Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/358

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now raised the thrilling and invigorating cry "To the Rhine!" and the Allies issued, on the 4th of December, their declaration from Frankfort, still offering peace, which Napoleon answered by raising another three hundred thousand men by conscription. The Allied armies crossed that far-famed river, while Schwartzenburg entered France through Switzerland.

The struggles and guerilla warfare which followed are too familiar to every reader of history to require recapitulation. Even after the battle of La Rothière Napoleon might have concluded terms of peace if he had chosen to make concessions. Before the final blow he haughtily said that he was nearer Munich than the Allies were to Paris; and to renounce even the frontier of the Rhine after so much bloodshed was worse than death to him. To the last he struggled against Lord Castlereagh's influence, whose presence in the Allied camp was worth a host of generals in circumventing his intrigues. England had already concluded a treaty with Joachim Murat of Naples, and Soult had been once more defeated by Wellington at Orthes (Feb. 27, 1814), on French ground, when on the 1st of March the treaty of Chaumont was agreed on by the Allied powers. By this celebrated diplomatic instrument it was stipulated that in the event of Napoleon refusing the terms which had been offered to him—viz., the reduction of France to the limits of the old monarchy, as they

crisis, rendered all the more severe by the defection of two brigades of Saxon foot, twenty-two guns, and the Würtemburg cavalry, in the middle of the great battle of Leipsic, Oct. 18, 1813.—Alison, ch. xxxi.]
 * [Footnote: were no longer invincible, and prepared for the final and crushing