Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig | Page 2

guests. He complied with the invitation; and every Frenchman who had not been able to escape, and fancied himself secure in the houses, was driven from his hiding-place, and delivered up to the Cossacks, who were received with unbounded demonstrations of joy.
About this time a Prussian corps began to be formed in Silesia, under the denomination of the Corps of Revenge. It was composed of volunteers, who bound themselves by an oath not to lay down their arms till Germany had recovered her independence. On the occupation of Leipzig by the allies, this corps received a great accession of strength from that place, where it joined by the greater number of the students at the university, and by the most respectable young men of the city, and other parts of Saxony. The people of Leipzig moreover availed themselves of every opportunity to make subscriptions for the allied troops, and large sums were raised on these occasions. Their mortification was sufficiently obvious when the French, after the battle of Lützen, again entered the city. Those who had so lately welcomed the Russians and Prussians with the loudest acclamations now turned their backs on their pretended friends; nay, such was the general aversion, that many strove to get out of the way, that they might not see them.
This antipathy was well known to Bonaparte by means of his spies, who were concealed in the town, and he took care to resent it. When, among others, the deputies of the city of Leipzig, M. Frege, aulic counsellor, M. Dufour, and Dr. Gross, waited upon him after the battle of Lützen, he expressed himself in the following terms respecting the corps of revenge: _Je sais bien que c'est chez vous qu'on a formé ce corps de vengeance, mais qui enfin n'est qu'une poli?onnerie qui n'a eté bon à rien._ It was on this occasion also that the deputies received from the imperial ruffian one of those insults which are so common with him, and which might indeed be naturally expected from such an upstart; for, when they assured him of the submission of the city, he dismissed them with these remarkable words: Allez vous en! than which nothing more contemptuous could be addressed to the meanest beggar.
It was merely to shew his displeasure at the Anti-Gallican sentiments of the city, that Napoleon, after his entrance into Dresden, declared Leipzig in a state of siege; in consequence of which the inhabitants were obliged to furnish gratuitously all the requisitions that he thought fit to demand. In this way the town, in a very short time, was plundered of immense sums, exclusively of the expense of the hospitals, the maintenance of which alone consumed upwards of 30,000 dollars per week. During this state of things the French, from the highest to the lowest, seemed to think themselves justified in wreaking upon the inhabitants the displeasure of their emperor; each therefore, after the example of his master, was a petty tyrant, whose licentiousness knew no bounds.
By such means, and by the immense assemblage of troops which began to be formed about the city at the conclusion of September 1813, its resources were completely exhausted, when the series of sanguinary engagements between the 14th and the 19th of the following month reduced it to the very verge of destruction. In addition to the pathetic details of the extreme hardships endured by the devoted inhabitants of the field of battle, which extended to the distance of ten English miles round Leipzig, contained in the following sheets, I shall beg leave to introduce the following extract of a letter, written on the 22d November, by a person of great commercial eminence in that city, who, after giving a brief account of those memorable days of October, thus proceeds:--
"By this five days' conflict our city was transformed into one vast hospital, 56 edifices being devoted to that purpose alone. The number of sick and wounded amounted to 36,000. Of these a large proportion died, but their places were soon supplied by the many wounded who had been left in the adjacent villages. Crowded to excess, what could be the consequence but contagious diseases? especially as there was such a scarcity of the necessaries of life--and unfortunately a most destructive nervous fever is at this moment making great ravages among us, so that from 150 to 180 deaths commonly occur in one week, in a city whose ordinary proportion was between 30 and 40. In the military hospitals there die at least 300 in a day, and frequently from 5 to 600. By this extraordinary mortality the numbers there have been reduced to from 14 to 10,000. Consider too the state of the circumjacent villages, to the distance of 10 miles round, all completely stripped; in scarcely any of them is there