While Buonaparte assembled in Franconia an army considerably superior in number to that of the Prussians, the latter occupied the country in the vicinity of the river Saale, and seemed, in doing so, to renounce all the advantage of making the attack on the enemy ere he had collected his forces. Yet, to make such an attack was, and must have been, the principal motive of their hasty and precipitate advance; especially after they had secured its primary object, the accession of Saxony to the campaign. The position which the Duke of Brunswick occupied was indeed very strong as a defensive one, but the means of supporting so large an army were not easily to be obtained in such a barren country as that about Weimar; and their magazines and depôts of provisions were injudiciously placed, not close in the rear of the army, but at Naumburg, and other places, upon their extreme left, and where they were exposed to the risk of being separated from them. It might be partly owing to the difficulty of obtaining forage and subsistence, that the Prussian army was extended upon a line by far too much prolonged to admit of mutual support. Indeed, they may be considered rather as disposed in cantonments than as occupying a military position; and as they remained strictly on the defensive, an opportunity was gratuitously afforded to Buonaparte to attack their divisions in detail, of which he did not fail to avail himself with his usual talent. The headquarters of the Prussians, where were the King and Duke of Brunswick, were at Weimar; their left, under Prince Hohenloe, were at Schleitz; and their right extended as far as Muhlhausen, leaving thus a space of ninety miles betwixt the extreme flanks of their line. Buonaparte, in the meantime, commenced the campaign, according to his custom, by a series of partial actions fought on different points, in which his usual combinations obtained his usual success; the whole tending to straiten the Prussians in their position, to interrupt their communications, separate them from their supplies, and compel them to fight a decisive battle from necessity, not choice, in which dispirited troops, under baffled and outwitted generals, were to encounter with soldiers who had already obtained a foretaste of victory, and who fought under the most renowned commanders, the combined efforts of the whole being directed by the master spirit of the age.