Next morning, the twentieth, Napoleon was alert and active; retreat began again, but only in tolerable order. Although he could not control the great attendant rabble of camp-followers and stragglers, he had nevertheless about a hundred and twenty thousand men under his standards; as many more, and those his finest veterans, were besieged and held in the fortresses of the Elbe, Oder, and Vistula by local militia. These places, he knew, would no longer be tenable; in fact, they began to surrender almost immediately, and the survivors of Leipsic were soon in a desperate plight from hunger and fatigue. Yet the commander gave no sign of sensibility. "'T was thus he left Russia," said the surly men in the ranks. Hunger-typhus appeared, and spread with awful rapidity; the country swarmed with partizans; the columns of the allies were behind and on each flank; fifty-six thousand Bavarians were approaching from Ansbach, under Wrede; at Erfurt all the Saxons and Bavarians still remaining under the French eagles marched away. The only foreign troops who kept true were those who had no country and no refuge, the unhappy Poles, who, though disappointed in their hopes, were yet faithful to him whom they wrongly believed to have been their sincere friend. Though stricken by all his woes, the Emperor was undaunted; the retreat from Germany was indeed perilous, but it was marked by splendid courage and unsurpassed skill. At Koesen and at Eisenach the allies were outwitted, and at Hanau, on the twenty-ninth, the Bavarians were overwhelmed in a pitched fight by an exhibition of personal pluck and calmness on Napoleon's part paralleled only by his similar conduct at Krasnoi in the previous year. At the head of less than six thousand men, he held in check nearly fifty thousand until the rest of his columns came up, when he fell with the old fire upon a hostile line posted with the river Kinzig in its rear, and not only disorganized it utterly, but inflicted on it a loss of ten thousand men, more than double the number which fell in his own ranks. But in spite of this brilliant success, the ravages of disease continued, and only seventy thousand men of the imperial army crossed the Rhine to Mainz. Soon the houses of that city were packed, and the streets were strewn with victims of the terrible hunger-typhus. They died by hundreds, and corpses lay for days unburied; before the plague was stayed thousands found an inglorious grave. CHAPTER IV THE FRANKFORT PROPOSALS[4] [Footnote 4: References: Fain: Manuscrit de 1814. Rothenburg: Die Schlacht bei Leipzig im Jahre 1813.] Importance of the Battle of Leipsic -- Decline of Napoleon's Powers -- His Gentler Side -- Disintegration of Napoleon's Empire -- The Coalition and the Sentiment of Nationality -- Reasons for the Parley at Frankfort -- Insincerity of the Proposal -- Napoleon and France -- The Revolution and the Empire -- Hollow Diplomacy.