Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/556

 5i8 Readings in European History depicted. Discouragement was at its height, and many sol- diers cursed the emperor and reproached him for abandon- ing them. This night, the 6th, the cold increased greatly. Its sever- ity may be imagined, as birds were found on the ground frozen stiff. Soldiers seated themselves with their heads in their hands and bodies bent forward in order thus to feel less the emptiness of their stomachs. . . . Everything had failed us. Long before reaching Wilna, the horses being dead, we received orders to burn our carriages and all their contents. VII. The German War of Liberation 448. Napo- leon's con- duct after Jena. (From Pasquier's Memoirs.) The German people, divided as they were into a mul- titude of little states, had borne apathetically Napoleon's dominion for some years. But his insolent conduct after the victory of Jena began to arouse the national feel- ing which was later to drive him from German soil and lay the foundation of a united fatherland. The judicious Chancellor Pasquier, in his Memoirs, thus describes Napoleon's unwarranted treatment of the Prussians. Prussia, which for about half a century had advanced step by step to the first rank among military powers, was laid low at the first clash of arms. Such of the old generals of Frederick the Great as still survived — the duke of Bruns- wick, General Mollendorf, and many others — either lost their lives on the battlefield of Jena or, as a result of the rout, the remnants of their former military reputation. Seventeen days sufficed to place the French army in possession of the Prussian capital, and the end of November saw it on the opposite side of the Vistula, after taking Ciistrin, Spandau, Liibeck, and Magdeburg, — the last named reputed to be the most strongly fortified town in the Prussian kingdom, — and occupying all the states belonging to Prussia, with the excep- tion of Silesia and the fortress of Colberg in Pomerania. . . ,