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Bakunin told me the planned retreat to the Erzgebirge had been called off: reinforcements had poured in overnight, and the fighters were so eager to fight they had held off the Prussians so far. But the Prussians had brought in more troops, and had switched tactics, breaking through house walls instead of attacking barricades head-on, so the defense of Dresden was doomed. He had proposed blowing up the Town Hall’s powder stores when the Prussians broke through, but the town council had hidden the powder, and Heubner had sided with them, so the retreat was set for the next morning. I told them I had seen thousands of reinforcements on the road to Freiberg, including four hundred exhausted reservists who couldn’t go further for lack of transport. Heubner begged me to go back and tell the reservist leaders to requisition horses and carts from the local villages to speed the retreat, and Marschall von Bieberstein, the former college friend who had been a fiery leader of the citizen guard, offered to come with me. He was hoarse and exhausted, barely able to speak, but agreed. We left that night, got to Freiberg at dawn, told the reservist leaders to take whatever transport they needed, and set off back to Dresden. Marschall left me at the edge of town to go rally more forces, and I fell asleep on the coach. I woke to shouting, and opened my eyes to see a column of armed revolutionaries marching away from Dresden. “What’s happened?” I called. “It’s all over,” one replied. “The provisional government is in the carriage behind us.”
I jumped out of the coach and ran up the hill, and found Heubner, Bakunin, and Martin, the revolutionary post-office clerk, in a slow-moving hired carriage, the driver sobbing because his springs were about to break under the weight of the men and the National Guards crammed in behind. Bakunin laughed at his tears, calling them nectar for the gods, but agreed to let Heubner and me get out to make room. Heubner walked down the line of retreating troops, telling them to fall back to Freiberg and wait for orders. A German Catholic priest named Menzdorff, who had been arrested by the Chemnitz guard for agitating them to join the uprising, fell in with us, and we learned the Chemnitz guard had invited the provisional government to their city only to arrest them, and were already on their way back to Chemnitz to set up the trap.
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