Brienne, where he had been a boy at school, had been the scene of a brilliantly successful action.

They had lost no glory at La Rothiere afterward--although they gained nothing else--where with thirty thousand men he had beaten back through one long bloody day and night thrice that number, only to have to retreat in the end for the salvation of those who had been left alive.
And, to him who had been wont to spend them so indifferently, men had suddenly become precious, since he could get no more.

Every dead or wounded man was now unreplaceable, and each loss made his problem harder to solve.

Since those two first battles he had been forced back, step by step, mile by mile, league by league, everywhere; and all his lieutenants likewise.

Now Schwarzenberg, with one hundred and thirty thousand men, confronted him on the Seine and the Aube, and Bluecher, with eighty thousand men, was marching on Paris by way of the Marne, with only Macdonald and his beaten and dispirited men, not ten thousand in number, to hold the fiery old Prussian field marshal in check.
"How had it all come to this, and why ?" the man asked himself, and, with all his greatness and clearness of vision, the reason did not occur to him.