Above all, the French now firmly held that great military barrier, the River Elbe.  Napoleon’s obstinacy during the armistice was undoubtedly fed by his boundless confidence in the strength of his military position.  In vain did his Marshals remind him that he was dangerously far from France; that, if Austria drew the sword, she could cut him off from the Rhine, and that the Saale, or even the Rhine itself, would be a safer line of defence.—­Ten battles lost, he retorted, would scarcely force him to that last step.  True, he now exposed his line of communications with France; but if the art of war consisted in never running any risk, glory would be the prize of mediocre minds.  He must have a complete triumph.  The question was not of abandoning this or that province:  his political superiority was at stake.  At Marengo, Austerlitz, and Wagram, he was in greater danger.  His forces now were not in the air; they rested on the Elbe, on its fortresses, and on Erfurt.  Dresden was the pivot on which all his movements turned.  His enemies were spread out on a circumference stretching from Prague to Berlin, while he was at the centre; and, operating on interior and therefore shorter lines, he could outmarch and outmanoeuvre them. “But,” he concluded, “where I am not my lieutenants must wait for me without trusting anything to chance.  The allies cannot long act together on lines so extended, and can I not reasonably hope sooner or later to catch them in some false move?  If they venture between my fortified lines of the Elbe and the Rhine, I will enter Bohemia and thus take them in the rear."[343]

The plan promised much.  The central intrenched camps of Dresden and Pirna, together with the fortresses of Koenigstein above, and of Torgau below, the Saxon capital, gave great strategic advantages.  The corps of St. Cyr at Koenigstein and those of Vandamme, Poniatowski, and Victor further to the east, watched the defiles leading from Bohemia.  The corps of Macdonald, Lauriston, Ney, and Marmont held in check Bluecher’s army of Silesia.  On Napoleon’s left, and resting on the fortresses of Wittenberg and Magdeburg, the corps of Oudinot, Bertrand, and Reynier threatened Berlin and Bernadotte’s army of the north cantonned in its neighbourhood; while Davoust at Hamburg faced Bernadotte’s northern detachments and menaced his communications with Stralsund.  Davoust certainly was far away, and the loss of this ablest of Napoleon’s lieutenants was severely to be felt in the subsequent complicated moves; with this exception, however, Napoleon’s troops were well in hand and had the advantage of the central position, while the allies were, as yet, spread out on an extended arc.