Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 by Patrick Fraser Tytler (beach read book .txt) 📖

"Lo, now apparent all,
Aslant the dew-bright earth and coloured air,
He looks in boundless majesty abroad,
And sheds the shining day, that burnished plays
On rocks, and hills, and towers, and wandering streams,
High gleaming from afar."

The descent to Soissons is through a declivity adorned by thriving gardens and neat cottages, detached from each other, which afforded a pleasing contrast to the solitary, uninhabited, though cultivated plains through which our route had previously lain. The Fauxbourgs of the town were wholly in ruins, having been totally destroyed in the three assaults which they had sustained during the previous campaign. The town itself is small, surrounded by decayed fortifications, and containing nothing of note, except the Gothic spires, which bear testimony to its antiquity.

On leaving Soissons on the road to Laon, you go for two miles through the level plain in which the town is situated; after which you begin to ascend the steep ridge by which its eastern boundary is formed. It was on the summit of this ridge that Marshal Blucher's army was drawn up, 80,000 strong, at the time when a detachment of his troops, under Count Langeron, was defending Soissons against the French army. Immediately below this position, there is placed a small village, which bore the marks of desperate fighting; all the houses were unroofed or shattered in every part by musket balls; and many seemed to have been burnt during the struggles of which it was formerly the theatre. There is an old castle a little higher up the ascent, which was garrisoned by the allied troops; in the neighbourhood of which, we perceived numerous traces of the immense bivouacs which had been made round its walls; particularly the bodies of horses and oxen, which the Russians had left on the ground, and which the peasants had taken no pains to remove.

From thence the road runs over a high level plateau, covered with miserable corn, or worse fallows, and having an aspect of sterility very different from what we were accustomed to in the rich provinces of France. In the midst of this dreary country, we beheld with delight several deep ravines, formed by streams which fall into the Aisne, sheltered from the chilling blasts that sweep along the high plains by which they are surrounded, the steep sides of which were clothed with luxuriant woods, and in the bottom of which are placed many little farms and cottages, which exhibited a perfect picture of rural beauty. Even here, however, the terrible effects of war were clearly visible; these sequestered spots had been ravaged by the hostile armies; and the ruined walls of the peasants dwellings presented a melancholy spectacle in the midst of the profusion of beauty with which they were surrounded.

Half way between Soissons and Laon, is placed a solitary inn, at which Bonaparte stopt six hours, after the disastrous termination of the battle of Laon. The people informed us, that during this time, he was in a state of great agitation, wrote many different orders, which he destroyed as fast as they were done, and covered the floor with the fragments of his writing. Many Cossacks and Bashkirs had been quartered in this inn; the people, as usual, would not allow them any good qualities, but often repeated, with evident chagrin—"Ils mangent comme des diables; ils ont mangé tous les poulets."

The features of the country continue with little variety, till you begin to descend from the high plateau, over which the road has passed into the wooded valley, in the centre of which the hill and town of Laon are placed. The dreary aspect of this plateau, which, though cultivated in every part, exhibited few traces of human habitation, was enlivened occasionally by herds of pigs, of a lean and meagre breed, (followed by shepherds of the most grotesque appearance,) wandering over the bare fallows, and seemingly reduced to the necessity of feeding on their mother earth.

At the distance of six miles from Laon, the descent begins to the plain below, down the side of a deep ravine, beautifully clothed with woods and vineyards. On the other side of this ravine lies the plateau on which the battle of Craon was fought, whose level desolate surface seemed a fit theatre for the struggle that was there maintained. At the bottom of the ravine the road passes a long line of villages, surrounded with wood and gardens, which had been wholly ruined by the operations of the armies; and among the neighbouring woods we were shewn numerous graves both of French and Russian soldiers.

The approach to Laon lies through a great morass, covered in different places with low brushwood, and intersected only by the narrow chaussèe on which the road is laid. The appearance of the town is very striking; standing on a hill in the centre of a plain of 10 or 12 miles in diameter, bounded on all sides by steep and wooded ridges. It is surrounded by an old wall, and some decayed towers, and is adorned by some fine Gothic spires, whose apparent magnitude is much increased by the elevated station on which they are placed.

