These were the reasons which rendered the battle so furious, so bloodthirsty on both sides; which led the combatants to rend each other with actual pleasure, with exulting rage.  Each yawning wound was hailed with a shout of joy by the person who inflicted it; each man who fell dying heard, instead of the gentle lament of pity, the sigh of sympathy, the jeering laugh, the glad, victorious shout of the pitiless foe.

Then Austrian generals, eagerly encouraging their men by their own example of bravery, pressed forward at the head of their troops.  The Archduke Charles, though ill and suffering, had himself lifted upon his horse, and, in the enthusiasm of the struggle, so completely forgot his sickness that he grasped the standard of a wavering battalion, dashed forward with it, and thereby induced the soldiers to rush once more, with eager shouts of joy, upon the foe.

More than ten times the village of Aspern was taken by the French, more than ten times it was recaptured by the Austrians; every step forward was marked by both sides with heaps of corpses, rivers of blood.  Every foot of ground, every position conquered, however small, was the scene of furious strife.  For the church in Aspern, the churchyard, single houses, nay, even single trees, bore evidence of the furious assault of the enemies upon each other; whole battalions went with exulting shouts to death.

On account of this intense animosity on both sides, this mutual desire for battle thus stimulated to the highest pitch, the victory on the first day remained undecided and the gathering darkness found the foes almost in the same position which they had occupied at the beginning of the conflict.  The Austrians were still in dense masses on the shore of the Danube; the French still occupied the island of Lobau, and their three bridges conveyed them across to the left bank of the Danube to meet the enemy.

But the second day, after the most terrible butchery, the most desperate struggle, was to see the victory determined.

It belonged to the Austrians, to the Archduke Charles.  He had decided it by a terrible expedient—­the order to let burning vessels drift down the Danube against the bridges which connected the island of Lobau with the left shore.  The wind and the foaming waves of the river seemed on this day to be allies of the Austrians; the wind swept the ships directly upon the bridges, densely crowded with dead bodies, wounded men, soldiers, horses, and artillery; the quivering tongues of flame seized the piles and blazed brightly up till everything upon them plunged in terrible, inextricable confusion down to the surging watery grave below.

At the awful spectacle the whole French army uttered cries of anguish, the Austrians shouts of joy.

Vainly did Napoleon himself ride through the ranks, calling in the beloved voice that usually kindled enthusiasm so promptly:  “I myself ordered the destruction of the bridges, that you might have no choice between glorious victory or inevitable destruction.”