“At the same time it had been found necessary to kill without delay the greatest part of the cattle brought from Germany and Italy.  These animals would neither walk any farther, nor eat.  Their eyes, sunk in their sockets, were dull and motionless.  They were killed without seeking to avoid the fatal blow.  Other misfortunes followed:  several convoys were intercepted, magazines taken, and a drove of eight hundred oxen had just been carried off from Krasnoe.”

This man added, that “regard ought also to be had to the great quantity of detachments which had passed through Smolensk; to the stay which Marshal Victor, twenty-eight thousand men, and about fifteen thousand sick, had made there; to the multitude of posts and marauders whom the insurrection and the approach of the enemy had driven back into the city.  All had subsisted upon the magazines; it had been necessary to deliver out nearly sixty thousand rations per day; and lastly, provisions and cattle had been sent forward towards Moscow as far as Mojaisk and towards Kalouga as far as Yelnia.”

Many of these allegations were well founded.  A chain of other magazines had been formed from Smolensk to Minsk and Wilna.  These two towns were in a still greater degree than Smolensk, centres of provisioning, of which the fortresses of the Vistula formed the first line.  The total quantity of provisions distributed over this space was incalculable; the efforts for transporting them thither gigantic, and the result little better than nothing.  They were insufficient in that immensity.

Thus great expeditions are crushed by their own weight.  Human limits had been surpassed; the genius of Napoleon, in attempting to soar above time, climate, and distances, had, as it were, lost itself in space:  great as was its measure, it had been beyond it.

For the rest, he was passionate, from necessity.  He had not deceived himself in regard to the inadequacy of his supplies.  Alexander alone had deceived him.  Accustomed to triumph over every thing by the terror of his name, and the astonishment produced by his audacity, he had ventured his army, himself, his fortune, his all, on a first movement of Alexander’s.  He was still the same man as in Egypt, at Marengo, Ulm, and Esslingen; it was Ferdinand Cortes; it was the Macedonian burning his ships, and above all solicitous, in spite of his troops, to penetrate still farther into unknown Asia; finally, it was Caesar risking his whole fortune in a fragile bark.

BOOK X.

CHAP.  I.

The surprise of Vinkowo, however, that unexpected attack of Kutusoff in front of Moscow, was only the spark of a great conflagration.  On the same day, at the same hour, the whole of Russia had resumed the offensive.  The general plan of the Russians was at once developed.  The inspection of the map became truly alarming.