Battle of Jena

The French accounts state that twenty thousand Prussians were killed and taken in the course of this fatal day.

Continuing Napoleon Crushes Prussia,
our selection from Life of Napoleon Bonaparte by Sir Walter Scott published in 1839. The selection is presented in seven easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Napoleon Crushes Prussia.

Time: 1806
Place: Jena and Auerstadt

Bonaparte, according to his custom, slept in the bivouac, surrounded by his guards. In the morning he harangued his soldiers and recommended to them to stand firm against the charges of the Prussian cavalry, which had been represented as very redoubtable. As before Ulm he had promised his soldiers a repetition of the Battle of Marengo, so now he pointed out to his men that the Prussians, separated from their magazines and cut off from their country, were in the situation of Mack at Ulm. He told them that the enemy no longer fought for honor and victory but for the chance of opening a way to retreat; and he added that the corps which should permit them to escape would lose their honor. The French replied with loud shouts and demanded instantly to advance to the combat. The Emperor ordered the columns destined for the attack to descend into the plain. His center consisted of the Imperial Guard and two divisions of Lannes. Augereau commanded the right, which rested on a village and a forest; and Soult’s division, with a part of Ney’s, was upon the left.

General Mollendorf advanced on his side, and both armies, as at Auerstaedt, were hid from each other by the mist, until suddenly the atmosphere cleared, and showed them to each other within the distance of half cannon-shot. The conflict instantly commenced. It began on the French right, where the Prussians attacked with the purpose of driving Augereau from the village on which he rested his extreme flank. Lannes was sent to support him, by whose succor he was enabled to stand his ground. The battle then became general, and the Prussians showed themselves such masters of discipline that it was long impossible to gain any advantage over men who advanced, retired, or moved to either flank, with the regularity of machines. Soult at length, by the most desperate efforts, dispossessed the Prussians opposed to him of the woods from which they had annoyed the French left; and at the same conjuncture the division of Ney and a large reserve of cavalry appeared upon the field of battle.

Napoleon, thus strengthened, advanced the center, consisting in a great measure of the Imperial Guard, who, being fresh and in the highest spirits, compelled the Prussian army to give way. Their retreat was at first orderly: but it was a part of Bonaparte’s tactics to pour attack after attack upon a worsted enemy, as the billows of a tempestuous ocean follow each other in succession, till the last waves totally disperse the fragments of the bulwark which the first have breached. Murat, at the head of the dragoons and the cavalry of reserve, charged, as one who would merit, as far as bravery could merit, the splendid destinies which seemed now opening to him. The Prussian infantry were unable to support the shock, nor could their cavalry protect them. The rout became general. Great part of the artillery was taken, and the broken troops retreated in disorder upon Weimar, where, as we have already stated, their confusion became inextricable, by their encountering the other tide of fugitives from their own left, which was directed upon Weimar also.

All leading and following seemed now lost in this army, so lately confiding in its numbers and discipline. There was scarcely a general left to issue orders, scarcely a soldier disposed to obey them and it seems to have been more by a sort of instinct than any resolved purpose, that several broken regiments were directed, or directed themselves, upon Magdeburg, where Prince Hohenlohe endeavored to rally them.

Besides the double battle of Jena and Auerstaedt, Bernadotte had his share in the conflict, as he worsted at Apolda, a village betwixt these two points of general action, a large detachment. The French accounts state that twenty thousand Prussians were killed and taken in the course of this fatal day; that three hundred guns fell into their power, with twenty generals or lieutenant-generals, and standards and colors to the number of sixty.

The mismanagement of the Prussian generals in these calamitous battles and in all the maneuvers which preceded them, amounted to infatuation. The troops also, according to Bonaparte’s evidence, scarcely maintained their high character, oppressed probably by a sense of the disadvantages under which they combated. But it is unnecessary to dwell on the various causes of a defeat, when the vanquished seem neither to have formed one combined and general plan of attack in the action nor maintained communication with each other while it endured nor agreed upon any scheme of retreat when the day was lost. The Duke of Brunswick, too, and General Schmettau, being mortally wounded early in the battle, the several divisions of the Prussian army fought individually, without receiving any general orders, and consequently without regular plan or combined maneuvers. The consequences of the defeat were more universally calamitous than could have been anticipated, even when we consider that, no mode of retreat having been fixed on, or general rallying-place appointed, the broken army resembled a covey of heath-fowl which the sportsman marks down and destroys in detail and at his leisure.

Next day after the action a large body of the Prussians, who, under the command of Mollendorf, had retired to Erfurt, were compelled to surrender to the victors, and the marshal, with the Prince of Orange Fulda, became prisoners. Other relics of this most unhappy defeat met with the same fate. General Kalkreuth, at the head of a considerable division of troops, was over-taken and routed in an attempt to cross the Hartz Mountains. Prince Eugene of Wurtemberg commanded an untouched body of sixteen thousand men, whom the Prussian general-in-chief had suffered to remain at Memmingen, without an attempt to bring them into the field. Instead of retiring when he heard all was lost, the Prince was rash enough to advance toward Halle, as if to put the only unbroken division of the Prussian army in the way of the far superior and victorious hosts of France. He was accordingly attacked and defeated by Bernadotte.

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