This enormous force, which was double that of the Czar's, gradually collected on the banks of the Niemen, a river emptying into the Baltic, and forming part of the western boundary of Russia. The army crossed it in three divisions, at a considerable distance from each other.[125] All were to meet at Wilna, a Polish city which Russia had seized in the dismemberment of that country, and which was about fifty miles southeast of the Niemen.
Napoleon himself, at the head of one of the three divisions, with a force of over two hundred thousand, crossed the river at Kowno on the 23d of June, and began his march for Wilna.[126] The weather was intensely hot, and in the course of a few weeks many thousand men fell out of the ranks through sickness and fatigue, and great numbers of horses died. The French hoped to encounter the Russian forces in a decisive battle before advancing far into the country. But it was the policy of the Czar not to fight, but to keep falling back, destroying all supplies as fast as he retreated, and so compelling the French to depend wholly upon their own resources.
Napoleon himself confessed that the Russians had the advantage. They, he said, would be animated by love of their native land to repel invasion, and all private and public interests would unite them. The French, on the other hand, had nothing to urge them on but the love of conquest and of glory, without even the hope of plunder, for in those desolate regions there was nothing they could seize.
The first real encounter was at Smolensk, a walled city on the Dnieper, about half way between Wilna and the ancient capital of Russia. After a day of hard fighting, the Russians fired the city and abandoned it. The French entered the smoking ruins. They were victors, but such a victory was almost as disheartening as a defeat. From that place a weary seven-days march brought the Grand Army to the village of Borodino, on the banks of the Kologa, a tributary of the Moskwa.[127] Here the Russian general, Kutusoff, had determined to make a stand in defence of that holy city of Moscow, not many leagues distant, for which every peasant stood ready to lay down his life. The result of the battle was in favor of Napoleon, but it cost him the lives of thirty thousand men to gain it; and though the Russians lost double that number, they knew that the time was coming when the elements and the great barren spaces of their country would fight for them. This was the 7th of September. From that date the Russians resumed their old tactics and continued to slowly retreat, burning the villages and the crops as they fell back. At length, at noon of the 14th, the French emperor came in sight of "the city of the Czars."
What followed from that time until Napoleon, baffled and beaten, reached Paris, leaving the wreck of the Grand Army behind him, may best be learned from the ensuing narrative of Count Ségur,[128] who was one of the generals in that army, an officer of the imperial staff, and an eye-witness of what he describes.[129]
His faithful history of that terrible disaster must necessarily be painful. It is in most respects the very opposite of Xenophon's account of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which precedes it. But the reader should reflect that the dark and sorrowful scenes of history may have lessons as salutary as the brighter ones; and that the story of a great failure, involving the ruin and death of thousands, may be as instructive and as helpful as the story of a great success. In Xenophon's case, we have the spectacle of a man of more than ordinary ability, stimulated by difficulty and peril until he rises to real greatness of achievement. In Napoleon's career we see a naturally "great mind dragged to ruin by its own faults"; but such a man could not fall alone, and it was inevitable that a multitude should suffer with him and for him.
D. H. M.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] Namely, at Kowno, Pilony, south of Kowno, and Grodno, still further south. At Kowno a monument bears the following inscription in Russian: "In 1812 Russia was invaded by an army numbering 700,000 men. The army recrossed the frontier numbering 70,000."
[126] See map facing p. 1. The upper dotted line represents the advance to Moscow; the lower, the line of retreat from that city.