What is strange is that so consummate a leader should have been entirely ignorant of the distribution of the enemy's forces, and should have left Davoust with only 27,000 men exposed to the attack of Brunswick with nearly 40,000.[110] In his bulletins, as in the "Relation Officielle," the Emperor sought to gloze over his error by magnifying Hohenlohe's corps into a great army and attenuating Davoust's splendid exploit, which in his private letters he warmly praised.

The fact is, he had made all his dispositions in the belief that he had the main body of the Prussians before him at Jena.
That is why, on the afternoon of the 13th, he hastily sent to recall Murat's horse and Bernadotte's corps from Naumburg and its vicinity; and in consequence Bernadotte took no very active part in the fighting.

For this he has been bitterly blamed, on the strength of an assertion that Napoleon during the night of the 13th-14th sent him an order to support Davoust.

This order has never been produced, and it finds no place in the latest and fullest collection of French official despatches, which, however, contains some that fully exonerate Bernadotte.[111] Unfortunately for Bernadotte's fame, the tattle of memoir writers is more attractive and gains more currency than the prosaic facts of despatches.
Fortune plays an immense part in warfare; and never did she favour the Emperor more than on October the 14th, 1806.

Fortune and the skill and bravery of Davoust and his corps turned what might have been an almost doubtful conflict into an overwhelming victory.