Blucher and the Uprising of Prussia Against Napoleon: 1806-1815

Blucher And The Uprising Of Prussia Against Napoleon: 1806-1815 BY ERNEST F. HENDERSON PH. D. (BERLIN), L. H. D. (TRINITY) BLUCHER is chiefly known to English readers as the man who came to Wellington's aid at Waterloo. The object of the present volume is to show that he had a separate existence of his own and performed other great deeds in the cause that are equally deserving of praise. Strange that he has never been made the subject of an English biography and that of his German lives none have been translated into English! The present work cannot pretend altogether to fill the gap, as the plan of the series, if I have under- stood it rightly, is to treat the movement as fully as the man. I shall feel a certain satisfaction if I can suc- ceed in establishing Blucher in his rightful position, as the peer of Wellington in all that concerns the overthrow of Napoleon. "You forget Well- ington's Spanish campaigns," I shall be told. "You in turn forget/* I shall answer, "that Blucher was the one progressive, inspiring ele- ment among the leaders of the allied armies from the year 1813 on." Without Blucher's decision to cross the Elbe at Wartenburg there would have been no battle of Leipzig without his cutting loose from Schwarzenberg in March, 1814, there would have been no closing in of the allies on Paris without his brave endurance at Ligny in spite of the non-arrival of the promised reinforcements, Wellington would have been over- whelmed at Quatre-Bras and there would have been no Waterloo. No time could be more favourable than the present for writing a work on Blucher, seeing that it is the centenary of the great events in which he played a part. This fact has given the im- petus to a whole new literature on the subject based very largely on new material from the war archives. In a splendid series of works all the campaigns have been treated objectively and critically and in such detail that we can follow the movements of each army literally from day to day. I owe much to Binder von Kriegelstein's two volumes on the war with Austria in 1809 to von Caemmerer's and von Holleben's volumes on the spring campaign of 1813 to Friederich's three volumes on the fall campaign of 1813 to von Janson's two volumes on the campaign of 1814 in Prance, and to von Lettow-Vorbeck's two volumes on the campaign of 1815. All of these writers are high officers in the German or Austrian armies, and their judgments have formed my last court of appeal in military matters. Purely literary works like those of Houssaye, for instance, who is an academician and not a military man, seem very puny in comparison. Of great use to me has been a new life of Blucher in two volumes by von linger but the earlier lives by Blasendorf and by von Wigger are not altogether superseded. Von linger gives a good working bibliography, which can be supplemented from the lists and the reviews that appear at intervals in the Forschungen zur Brandenburg Preussischen Geschichte and in the historical magazines.