In crossing this chaussèe, we were immediately struck with the extraordinary policy of Bonaparte, in attacking the Russian army posted on the heights of Laon, where his only retreat was by the narrow road we were traversing, which for several miles, ran through a morass, impassible for carriages or artillery. This appeared the more wonderful, as the army he was attacking was more numerous than his own, composed of admirable troops, and posted in a position where little hopes of success could be entertained. It was an error of the same kind as he committed at Leipsic, when he gave battle to the allied armies with a single bridge and a long defile in his rear. It is laid down as one of the first maxims of war, by Frederic the Great, "never to fight an enemy with a bridge or defile in your rear: as if you are defeated, the ruin of the army must ensue in the confusion which the narrowness of the retreat creates." We cannot suppose so great a general as Bonaparte to have been ignorant of so established a principle, or a rule which common sense appears so obviously to dictate; it is more probable, that in the confidence which the long habit of success had occasioned, he never contemplated the possibility of a defeat, nor took any measures whatever for ensuring the safety of his army in the event of a retreat. Be this as it may, it is certain that he fought at Laon with a morass, crossed by a single chaussèe, in his rear, and that if he had been totally defeated, instead of being repulsed in the action which then took place, his army must have been irretrievably ruined, in the narrow line over which their retreat was of necessity conducted.

At the foot of the hill of Laon is placed a small village named Semilly, in which a desperate conflict had evidently been maintained. The trees were riddled with the cannon-shot; the walls were pierced for the fire of infantry, and the houses all in ruins, from the showers of balls to which they had been exposed. The steep declivity of the hill itself was covered with gardens and vineyards, in which the allied army had been posted during the continuance of the conflict; but though three months had not elapsed since the period when they were filled with hostile troops, no traces of desolation were to be seen, nor any thing which could indicate the occurrence of any extraordinary events. The vines grew in the utmost luxuriance on the spot where columns of infantry had so recently stood, and the garden cultivation appeared in all its neatness, on the very ground which had been lately traversed by all the apparatus of modern warfare. It would have been impossible for any one to have conceived, that the destruction they occasioned could so soon have been repaired; or that the powers of Nature, in that genial climate, could so rapidly have effaced all traces of the desolation which marked the track of human ambition.

The town of Laon itself contains little worthy of note; but the view from its ramparts, though not extensive, was one of the most pleasing which we had seen in France. The little plain with which the town is surrounded, is varied with woods, corn fields, and vineyards; the view is closed on every side by a ridge of hills, which form a circular boundary round its farthest extremity, while the foreground is finely marked by the decaying towers of the fortress, or the dark foliage which shades its ramparts.

We walked over the field of battle with a degree of interest, which nothing but the memorable operations of which it had formerly been the theatre, could possibly have excited. The accounts of the action, which we received from the inhabitants of the town, and peasantry in its vicinity, agreed perfectly with the official details which we had previously read; and although we could not give an opinion with confidence on a military question, it certainly appeared to us, that the operations of the French army had been ill combined. Indeed, some French officers with whom we conversed on the next day, allowed that the battle had been ill fought, but, as usual, laid all the blame upon Marmont. The main body of the French army, advancing by the road from Soissons, attacked the villages of Ardon and Semilly in front of the town, on the centre of Marshal Blucher's position, and his right wing, which was posted in the intersected ground to the west of the town, on the morning of the 9th of March. These parts of the position were occupied chiefly by the corps of Woronzoff and Buloff, and as they were very strong, no impression was made on them, and the troops who defended them maintained themselves, without support from the reserves, during the whole day. Late in the evening, the corps of Marmont, with a body of cavalry under Arrighi, appeared on the road from Rheims, advancing apparently without any communication or concert with the troops under Napoleon in person, (who were drawn up, for the most part, in heavy columns, in the immediate vicinity of the Soissons road), and made a furious attack on the extreme left of Marshal Blucher's position. The Marshal being satisfied by this time, that the troops in position about the town were adequate to the defence of it against Napoleon's force, was enabled to detach the whole corps of York, Kleist, and Sacken, with the greater part of his cavalry, to oppose Marmont, who was instantly overthrown, cut off from all communication with Napoleon, and driven across the Aisne, with the loss of four or five thousand prisoners, and forty pieces of cannon. The only assistance which Napoleon could give him in his retreat, was by renewing the attack on Ardon and Semilly, which he did next morning, and maintained the action during the whole of the 10th, with no other effect, than preventing the pursuit of Marmont from being followed up by the vigour which might otherwise have been displayed by the Silesian army, notwithstanding the fatigues which they had undergone at that time, during six weeks of continued marching and fighting.

The village of Athies, where the contest with Marmont's corps was decided, containing about 200 houses, had been completely burnt in the time of the action; and, when we were there, little progress had been made in rebuilding it, but the inhabitants, then living in temporary sheds, displayed their usual cheerfulness and equanimity; they were very loud in reprobation of the military conduct of Marmont, and very anxious to convince us, that the French had been overwhelmed only by great superiority of numbers, and that the allies might have completely cut off the retreat of Marmont towards Rheims,