Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/240

 useless. At last in 1813 came a year in which Wellington did not need to retreat into Portugal. He won the great battle of Vittoria In June, and then drove the French back in headlong flight over the Pyrenees. Early in 1814 our men were fighting their way into that French province which, five hundred years before, we used to call ‘English Aquitaine’.

And meanwhile in 1812, at the other end of Europe, Napoleon himself had suffered an even worse disaster. He had invaded Russia, a country whose people were as ignorant, as backward and as patriotic as the Spaniards. The greatest French army that was ever put on foot had starved and been frozen among the snows of Russia. As its broken remnants retreated through Germany, the Prussians, whom the French had cruelly ill-treated since 1806, jumped upon them, and called on all other Germans to do the same. The Austrians joined in. England poured money into the hands of all who would fight the French. Since Pitts death until 1812 there had only been one great British minister, George Canning; but he had resigned his office in 1809. Now in 1812 Lord Castlereagh, a minister almost as great as Pitt, came to the front, and it was his Government that really finished the war. Napoleon could, indeed, collect a new army in 1813, but it was never so good as the one he had lost in Russia; and it suffered a fearful defeat at Leipzig. After a most gallant defence of the French roads which lead to Paris, Napoleon was compelled by his own generals to resign the throne, and Louis XVII, the heir of the old French monarchy, was recalled to France as king in 1814. Napoleon was allowed to retire to the little Italian island of Elba, but he did not stay there long.

In order to arrange a general peace, the great