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, and the second, Minsk.  He had made these two towns his two great depots, where immense magazines were established.  But Wittgenstein, still before Polotsk, threatened the left flank of the former, and Tchitchakof, already at Bresk-litowsky, the right flank of the latter.  Wittgenstein’s force was gaining strength by recruits and fresh corps which he was daily receiving, and by the gradual diminution of that of Saint Cyr.

Napoleon, however, reckoned upon the Duke of Belluno and his thirty-six thousand fresh troops.  The corps d’armee had been at Smolensk ever since the beginning of September.  He reckoned also upon detachments being sent from his depots, 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 Duena 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, check Kutusoff, and threaten Alexander even in his second capital.

He therefore proclaimed that he was going to take post on the Duena.  But it was not 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 efface.  He placed no reliance on a sea of snow six feet deep, with which winter would speedily cover those parts, but to which it would also give solidity:  the whole then would be one wide road for the enemy to reach him, to penetrate into the intervals between his wooden cantonments, scattered over a frontier of two hundred leagues, and to burn them.

Had he at first stopped there, as he declared he should on his arrival at Witepsk; had he there taken proper measures for preserving and recruiting his army; had Tormasof, Tchitchakof and Hoertel been driven out of Volhynia; had he raised a hundred thousand Cossacks in those rich provinces; his winter-quarters would then have been habitable.  But now, nothing was ready for him there; and not only was his force inadequate to the purpose, but Tchitchakof, a hundred leagues in his rear, would still threaten his communications with Germany and France and his retreat.  It was therefore at a hundred leagues beyond Smolensk, in a more compact position, behind the morasses of the Berezina, it was to Minsk, that it was necessary to repair in search of winter-quarters, from which he was forty marches distant.

But should he arrive there in time?  He had reason to think so.  Dombrowski and his Poles, placed around Bobruisk, would be sufficient to keep Ertell in check.  As for Schwartzenberg, that general had been victorious; he was at the head of forty-two thousand Austrians, Saxons, and Poles, whom Durutte, and his French division, from Warsaw, would augment to more than fifty thousand men.  He had pursued Tormasof as far as the Styr.