The emperor, on his part, already at Dorogobouje, no longer hesitated; he knew that he carried every where with him the fate of Europe; that wherever he might be, that would always be the place where the destiny of nations would be decided; that he might therefore advance, fearless of the threatening consequences of the defection of the Swedes and Turks.  Thus he neglected the hostile armies of Essen at Riga, of Wittgenstein before Polotsk, of Ertell before Bobruisk, and of Tchitchakof in Volhynia.  They consisted of 120,000 men, whose number could not but keep gradually augmenting; he passed them, and suffered himself to be surrounded by them with indifference, assured that all these vain obstacles of war and policy would be swept away by the very first thunderbolt which he should launch.

And yet, his column of attack, which was 185,000 strong at his departure from Witepsk, was already reduced to 157,000; it was diminished by 28,000 men, half of whom occupied Witepsk, Orcha, Mohilef, and Smolensk.  The rest had been killed or wounded, or were straggling, and plundering in his rear our allies and the French themselves.

But 157,000 men were sufficient to destroy the Russian army by a complete victory, and to take Moscow.  As to his base of operation, notwithstanding the 120,000 Russians by whom it was threatened, it appeared to be secure.  Lithuania, the Duena, the Dnieper, and lastly Smolensk, were or would soon be covered towards Riga and Duenabourg by Macdonald and 32,000 men; towards Polotsk, by Saint-Cyr, with 30,000; at Witepsk, Smolensk, and Mohilef, by Victor and 40,000; before Bobruisk, by Dombrowski and 12,000; and on the Bug by Schwartzenberg and Regnier, at the head of 45,000 men.  Napoleon reckoned besides on the divisions of Loison and Durutte, 22,000 strong, which were already approaching Koenigsberg and Warsaw; and on reinforcements to the amount of 80,000, all of which would enter Russia before the middle of November.

He should thus have 280,000 men, including the Lithuanian and Polish levies, to support him, while, with 155,000 more, he made an incursion of 93 leagues; for such was the distance between Smolensk and Moscow.

But these 280,000 men were commanded by six different leaders, all independent of each other, and the most elevated of them, he who occupied the centre, and who seemed to be appointed to act as an intermediate link, to give some unity to the operations of the other five, was a minister of peace, and not of war.

Besides, the same causes which had already diminished, by one-third, the French forces which first entered Russia, could not fail to disperse or to destroy a still greater proportion of all these reinforcements.  Most of them were coming by detachments, formed provisionally into marching battalions under officers new to them, whom they were to leave the first day, without the incentive of discipline, esprit de corps, or glory, and traversing an exhausted country, which the season and the climate would be rendering daily more bare and more rude.