BOOKS.

JENA AND AUERSTADT : A CATASTROPHE AND A WARNING.* THIS record of a tragedy without parallel in modern times is earnestly recommended by its illustrious sponsor to all British subjects, and especially to statesmen, for its revelations of " the fate, amazing in its swiftness, and appalling in its severity, which may at any moment overtake a State which exists in fancied security, based on traditions of a heroic past, and wrapped in a selfish indifference, hoping, ostrich-like, to escape the danger it refuses to see."

Respectfully accepting Lord Roberts's warranty of the rising author's fitness as interpreter to the present generation of the " handwriting on the wall," and of his thorough acquaintance with the battlefields of 1806, we must dissent from Mr. Petre's discovery that incorporation of footnotes in the text saves the reader " annoyance," for his habit in this respect often distorts his narrative. Then the chief actors of the debcicle are not individualised, his por- traiture making Haugwitz, Davout, Blucher, personally regarded, nonentities. Even that pearl of beauty and patriotic devotion, Queen Luisa of Prussia, is introduced in mere Court Circular fashion.

The interesting chapter on " the origin of the war," though fairly accurate, wants an explanation of the bureaucratic apparatus which hampered Prussia's international position. King Frederick William's relations with the pro-Gallican statesman Haugwitz, and his rival, the anti-Gallican Harden- berg, were not those of his great-grandson with Prince Billow : they were carried on by the indirect method of the so-called " Double Cabinet," under which all Ministerial proposals passed through a half-civil, half-military Secretariat, which, after manipulating the documents concerned so as to suit its own fancies, would pass them on to the Sovereign. Then, once a Minister always a Minister, the elasticity of the ideas of retirement and leave being such that once when Haugwitz was in charge of the Foreign Department the negotiations with Russia were entrusted to Hardenberg, who was out of office. Now of these fundamental realities our volume gives no hint. The Jena period saw the " Little Corporal's" bodily and psychological powers in their zenith, and never was he a more finished performer in the art of diplo- matic legerdemain. Austerlitz had been the prologue to his annihilation of the Holy Roman Empire, and enabled him to make the South German States vassals of France by driving them into membership of a Confederation of the Rhine which was to maintain a contingent of sixty thousand men at his disposal. This disruption of the Fatherland causing great irritation in Berlin, the invader offered Frederick William compensation in the shape of a North German copy of the Rheinbund, which was to bring under the King's protectorate the Hanseatic cities, Saxony, Hesse-Cassel, and other good territorial assets. Tempted by this bait, the pinchbeck Hohenzollern recommended his neighbours to accept it, whereupon Napoleon categorically ordered them to reply by a flat refusal! Worthy also of the " mysteries " of Maskelyne and Devant were the feats of sleight-of-band whereby the Emperor incited Prussia, first to the seizure, and almost immediately afterwards to the abandonment, of Hanover. Well told in this volume is the story of the alternations of cajolery and affected violence which so baffled Haugwitz when he came to Vienna after Austerlitz with a veiled ultimatum that he signed on his own responsibility a Treaty binding his Sovereign to make important territorial concessions to France, and to recoup himself by large annexations in the Hanoverian dominions." Hardly bad Frederick William accepted this scheme, though in very diluted shape, when Napoleon,

" Napoleon's Conquest of Prussia on 1806. By P. Loraine Petre. With an Introduction by Pield•Marshal Earl Roberts, V.C., K.G., &c. With 7 Maps and Battle Plans, and numerous Portraits and other Illustrations. London; John Lana [12s. Bd. net.]

thinking that he might purchase peace from England by offering her Hanover, notified to Prussia that the recent agreement was to be considered as torn up. This volte-face, with other complications, such as the execution of the Nuremberg bookseller Palm for selling a patriotic pamphlet (an incident overlooked by our author), strengthened the war party in Berlin, and led to counter Prussian demands gladly treated by Napoleon as a cases belli.

