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w. Ambition was, at that time, completely unshackled; every thing inspired the passion for glory; they had been launched into a boundless career. How was it possible to measure the ascendancy, which a powerful emperor must have acquired, or the strong impulse which he had given them?--an emperor, capable of telling his soldiers after the victory of Austerlitz, "I will allow you to name your children after me; and if among them there should prove one worthy of us, I will leave him every thing I possess, and name him my successor." CHAP. III. The junction of the two wings of the Russian army, in the direction of Smolensk, had compelled Napoleon also to approximate his various divisions. No signal of attack had yet been given, but the war involved him on all sides; it seemed to tempt his genius by success, and to stimulate it by reverses. On his left, Wittgenstein, equally in dread of Oudinot and Macdonald, remained between the two roads from Polotsk and Duenabourg, which meet at Sebez. The Duke of Reggio's orders had been to keep on the defensive. But neither at Polotsk nor at Witepsk was there any thing found in the country, which disclosed the position of the Russians. Tired of feeling nothing of them on any side, the marshal determined to go in quest of them himself. On the 1st of August, therefore, he left general Merle and his division on the Drissa, to protect his baggage, his great park of artillery, and his retreat; he pushed Verdier towards Sebez, and made him take a position on the high-road, in order to mask the movement which he was meditating. He himself, turning to the left with Legrand's infantry, Castex's cavalry, and Aubrey's light artillery, advanced as far as Yakoubowo, on the road to Osweia. As chance would have it, Wittgenstein, at the same moment, was marching from Osweia to Yakoubowo; the hostile armies unexpectedly met each other in front of that village. It was late in the day; the shock was violent, but of short duration: night put an end to the combat, and postponed its decision. The marshal found himself engaged, with a single division, in a deep and narrow pass, surrounded with woods and hills, all the declivities of which were opposed to us. He was hesitating, however, whether he should quit that contracted position, on which all the enemy's fire was about to be concentrated, when a young Russian staff-officer, scarcely emerged from boyhood, came dashing heedlessly into our
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