in
which his outposts were driven into the town, he crossed the Danube;
three days later he effected a junction with his second division, left
in the Bohemian Forest, and stood at Cham with an effective fighting
force of eighty thousand men. The result proved that Napoleon's
judgment had been unerring; had he pursued, in spite of all
remonstrance and in disregard of the fatigue of his men, he would have
had no mighty foe to fight a few weeks later at Wagram. Some time
thereafter he told an Austrian general that he had deliberated long,
and had refrained from following Charles into Bohemia for fear the
Northern powers would rise and come to the assistance of Austria. "Had
I pursued immediately," he said at St. Helena, "as the Prussians did
after Waterloo, the hostile army crowded on to the Danube would have
been in the last extremity."

"Labor is my element," he remarked on the same dreary isle almost amid
the pangs of dissolution. "I have found the limit of my strength in
eye and limb; I have never found the limit of my capacity for work."
This was certainly true of this five days' fight. "His Majesty is
well," wrote Berthier on the twenty-fourth, "and endures according to
his general habit the exertion of mind and body." Once more his enemy
was not annihilated, but this contentment and high spirits seem
natural to common minds, which recall that in a week he had evolved
order from chaos, and had stricken a powerful, united foe, cutting his
line in two, and sending one portion to the right-about in utter
confusion. To the end of his life Napoleon regarded the strategic
operations culminating at Eckmuehl as his masterpiece in that
particular line. Jomini, his able critic, remained always of the same
opinion. French history knows this conflict as the Battle of Five
Days; Thann, Abensberg, Landshut, Eckmuehl, and Ratisbon being the
places in or near which on each day a skirmish or combat occurred to
mark the successive stages of French victory.

The results were of the most important kind. In the first place,
Austria's pride and confidence were gone. She had lost fifty thousand
men, and her warfare was no longer offensive, but defensive. Charles
called for peace, but the Emperor would not listen. The Archduke John,
moreover, was compelled to abandon the Tyrol, and when he found
himself again in Italy, he was no longer confronted by Eugene alone,
that excellent youth but feeble general, whom he had so easily
defeated: M