Mr. Petre's comparison of the opposed armies explains that for the slow-paced Prussians, overburdened with baggage, marching by rigid parade rules, and on the battlefield

sticking religiously to old Frederician formations, defeat was a foregone conclusion. While their normal march-day was fifteen miles, the French would easily cover twice that distance. The Prussian musket, again, was the worst in Europe; the Prussians would deploy review fashion in the face of tirailleurs attacking them from under cover; and their cavalry, armed with the anne blanche, would be flung against the enemy's unbroken squares. Napoleon, a specialist of course in artillery, began to develop his later manner of employing great lines of guns ; and Bernadotte, in emulation, as it were, of his chief's "whiff of grape-shot," on one occasion silenced with twelve field-pieces the fire of fifty-eight Prussian guns. Then as to administration and command. The perpetual

recourse to councils of war and the constant discussions of new plans by the Generals in command, with the want of a Staff organisation on what we may call Moltke principles, accentuated the hopeless inferiority of the Prussians to an army conducted on new lines of warfare. The alleged personal imbecility of some of the Prussian leaders may be called an open question, and one modern authority on whom our author systematically relies argues that the mainspring of the great collapse of 1806 was not so much the weakness of the military machine as "the spirit of the epoch," which prevented men from rightly reading the situation.

Summarising these conclusions of Baron von der Goltz, the author continues :-

"Is there nothing in it which England can lay to heart as a lesson in the necessity for preparation and national self-sacrifice P Is there not in England of the twentieth century a fear of offending the country and imposing excessive charges on it' ? Is there no false economy, the result of an exaggerated scrupu- losity' ? Is there no cause for such fears of offending and for such false economy in the unwillingness or the neglect of a great part of the manhood of the nation to make the sacrifices of its time and convenience which alone can enable it to place itself in a position of effective defence ? Are we quite free from a spirit of the epoch, hardened in a frivolous civilisation, in a false honesty, in the taste for pleasures, and in egoism' ? Lastly, can we plead not guilty' to charges of undue satisfaction with the past, of neglect of the future, of concerning ourselves with trivialities instead of holding to serious matters ?"

To this hypothetical interpretation of the " message" of the battles of Jena and Auerstadt some readers may prefer a little positive arithmetic. Although the Prussians and Saxons had a united strength of three hundred thousand men, the

" striking force," as Mr. Haldane would say, mobilised to meet Napoleon only reached half that figure ; and allowing for the

"Prussian army's inferiority in number, in organisation, in system of supply, in equipment, and in generalship, it was not worth more than one-third, possibly even one-fourth, of the French." Napoleon's number assembled on the Upper Main is put at a hundred and eighty thousand.

The advance of the serpents of battle to the skirts of the

chain of pine- and fir-clad mountains known as the ThUringer- wald, the French army front the south-west, the Prussians and their Saxon allies from the north-east, is minutely traced in the text, but the accompanying sketch-maps hardly help one to follow their windings, or to understand how Napoleon meant to cut into his enemy's oblique line of retreat across the Elbe and its tributary, the Saale. Then the book's foggy plan of the twin-battles of October 14th is so twisted round

that the track of the defeated army from Jena to Weimar is made to run north instead of west, Auerstadt also being dis- placed. As to the field of Jena, the denizen of Surrey may be gratified by a page-long synthesis of Box Hill, Dorking, and their surroundings with the plateau which was the scene of Prince Hohenlohe's rout. On the evening before the battle the Emperor climbed the said Landgrafenberg to examine the arrangements already taken on the slope by Marshal Lannes, reconnoitred every point, and was fired on by mistake by a French sentry. On this occasion occurred an incident which shows that he was a different man from the Napoleon who fell asleep at Bautzen and Leipzig amidst the roar of the

