Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume II.djvu/771

 BLtJCHER 751 of independence, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the chiefs of the Tugendbund, desiring to ex- temporize a popular hero, had chosen Blucher. In propagating his fame among the masses, they had succeeded so well, that when Frederick William III. called the Prussians to arms by the proclamation of March 17, 1813, they were strong enough to impose him upon the king as the general-in-chief of the Prussian army. In the well contested, but for the allies unfortu- nate, battles of Liltzen and Bautzen he act- ed under Wittgenstein, the commander of the Russian army. During the retreat of the allied armies from Bautzen to Schweidnitz, he lay in ambush at Haynau, from which he fell with his cavalry on the French advanced guard under Maison, who in this affair lost 1,500 men and 11 guns. Through this surprise Blucher raised the spirit of the Prussian army, and made Napoleon very cautious in pursuit. Blucher's command of an independent army dates from the ex- piration of the truce of Tracheuberg, Aug. 10, 1813. The allied sovereigns had then divided their forces into three armies : the army of the north under Bernadotte, stationed along the lower Elbe ; the main army, advancing through Bohemia; and the Silesian army, with Blu- cher as its commander-in-chief, supported by Gneisenau as the chief of his staff, and Muffling as his quartermaster general. These two men, attached to him in the same quality until the peace of 1815, supplied all his strategical plans. Blucher himself, as Muffling says, " understood nothing of the strategical conduct of a war ; so little indeed, that when a plan was laid before him for approval, even relating to some unim- portant operation, he could not form any clear idea of it, or judge whether it was good or bad." Like many of Napoleon's marshals, he was unable to read the maps. The Silesian army was composed of three corps (Tarmee : 40,000 Russians, under Count Langeron; 16,- 000 men under Baron von Sacken; and a Prussian corps of 40,000 men under Gen. York. Blucher's position was extremely difficult at the head of this heterogeneous army. Lan- geron, who had already held independent com- mands, and demurred to serving under a for- eign general, was moreover aware that Blucher had received secret orders to limit himself to the defensive, but was altogether ignorant that the latter, in an interview on Aug. 11 with Barclay de Tolly at Reichenbach, had extorted the permission to act according to circum- stances. Hence Langeron thought himself justified in disobeying orders whenever the general-in-chief seemed to him to swerve from the preconcerted plan, and in this mutinous conduct he was strongly supported by Gen. York. The danger arising from this state of things became more and more threatening, when the battle on the Katzbach secured Blu- cher that hold on his army which guided it to the gates of Paris. Marshal Macdonald, charged by Napoleon to drive the Silesian army back into the interior of Silesia, began the battle 100 VOL. H. 48 by attacking, Aug. 26, Blucher's outposts, stationed from Prausnitz to Kraitsch, where the Neisse flows into the Katzbach. The so- called battle on the Katzbach consisted in fact of four different actions, the first of which, the dislodging by a bayonet attack from a plateau behind a ridge on the right bank of the Neisse of about eight French battalions, which constituted hardly one tenth of the hostile force, led to results quite out of proportion to its original importance, in consequence of the fugitives from the plateau not being col- lected at Niederkrain, and left behind the Katzbach at Kraitsch, in which case their flight would have had no influence whatever on the rest of the French army ; in consequence of different defeats inflicted at nightfall upon the enemy by Sacken's and Langeron's corps stationed on the left bank of the Neisse; in consequence of Marshal Macdonald, who com- manded in person on the left bank, and had defended himself weakly till 7 o'clock in the evening against Langeron's attack, marching his troops at once after sunset to Goldberg, in such a state of exhaustion that they could no longer fight, and must fall into the enemy's hand ; and, lastly, in consequence of the state of the season, violent rains swelling the other- wise insignificant streams the fugitive French had to traverse the Neisse, the Katzbach, the Deichsel, and the Bober to rapid torrents, and making the roads almost impracticable. Thus it occurred, that with the aid of the country militia in the mountains on the left flank of the Silesian army, the battle on the Katzbach, insignificant in itself, resulted in the capture of 18,000 prisoners, above 100 pieces of artillery, and more than 300 ammunition, hospital, and baggage wagons. After the bat- tle Blucher did everything to instigate his forces to exert their utmost strength in the pursuit of the enemy, justly representing to them that " with some bodily exertion they might spare a new battle." On Sept. 3 he crossed the Neisse with his army, proceeding by Gorlitz to concentrate at Bautzen. By this move he saved the main army, which, routed at Dresden, Aug. 27, and forced to retreat be- hind the Erzgebirge, was now disengaged ; Na- poleon being compelled to advance with re- enforcements toward Bautzen, there to take up the army defeated on the Katzbach, and to offer battle to the Silesian army. During his stay in the E. corner of Saxony, Blucher, by a series of retreats and advances, always shunned battle when offered by Napoleon, but always engaged when encountering single detachments of the French army. On Sept. 22, 23, and 24 he exe- cuted a flank march on the right of the enemy, advancing by forced marches to the lower Elbe, in the vicinity of the army of the north. On Oct. 2 he bridged the Elbe at Elster with pontoons, and on the morning of the 3d his army defiled. This movement, not only bold, but even hazardous, inasmuch as he complete- ly abandoned his lines of communication, was