Haugwitz once removed to Vienna, and the Allies thus deprived of the certainty that Prussia would take the field, Napoleon trusted that a single great defeat would suffice to break up the Coalition. The movements of the Allies were exactly those which he expected and desired. He chose his own positions between Brünn and Austerlitz in the full confidence of victory; and on the morning of the 2nd of December, when the mists disappeared before a bright wintry sun, he saw with the utmost delight that the Russian columns were moving round him in a vast arc, in execution of the turning-movement of which he had forewarned his own army on the day before. Napoleon waited until the foremost columns were stretched far in advance of their supports; then, throwing Soult's division upon the gap left in the centre of the allied line, he cut the army into halves, and crushed its severed divisions at every point along the whole line of attack. The Allies, although they outnumbered Napoleon, believed themselves to be overpowered by an army double their own size. The incoherence of the allied movements was as marked as the unity and effectiveness of those of the French. It was alleged in the army that Kutusoff, the commander-in-chief, had fallen asleep while the Austrian Weyrother was expounding his plans for the battle; a truer explanation of the palpable errors in the allied generalship was that the Russian commander had been forced by the Czar to carry out a plan of which he disapproved. The destruction in the ranks of the Allies was enormous, for the Russians fought with the same obstinacy as at the Trebbia and at Novi. Austria had lost a second army in addition to its capital; and the one condition which could have steeled its Government against all thoughts of peace--the certainty of an immediate Prussian attack upon Napoleon--had vanished with the silent disappearance of the Prussian envoy. Two days after the battle, the Emperor Francis met his conqueror in the open field, and accepted an armistice, which involved the withdrawal of the Russian army from his dominions. [Haugwitz signs Treaty with Napoleon, Dec. 15.]