guns:— "After supping with the generals present on the plateau, he started downhill on foot to see that all was well with the artillery and ammunition on the steep ascent from Jena. He was furious at discovering that the head of the artillery column had in the dark mistaken a narrow ravine for the road. So narrow was it that the axle-boxes of the leading guns were jammed in the rocks on either side. The whole column was stuck fast, unable either to advance or retire. Angry as he was at the mistake, and at the absence of the general in command of the artillery, he wasted no time in recriminations. Once more he was the artillery officer. Assembling the weary gunners, he provided them with tools fetched from the park in rear, and with lanterns, and set them to work to hack a way for the guns. Himself holding a lantern, he urged on the work. Tired as they were, the men laboured under the eyes of the Emperor without a murmur, until at last the obstacle was removed, and the long column began to move slowly on. What a scene for the brush of a Rembrandt ! It is easy to picture, as one walks down the steep road from the Landgrafen- berg to Jena, how the artillery column might stray into one of the small ravines which here and there run parallel to the road, which is said to be still very much as it was in 1806."

During the battles the Duchess of Saxe-Weimar remained in her capital, and, pocketing her repugnance, entertained at supper Lauues, Murat, and Seg,ur, who had taken up their quarters in her palace after the pursuit. To this meal the author grants preferential treatment, instead of telling how, when Napoleon himself alighted at the Royal lady's door,

she accosted him with a courage and dignity that drew from him the remark : There is a woman whom our two hundred cannon cannot frighten." We are not told that from this palace was issued the first of the series of bulletins in which the spotless Queen Luisa was so villainously traduced (vide Spectator, November 3rd, 1906), or how the little pillar on the field of Rosbach was pulled down by the Emperor's orders and carted for conveyance to Paris, or how, after his arrival in Berlin, he had the car and steeds of Victory dis- lodged from the Brandenburg Gate and sent to keep company with the bronze Byzantine horses of St. Mark's stolen by him some years previously from Venice.

Drawn in the darkest hues are the wholesale surrenders of fortresses that followed the collapse of October 14th. Totally eclipsed for reasons not given is the historic defence of the Pomeranian stronghold of Colberg, conducted by those heroes of the subsequent War of Liberation, Schill and Gneisenau, who held out until the Peace of Tilsit set them free. Blucher, retreating northwards to the shores of the Baltic, took refuge with his detachment in the Free City of Lubeck, where, after a hopeless struggle, he was driven to sign his name to the words : " I capitulate because I have neither bread nor ammunition." The neutrality of the unhappy Hanseatic citizens did not save them from the hurricane of horrors that burst upon every place which saw the French soldiery within its walls :—

" Those troops, as has been said, saw in the city merely a place taken by storm, to plunder which they considered their right under the usages of war. The Marshals said this plainly to a depu- tation of the citizens. Bernadotte and the other superior officers, as Hoepfner admits, personally exerted themselves in trying to stop the pillage ; but their men, exasperated by the desperate resistance in the streets and houses, were out of hand, and deter- mined to wreak their vengeance on the inhabitants, whom they refused to distinguish from the Prussian soldiery. 'A soldiery,' says Jomini, inflamed by cruel scenes is not easy to restrain ; the inhabitants of this flourishing city had naturally to suffer all the horrors of a town taken by assault.' Dumas, writing on the same subject, says: The combats, the carnage in the streets, in the houses, in the squares, in the churches, ceased only with the approach of night, night of horror, during which the unhappy city of Liibeck was given over to all the excesses inevitable after a storm. More than 30,000 soldiers spread through it in disorder, and in this confusion the conquered joined with the conquerors in these scenes of desolation.'" The author's epilogue repeats the burden of the leitmotiv so emphatically intoned in Lord Roberts's introduction and developed in the volume. Instead of being satisfied, asks Mr. Petre, with our muddle style," ought we not, with the terrible example of 1806 before our eyes, to consider military training and service "a privilege, not merely a duty" ? Is not the calamity of Prussia "a sufficient warning to induce us, by proper preparation, to guard against the bare possibility of our case becoming a similar lesson for future generations " ? If these questions are a veiled defence of army service on the French or German model, we reply "No !" But if they point to the adoption of the universal training advocated by the National Service League, our answer will be an emphatic " Yes!"