For sheer concentration of effort, Friedland was Napoleon’s most impressive victory after Austerlitz and Ulm. At the cost of 11,500 killed, wounded and missing, he had utterly routed the Russians, whose losses have been estimated at around 20,000 – o 43 per cent of their total – though only around twenty guns [cannon].
Percy’s hundred surgeons had to work through the night, and a general later recalled ‘meadows covered with limbs severed from their bodies, those frightful places of mutilation and dissection which the army called ambulances’.
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Tilsit." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 455. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Smith, Data Book pp. 250-51.
Woloch, The French Veteran p. 199.
Further Reading:
Napoleone di Buonaparte / Napoléon Bonaparte / Napoleon I
That description almost sounds like a WW1/2 battlefield. It would be interesting to try and find more accounts of the aftermath of these battles, because if you think about it, its the first time anyone would have seen something like this.
This era of warfare has never really interested me that much to be honest. I like to find out about ancient battles and the strategies we think they used, and everything from WW1 onwards is fascinating because it seems like every couple of years there is a new style of fighting, or piece of technology that changes everything. The American civil war only interests me because it is the first place you begin to see something that resembles the trench warfare in WW1.
Perhaps the intriguing parts of Napoleon's era are the experiences of the soldiers fighting, rather than the logistics and strategy of the battles, and I just haven't looked hard enough.