It is a remarkable fact, that he issued orders for this retreat northward at the very moment that Kutusoff and his Russians, dismayed at their defeat at Malo-jaroslavetz, were retiring towards the south.
From that moment Napoleon had nothing in his view but Paris, just as on leaving Paris he saw nothing but Moscow. It was on the 26th of October that the fatal movement of our retreat commenced. Davoust, with twenty-five thousand men, remained as a rear-guard. While by advancing a few paces, without being aware of it, he was spreading consternation among the Russians, the Grand Army, in astonishment, was turning its back on them. It marched with downcast eyes, as if ashamed and humbled. In the midst of it, its commander, gloomy and silent, seemed to be anxiously measuring his line of communication with the fortresses on the Vistula.
For the space of more than two hundred and fifty leagues it offered but two points where he could halt and rest, the first Smolensk, the second Minsk. He had made those towns his two great depôts, where immense magazines were established.
Napoleon, however, reckoned upon the Duke of Belluno and his thirty-six thousand fresh troops. That corps had been at Smolensk ever since the beginning of September. He relied also upon detachments being sent from his depôts, on the sick and wounded who had recovered, and on the stragglers, who would be rallied and formed at Wilna into marching battalions. All these would successively come into line, and fill up the chasms made in his ranks by the sword, famine, and disease. He should therefore have time to regain that position on the Dwina and the Borysthenes, where he wished it to be believed that his presence, added to that of Victor, Saint-Cyr, and Macdonald, would overawe Wittgenstein,[163] check Kutusoff, and threaten the Czar Alexander even in his second capital.
He accordingly announced that he was going to take post on the Dwina. But it was not in truth, upon that river and the Borysthenes that his thoughts rested: he was sensible that it was not with a harassed and reduced army that he could guard the interval between those two rivers and their courses, which the ice would speedily seal.
It was therefore a hundred leagues beyond Smolensk, in a more compact position, behind the morasses of the Berezina—to Minsk, that it was necessary to repair in search of winter quarters, from which he was then forty marches distant.
§ 12. Napoleon's attempt to destroy the Kremlin: view of the battle-field of Borodino.
Napoleon had arrived quite pensive at Vereïa,[164] when Mortier presented himself before him. But I here discover, that, hurried along in the relation just as we then were in reality, by the rapid succession of violent scenes and memorable events, my attention has been diverted from occurrences worthy of notice. On the 23d of October, at half past one in the morning, the air was shaken by a tremendous explosion, which for a moment startled both armies, though amid such mighty anticipations scarcely anything then much excited their astonishment.