The night of May twenty-second was the beginning of such bitterness for the French emperor as he had not yet tasted. His enemy's forces numbered about seventy thousand, his own perhaps forty-five thousand; but this was entirely his own fault, due largely to overweening confidence in himself and a weak contempt for foes who, after a long and severe novitiate, now fought like veteran Frenchmen, and were led by one who had learned the lessons of Napoleon's own strategy. Five times Essling had been lost and won; how often Aspern had been captured and retaken could only be estimated. Both hamlets were now abandoned by the French. The last Austrian charge against the center had been made and repelled with fiery valor, but in it Lannes was mortally wounded. The grand total, therefore, of the two days was a loss of gallant troops by the thousand, and of this marshal, Napoleon's greatest division general, the friend of his youth, and the only surviving one that was both fearless and honest. Worse even than this, the "unconquerable," though not conquered, had been checked, and that, too, not in a corner, as in Spain or at Eylau, but in the sight of all Europe, on a field chosen by himself. As the war-sick Emperor passed the litter on which lay his old comrade, he threw himself on the living but maimed and half-conscious form in an agony of tenderness; and that night, as he sat at table before an untasted meal, briny tears rolled over cheeks which did not often know the sensation. But the bulletin which he dictated ran, "The enemy withdrew to their position, and we remained masters of the field." This latter clause was exactly as true of the French at Aspern as it had been of the Russians at Eylau--the affair was a technical victory, a moral defeat. The Austrians celebrated the battle as their victory, the honors of which they accorded to the last cavalry charge under Prince John Liechtenstein; and in the peaceful churchyard at Aspern lies the effigy of a majestic lion stricken to the heart, as a reminder to patriotic Austrians of those two days' victorious fighting, which literally drenched the spot with blood. "We could not use the victory," wrote Charles's chief of staff on the twenty-fourth; "for the enemy's strong position made pursuit impossible." This he well knew, because the night before the Austrians had tried with signal failure to dislodge the French army from the Lobau.