Germany from the Earliest Period, Volume 4Menzel, Wolfgang
History
Germany from the Earliest Period, Volume 4
Menzel, Wolfgang
Germany -- History
forests, exterminated numbers of the flying foe. The imperial troops
were also unremitting in their pursuit, again defeated Bernadotte at
Aschaffenburg and chased Jourdan through Nassau across the Rhine.
Marceau, who had vainly besieged Mayence, again made stand at
Allerheim, where he was defeated and killed.[11]
Moreau, completely deceived by the archduke, had, meanwhile, remained
in Bavaria. After defeating General Latour at Lechhausen, instead of
setting off in pursuit of the archduke and to Jourdan's aid, he was,
as the archduke had foreseen, attracted by the prospect of gaining a
rich booty, in an opposite direction, toward Munich. Bavaria submitted
to the French, paid ten millions, and ceded twenty of the most
valuable pictures belonging to the Dusseldorf and Munich galleries.
The news of Jourdan's defeat now compelled Moreau to beat a rapid
retreat in order to avoid being cut off by the victorious archduke.
Latour set off vigorously in pursuit, came up with him at Ulm and
again at Ravensberg, but was both times repulsed, owing to his
numerical inferiority. A similar fate awaited the still smaller
imperial corps led against the French by Nauendorf at Rothweil and by
Petrosch at Villingen, and Moreau led the main body of his army in
safety through the deep narrow gorges of the Hollenthal in the Black
Forest to Freiburg in the Breisgau, where he came upon the archduke,
who, amid the acclamations of the armed peasantry (by whom the
retreating French[12] were, as in the Spessart, continually harassed
in their passage through the Black Forest), had hurried, but too late,
to his encounter. Moreau had already sent two divisions of his army,
under Ferino and Desaix, across the Rhine at Huningen and Breisach,
and covered their retreat with the third by taking up a strong
position at Schliesgen, not far from Freiburg, whence, after braving a
first attack, he escaped during the night to Huningen. This retreat,
in which he had saved his army with comparatively little loss, excited
general admiration, but in Italy there was a young man who scornfully
exclaimed, "It was, after all, merely a retreat!"
[Footnote 1: The following trait proves the complete stagnation of
chivalric feeling in the army. Szekuli, colonel of the Prussian
hussars, condemned several patriotic ladies, belonging to the highest
Polish families at Znawrazlaw, to be placed beneath the gallows, in
momentary expectation of death, until it, at length, pleased him to
grant a reprieve, couched in the most offensive and indecent terms.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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