Blücher, leaving twenty-eight thousand men before Mainz, crossed the Saar on January ninth with forty-seven thousand; Schwarzenberg, with the main army arrayed in four columns, two hundred and nine thousand strong, crossed the Rhine at or near Basel and moved toward Langres. The thin, straggling French columns began to retreat concentrically toward Châlons on the Marne. At the opening of the second stage in the campaign Blücher had invested the Mosel fortresses, and was advancing, with less than thirty thousand men, toward Arcis on the Aube; Schwarzenberg was in and about Langres; and the French were concentrated on a line from Vitry-le-François to St. Dizier. Napoleon reached Châlons on the twenty-sixth, having left Joseph to represent him in Paris. The wily strategist, feeble as was his strength, had momentarily secured the advantage over his unwieldy foe, having wedged himself between the invading armies, and being quite strong enough, with the forty thousand soldiers in his ranks, to cope with Blücher.
[Footnote 6: References: Fournier, Der Congress von Châtillon. Die Politik im Kriege von 1814. Eine historische Studie. Koch, Mémoires p. s. à l'histoire de la campagne de 1814. Sorel, L'Europe et la révolution française, Vol. VIII.]
The Fertility of Genius -- The Battles of Brienne and La Rothière -- The French Retreat -- Victory at Champaubert -- Victory at Montmirail -- Victory at Vauchamps -- Success Engenders Delusion -- Insincerity of the Allies -- Their Clashing Interests -- The Congress of Châtillon -- Napoleon's Procrastination -- French Victory and French Diplomacy.
The year 1814 is the most astonishing of Napoleon's military life. He first conceived a plan for combining the resources of Italy, Switzerland, Naples, and France. This failed by Augereau's sloth and Murat's ingratitude. Nothing daunted, the fertile brain then outlined schemes for meeting the quick advance of the allies through the Netherlands, for defending the Rhine frontier, and for a levy _en masse_ of the French people to hurl back invasion under the walls of Paris. After taking the field, the daring of his conceptions, the rapidity of his movements, the surprises he prepared for his enemy, the support he wrung from an exhausted land, the devotion he received from a panting, ill-clothed army at bay--all are so remarkable that by contrast the allies appear to be a lumbering, stupid mass. With another antagonist they would have appeared in a very different light; Gneisenau's clear head, Blücher's daring, Radetzky's good sense and courage, together with the valor of the forces at their back, would have won the goal far more easily with an ordinary, or even an extraordinary, combatant in Napoleon's plight. The Emperor of the French had not merely a prestige worth a hundred thousand men, as he was fond of reckoning: he had an activity of mind and body, a reservoir of resources, which made his single blade cover the whole circumference of defense like the whirling spokes of a fiery wheel.