When day dawned on October eighteenth the French army occupied an entirely new position: the right wing, under Murat, lying between Connewitz and Dölitz; the center at Probstheida in a salient angle; the left, under Ney, with front toward the north between Paunsdorf and Gohlis. Within this arc, and close about the city, stood all the well-tried corps, infantry, artillery, and cavalry, under their various leaders of renown--Poniatowski, Augereau, Victor, Drouot, Kellermann, Oudinot, Latour-Maubourg, Macdonald, Marmont, Reynier, and Souham; Napoleon was on a hillock at Thonberg, with the old guard in reserve. His chief concern was the line of retreat, which was still open when, at seven, the fighting began. Schwarzenberg, with the left, could get no farther than Connewitz. Bennigsen, with the right, started to feel Bernadotte and complete the investment. Neither was entirely successful, but Marmont withdrew from before Blücher, and Ney from before Bernadotte and Bennigsen, in order to avoid being surrounded; so that the two French armies were united before nightfall on the western outskirts of the town, where Bertrand had routed Gyulay, and had kept open the all-important line of retreat, over which, since noon, trains of wagons had been passing. But magnificent as was the work of all these doughty champions on both sides, it was far surpassed in the center, where during the entire day, under Napoleon's eye, advance and resistance had been desperate. Men fell like grass before the scythe, and surging lines of their comrades moved on from behind. Such were the numbers and such the carnage that men have compared the conflict to that of the nations at Armageddon.
At Victor's stand, near Probstheida, the fighting was fiercer than the fiercest. The allied troops charged with fixed bayonets, rank after rank, column following on column; cannon roared while grape-shot and shells sped to meet the assailants; men said the air was full of human limbs; ten times Russians and Prussians came on, only to be ten times driven back. The very soil on which the assailants trod was human flesh. Hour after hour the slaughter continued. Occasionally the French attempted a rally, but only to be thrown back by musket fire and cavalry charge. It was the same at Stötteritz, where no one seemed to pause for breath. Woe to him who fell in fatigue: he was soon but another corpse in the piles over which new reinforcements came on to the assault or countercharge. At last there was scarcely a semblance of order; in hand-to-hand conflict men shouted, struggled, wrestled, thrust, advanced, and withdrew, and in neither combatants nor onlookers was there any sense of reality. By dusk the heated cannon were almost useless, the muskets entirely so, and, as darkness came down, the survivors fell asleep where they stood, riders in their saddles, horses in their tracks. Napoleon learned that thirty-five thousand Saxons on the left had gone over to the enemy, and some one of his staff handing him a wooden chair, he dropped into it and sank into a stupor almost as he touched it. For half an hour he sat in oblivion, while in the thickening darkness the marshals and generals gathered about the watch-fires, and stood with sullen mien to abide his awakening. The moon came slowly up, Napoleon awoke, orders were given to complete the dispositions for retreat already taken, and, there being nothing left to do, the Emperor, with inscrutable emotions, passed inside the walls of Leipsic to take shelter in an inn on the creaking sign-board of which were depicted the arms of Prussia!