United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Good by, my dear, my health is perfect, although I have a cold from the rain and cold of the bivouac. Be cheerful and contented. Ever yours." From Tilsitt Napoleon wrote to his wife, June 19: "I have sent Tascher to you to allay your anxiety. Everything goes on admirably here. The battle of Friedland decided everything. The enemy is confounded, cast down, and extremely enfeebled.
Your last hour has come! Prepare to stand before your Judge!" "Ay, you will kill me, then, beautiful lady?" asked Napoleon, sneeringly. "You will revenge the defeats I have inflicted on the descendants of Burgrave Albert the Handsome, on the battle-fields of Jena, Eylau, and Friedland?
During our stay at Tilsit, Napoleon held a review of his Guard and the army in the presence of Alexander, who was impressed by the martial air and bearing of these troops. The Russian Emperor, in his turn, put on display some fine battalions of his Guard, but he did not dare to parade his line regiments, whose numbers had been so greatly reduced at Heilsberg and Friedland.
There was but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was the destruction of the Vendome column; he reproached himself for the feeling as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather's voice still sounded in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa those epic narratives that thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of them.
He reached Naumburg on the 1st November, 1632, before the corps, which the Duke of Friedland had despatched for that purpose, could make itself master of that place. The inhabitants of the surrounding country flocked in crowds to look upon the hero, the avenger, the great king, who, a year before, had first appeared in that quarter, like a guardian angel.
Lagroin chafed that he must play recruiting-sergeant and general also. But it gave him comfort to remember that the Great Emperor had not at times disdained to be his own recruiting-sergeant; that, after Friedland, he himself had been taken into the Old Guard by the Emperor; that Davoust had called him brother; that Ney had shared his supper and slept with him under the same blanket.
Two thousand dead which he left behind him on the field, testified to the extent of his loss; and the Duke of Friedland remained unconquered within his lines. For fourteen days after this action, the two armies still continued in front of each other, each in the hope that the other would be the first to give way.
His aim had been to conceal his advance across the Niemen, to surprise the two chief Russian armies while far separated, and thus to end the war on Lithuanian soil by a blow such as he had dealt at Friedland. The Russian arrangements seemed to favour his plan.
On his migration from Berlin to Prague, when he got the gas-contract, Friedland, by a profuse display of his hospitality, and a careful concealment of his Jewish birth, wormed his way among families of birth and position, and finally into the higher governmental circles.
Secret instructions were therefore issued to the principal officers, on whose fidelity reliance could be placed, to seize the persons of the Duke of Friedland and of his two associates, Illo and Terzky, and keep them in close confinement, till they should have an opportunity of being heard, and of answering for their conduct; but if this could not be accomplished quietly, the public danger required that they should be taken dead or live.
Word Of The Day