
Clairfayt, wiser than his predecessors, concentrated his forces alternately upon these points, and gained victories at Manheim and in the lines of Mayence so decisive that they caused the army of the Sambre and Meuse to recross the Rhine to cover the Moselle, and brought Pichegru back to Landau.
From that hour all was lost. Only the Guard stood firm in the wreck of the French army; and though darkness and exhaustion checked the English in their pursuit of the broken troops as they hurried from the field, the Prussian horse continued the chase through the night. Only forty thousand Frenchmen with some thirty guns recrossed the Sambre while Napoleon himself fled hurriedly to Paris.
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