Battle Of Leipzig Quotes

Between a battle lost and a battle won,’ Napoleon had said on the eve of the battle of Leipzig, ‘the distance is immense and there stand empires.

In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.

Some 600,000 soldiers met in October 1813 at the Battle of Leipzig, the so-called ‘Battle of the Nations’ – the bloodiest encounter in Europe until the First World War.

Two German-held villages, Mametz and Montauban, were captured on July 1, as well as a German strongpoint, the Leipzig Redoubt. The human cost of the day’s attack was higher than on any other single day of battle in the First World War. Just over a thousand British officers and more than 20,000 men were killed, and 25,000 seriously wounded.

Luther’s chronic stomach troubles have also been linked to a psychosomatic problem. His neurotic phobias all seemed to go directly to his stomach, destroying his digestion. His problem with flatulence has become legendary, due in part to his own exaggeration of it. His writings are sprinkled with references to his constant belching and breaking of wind. He said, “If I break wind in Wittenburg, they will hear it in Leipzig.” Fortunately Luther was able to find a sanctified use for his flatulence. He advised his students that the breaking of wind was a most effective device to repel the attacks of the devil. Elsewhere Luther spoke of resisting Satan by throwing an inkwell at him. Luther described his battle with Satan in the terms of a man under siege. He was sure that he was a personal target of the prince of hell.

Es kam auch zu weiteren Überläufen, allen voran 4000 Sachsen, die Reyniers Korps zugeteilt waren und ganz einfach in geschlossenen Reihen zu den Alliierten marschierten. Zu den Augenzeugen dieses bemerkenswerten Seitenwechsels zählte Marschall Macdonald, der durch das Fernrohr beobachtete, wie die Sachsen, während sie einen erfolgreichen Vorstoß gegen die Verbündeten anführten, einfach kehrtmachten und ihre Waffen auf die Franzosen richteten, die ihnen folgten. »Kalten Blutes, in himmelschreiender Weise«, erinnerte er sich später, »schossen sie die Ahnungslosen nieder, mit denen sie bis hierher in treuer Waffenbrüderschaft gefochten.« Verzweifelte Versuche Marschall Neys, die Reihen zu schließen und einen Gegenangriff zu führen, wurden von der britischen Raketenbrigade zunichte gemacht, deren Congreve’sche Raketen, benannt nach dem britischen Erfinder William Congreve, unter den vorrückenden Kolonnen Angst und Schrecken verbreiteten.