French Army, Reichs Army, all was gone to staves, to utter chaotic wreck.

Hildburghausen went by Naumburg; crossed the Saale there; bent homewards through the Weimar Country; one wild flood of ruin, swift as it could go; at Erfurt "only one regiment was in rank, and marched through with drums beating." His Army, which had been disgustingly unhappy from the first, and was now fallen fluid on these mad terms, flowed all away in different rills, each by the course straightest home; and Hildburghausen arriving at Bamberg, with hardly the ghost or mutilated skeleton of an Army, flung down his truncheon,--"A murrain on your Reichs Armies and regimental chaoses!"-- and went indignantly home.

Reichs Army had to begin at the beginning again; and did not reappear on the scene till late next Year, under a new Commander, and with slightly improved conditions.
Dauphiness Proper was in no better case; and would have flowed home in like manner, had not home been so far, and the way unknown.

Twelve thousand of them rushed straggling through the Eichsfeld; plundering and harrying, like Cossacks or Calmucks: "Army blown asunder, over a circle of forty miles' radius," writes St.Germain: "had the Enemy pursued us, after I got broken [burst in upon by Mayer and his Free-Corps people] we had been annihilated.

Never did Army behave worse; the first cannon-salvo decided our rout and our shame." [St.Germain to Verney: different Excerpts of Letters in the two weeks after Rossbach and before (given in Preuss, ii.