The Emperors Alexander and Francis fled eastwards into the night.  Between them there was now a tacit understanding that the campaign was at an end.  On that night Francis sent proposals for a truce; and in two days’ time Napoleon agreed to an armistice (signed on December 6th) on condition that Francis would send away the Russian army and entirely exclude that of Prussia from his territories.  A contribution of 100,000,000 francs was also laid upon the Hapsburg dominions.  On the next day Alexander pledged himself to withdraw his army at once; and Francis proceeded to treat for peace with Napoleon.  This was an infraction of the treaties of the Third Coalition, which prescribed that no separate peace should be made.

Under the circumstances, the conduct of the Hapsburgs was pardonable:  but the seeming break-up of the coalition furnished the Court of Berlin with a good reason for declining to bear the burden alone.  It was not Austerlitz that daunted Frederick William; for, after hearing of that disaster, he wrote that he would be true to his pledge given on November 3rd.  But then, on the decisive day (December 15th), came the news of the defection of Austria, the withdrawal of Alexander’s army, and the closing of the Hapsburg lands to a Prussian force.  These facts absolved Frederick William from his obligations to those Powers, and allowed him with perfect good faith to keep his sword in the scabbard.  The change, it is true, sadly dulled the warlike ardour of his army; but it could not be called desertion of Russia and Austria.[44] The disgrace came later, when, on Christmas Day, Haugwitz reached Berlin, and described to the King and Ministers his interview with Napoleon in the palace of Schoenbrunn, and the treaty which the victor then and there offered to Prussia at the sword’s point.

For most men a great victory such as Austerlitz would have brought a brief spell of rest, especially after the ceaseless toils and anxieties of the previous fortnight.  Yet now, after ridding himself of all fear of Austria, Napoleon at once used every device of his subtle statecraft to dissolve the nascent coalition.  And Fortune had willed that, when flushed with triumph, he should have to deal with a timorous time-server.

It is the curse of a policy of keeping up a dainty balance in a hurricane that it unmans the balancer, until at last the peacemaker resembles a juggler.  A decade of compromise and evasion of difficulties had enfeebled the spirit of Prussia, until the hardest trial for her King was to take any step that could not be retraced.  He had often spoken “feelingly, if not energetically,” of the predicaments of his position between France, England, and Russia.[45] And, as in the case of that other bon pere de famille, Louis XVI., whom Nature framed for a farmhouse and Fate tossed into a revolution, his lack of foresight and resolution took the heart out of his advisers and turned statesmen into trimmers.  Even before