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Scarcely had the new troops arrived at Smolensk, according to the emperor's order, than they found themselves obliged to go to the assistance of our left wing, which was threatened by Count Wittgenstein. A large reinforcement had joined the Russian army at this point. Marshal Macdonald was compelled to abandon the siege of Riga in order to support the Prussians on the lower Dwina. Marshal St.
Northward, again, is Archangel, which the English discovered in 1533, with the result that the commerce fell entirely into their hands and those of the Dutch. On the west of Archangel is Russian Lapland. Then, ascending the Dwina from the coast, we arrive at the territories of Moscow, long the centre of the empire.
Admiral Tchichagoff, at the head of 50,000 soldiers, hitherto opposed to the Turks on the side of Moldavia, marched towards the left wing of Barclay de Tolly's force; and the right, which had gradually retired until it reached a strong camp formed on the river Dwina, was reinforced from Finland, though not so largely.
The two villages near Lida, two in the government of Grodno, the hundreds of villages and thousands of huts near Dwina, Rzezyca, Mohilew, Witebsk, burned, razed to the ground by an excited and hired rabble of Muscovite Muziks, who had sought and found hospitality in Poland for hundreds of years certainly all these villages and huts were not inhabited even by the 'lesser nobility. And it is also certain that the dwellers were not so cruelly punished for denouncing the 'dogs of nobles' an expression, if we are not mistaken, taken from the vocabulary of the corporal or subaltern officials, and which has never reached the fourteenth class from which the Rossian begins to reckon humanity.
The number of Wuerttembergians afflicted with dysentery, while on the march from the Niemen to the Dwina, amounted to three thousand, at least this many were left behind in the hospitals of Malaty, Wilna, Disna, Strizzowan and Witepsk. The number of deaths in the hospitals increased as the disease proceeded, from day to day, and the number of those who died on the march was not small.
He soon begins to face seriously the prospect of such an event. At the close of 1810 he writes that the Russians are intrenching themselves on the Dwina and Dniester, which "shows a bad spirit." But the great difficulty is Russia's imperfect observation of the Continental System.
Accordingly, leaving Wittgenstein with 25,000 men to hold Oudinot's corps in check on the middle Dwina, he marched eastwards towards Vitepsk. True, he left St. Petersburg open to attack; but it was not likely that Napoleon, when the summer was far spent, would press so far north and forego his usual plan of striking at the enemy's chief forces.
The army of the Dwina was commanded by General Barclay de Tolly; the army of the Dnieper marched under the orders of Prince Bagration. The emperor went straight towards the enemy, hoping to open the campaign by one of those brilliant strokes by which he had been accustomed to terrify Europe.
On the 17th June he arrived at Intersburg, having resolved to cross the Niemen at Kowno, in order to direct his march upon the Dwina and Dnieper by the road leading to Moscow, passing first by Wilna, the capital of Lithuania. It was, in fact, upon those two rivers, the real frontiers of the Russian empire, that the Emperor Alexander had concentrated his forces.
It was decided that the principal place for the exchange of merchandise should be at Kolmogar, on the Bay of Dwina, nearly opposite the convent of St. Nicholas; that each party should be free to name its own prices, but that every kind of fraud should be judged after the criminal code of Russia.
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