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Updated: June 29, 2025
The Danish troops, who occupied Cuxhaven, received orders to proceed to Bremerlehe, to favour the operations of the Westphalians and the Dutch. Meanwhile the English approached Cuxhaven, where they landed 3000 or 4000 men. The persons in charge of the custom-house establishment, and the few sailors who were in Cuxhaven, fell back upon Hamburg.
Cyr; of sixteen thousand Wurtembergers under Scheeler, over whom Marshal Ney was allotted the chief command; single regiments, principally cavalry, were drawn off in order more thoroughly to intermix the Germans with the French; of seventeen thousand Saxons under Reynier; of eighteen thousand Westphalians under Vandamme; also of Hessians, Badeners, Frankforters, Wurzburgers, Nassauers, in short, of contingents furnished by each of the confederated states.
Davoust, and next to him Count Lobau, were to deploy on the right of Ney: the guard in the centre, as a reserve, and farther off the army of Italy. The place of Junot and the Westphalians was indicated; but a false movement had carried them out of the way.
The Westphalians seem to go on the let-us-alone principle; they seem to be anti-everything from Bismarck and Protestantism downward. I sang the last evening of our stay here. The piano belonging to this hunting-lodge is as old as the alte Herr, and must have been here for years, and even at that must be an heirloom.
The retreat of the French army, the last act of the great drama, commenced. While the Westphalians guarded the battle-field the army marched to Moscow, exhausted, starving, finding new sufferings every day. On the road from Moshaisk to Moscow they encountered frightful conditions in the villages which were filled with wounded Russians.
During the night flames could be seen here and there on this field of death; these were fires built by wounded soldiers who had crawled together to protect themselves from the cold of the night and to roast a piece of horseflesh. On September 12th. the Westphalians moved to Moshaisk, which was deserted by all inhabitants, plundered, and half in ashes.
While the dissertation of von Scherer treats on the fate of the Wuerttembergian corps of Napoleon's grand army, a memoir of First Lieutenant von Borcke who served as adjutant of General von Ochs in the Westphalian corps relates the fate of the Westphalians in the grand army of 1812. The Westphalians, 23,747 men strong, left Cassel in the month of March, 1812, to unite with the French army.
The artillery the prisoners had seen in front of them during the first days was now replaced by Marshal Junot's enormous baggage train, convoyed by Westphalians. Behind the prisoners came a cavalry baggage train. From Vyazma onwards the French army, which had till then moved in three columns, went on as a single group.
Here, as we have learned, were found the Westphalians, not more than 3 thousand, the remainder of 10 thousand at Smolensk, of 23 thousand who crossed the Niemen. Napoleon gave orders to take the wounded at Borodino into the baggage wagons and forced every officer, every refugee from Moscow who had a vehicle, to take the wounded as the most precious load.
There again, if the Westphalian army had had a commander, if that commander had pressed the Russian leader more closely, if he had replaced him at Bickof, when he came in collision with Davoust at Mohilef, it is certain that in that case Bagration, enclosed between the Westphalians, Davoust, the Boristhenes, and the Berezina, would have been compelled to conquer or to surrender We have seen that the Russian prince could not pass the Berezina but at Bobruisk, nor reach the Boristhenes, except in the direction of Novoï-Bikof, forty leagues to the south of Orcha, and sixty leagues from Witepsk, which it was his object to reach.
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