The soldier, who here gives the relation of what he himself saw, neither wishes to flatter a government, nor to gain the good opinion of an army. His object will be, to detail, with truth, what he has either seen or been able to discover from others; and, forgetting the part he himself acted, he will speak with candour and impartiality of the events that passed under his own observation, without the slightest tincture of prejudice, or passion. Of these events, posterity must be the judge. Nothing will be found here, but the simple recital, without commentary, naked, and devoid of art, of one of the most famous epochs of history. To attempt to reason on the operations of wars that have passed in our times would be giving too much scope to self-love, which always adopts or rejects, as suits our own opinions. It is not the strength of the respective armies opposed to each other at the battle of Austerlitz, or the losses they sustained, which particularly distinguishes it, from many of those which took place in the first campaigns of the French Revolution, and the seven years war. We have heretofore often seen 150,000 men in the field, and 30,000 slain. But it is the consequences of the action of the 2d of December, 1805; it is the epoch when it decided the fate of war; it is the _moment_ in which it was fought, which makes it worthy of attention, and which will assign it a marked place in history. It was the wish to gain personal information that induced the author to collect materials, which may become useful to a better pen: and he avails himself of a leisure moment to offer them to such as have the talent to make use of them. In order that the past may serve to elucidate the future, it becomes requisite to recur to the circumstances that led to this decisive day; which proved how scrupulously accurate it is necessary to be, in making the calculations and combinations, to which the existing circumstances and the knowledge of human nature give rise.