"At length," said Napoleon, as he gazed on the advance from the opposite side, "at length I have them!"[133] He had no doubt it was the purpose of the Russians to pass through the city, and, deploying from its gates, to offer him under the walls that general action for which he longed, and on which so much depended. He took all the necessary measures for preparing his line of battle.
But the cautious Barclay de Tolly was determined, that not even for the protection of the sacred city would he endanger the safety of his army, so indispensably necessary to the defence of the empire. He dismissed to Ellnia his more impatient coadjutor, Prince Bagration, who would willingly have fought a battle, incensed as he was at beholding the cities of Russia sacked, and her fields laid waste, without the satisfaction either of resistance or revenge. Barclay in the meanwhile occupied Smolensk, but only for the purpose of covering the flight of the inhabitants, and emptying the magazines.
Buonaparte's last look that evening, was on the still empty fields betwixt his army and Smolensk. There was no sign of any advance from its gates, and Murat prophesied that the Russians had no purpose of fighting. Davoust entertained a different opinion; and Napoleon, continuing to believe what he most wished, expected with the peep of day to see the whole Russian army drawn up betwixt his own front and the walls of Smolensk. Morning came, however, and the space in which he expected to see the enemy was vacant as before. On the other hand, the high-road on the opposite side of the Dnieper was filled with troops and artillery, which showed that the grand army of the Russians was in full retreat. Disappointed and incensed, Napoleon appointed instant measures to be taken to storm the place, resolving as speedily as possible to possess himself of the town, that he might have the use of its bridge in crossing to the other side of the Dnieper, in order to pursue the fugitive Russians. There are moments when men of ordinary capacity may advise the wisest. Murat remarked to Buonaparte, that as the Russians had retired, Smolensk, left to its fate, would fall without the loss that must be sustained in an attack by storm, and he more than hinted the imprudence of penetrating farther into Russia at this late season of the year. The answer of Napoleon[134] must have been almost insulting; for Murat, having exclaimed that a march to Moscow would be the destruction of the army, spurred his horse like a desperate man to the banks of the river, where the Russian guns from the opposite side were cannonading a French battery, placed himself under a tremendous fire, as if he had been courting death, and was with difficulty forced from the dangerous spot.[135]
BATTLE OF SMOLENSK.
Meantime, the attack commenced on Smolensk, but the place was defended with the same vigour as on the day before. The field-guns were found unable to penetrate the walls; and the French lost four or five thousand men in returning repeatedly to the attack. But this successful defence did not alter Barclay's resolution of evacuating the place. It might no doubt have been defended for several days more, but the Russian general feared that a protracted resistance on this advanced point might give Napoleon time to secure the road to Moscow, and drive the Russian armies back upon the barren and exhausted provinces of the northwest, besides getting betwixt them and the ancient capital of Russia. In the middle of the night, then, while the French were throwing some shells into the place, they saw fires beginning to kindle, far faster and more generally than their bombardment could have occasioned.[136] They were the work of the Russian troops, who, having completed their task of carrying off or destroying the magazines, and having covered the flight of the inhabitants, had now set the dreadful example of destroying their own town, rather than that its houses or walls should afford assistance to the enemy.
SMOLENSK.
When the Frenchmen entered Smolensk, which they did the next morning, 18th August, most of the town, which consisted chiefly of wooden houses, was yet blazing—elsewhere they found nothing but blood and ashes.[137] The French troops were struck with horror at the inveterate animosity of the Russians, and the desperation of the resistance which they met with; and all began to wish a period to a war, where there was nothing to be gained from the retreating enemy, except a long vista of advance through an inhospitable wilderness of swamps, pine-forests, and deserts; without provisions, and without shelter; without hospitals for the sick, and dressings for the wounded; and without even a shed where the weary might repose, or the wounded might die.
Buonaparte himself hesitated,[138] and is reported to have then spoken of concluding the campaign at Smolensk, which would, he said, be an admirable head of cantonments.[139] "Here," he said, "the troops might rest and receive reinforcements. Enough was done for the campaign. Poland was conquered, which seemed a sufficient result for one year. The next year they would have peace, or they would seek it at Moscow." But in the interior of his councils, he held a different language, and endeavoured to cover, with the language of prudence, the pride and pertinacity of character which forbade him to stop short in an enterprise which had yet produced him no harvest of renown. He stated to his generals the exhausted state of the country, in which his soldiers were living from hand to mouth; and the risk and difficulty of drawing his supplies from Dantzic or Poland, through Russian roads, and in the winter season. He alleged the disorganised state of the army, which might move on, though it was incapable of stopping. "Motion," he said, "might keep it together; a halt or a retreat would be at once to dissolve it. It was an army of attack, not of defence; an army of operation, not of position. The result was, they must advance on Moscow, possess themselves of the capital, and there dictate a peace."[140]
The language which Ségur has placed in the mouth of the Emperor, by no means exaggerates the dreadful condition of the French army. When Napoleon entered the country, only six weeks before, the corps which formed his operating army amounted to 297,000 men; and by the 5th August, when preparing to break up from Witepsk, that number was diminished to 185,000, not two-thirds of their original number, and a great additional loss had been sustained in the movements and encounters on the Dnieper. The wounded of the army were in the most miserable state, and it was in vain that the surgeons tore up their own linen for dressings; they were obliged to use parchment, and the down that grows on the birch-trees; it is no wonder that few recovered.
Thus it may be concluded, that this rash enterprise carried with it, from the beginning, the seeds of destruction, which, even without the conflagration of Moscow, or the Russian climate, though the latter must have been at all events included, made the expedition resemble that of Cambyses into Egypt; of Crassus, and after him Julian, into Parthia; and so many others of the same character, where the extent of preparation only rendered the subsequent fate of the invaders more signally calamitous.