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Updated: June 14, 2025
They might indeed be met by Wittgenstein, but Tchitchakoff covered Borisow, and would be certain to burn the bridge over the Berezina if he saw it threatened. The emperor listened as he kept looking at his maps. At last something arrested his attention, the sight of a name of ill-omen: "Poltava! Poltava!" he repeated.
But it is pleasant to think that the sons of the men who had fallen in the awful passage of the Berezina forty years before were worthy of their fathers, and could face death with a smile and a jest as well as they.
Should the bridge fall into the hands of Admiral Tchitchakoff, the army would be blockaded behind the Berezina, or compelled to ascend to its source at the risk of being attacked by Count Wittgenstein. Marshals Victor and Oudinot, with their weak and decimated regiments, could not succeed in dislodging the enemies from their position near Smoliantzy on the Oula.
Minsk, where there were supplies for the whole army for months, had been captured, and now Borizow, where the passage of the Berezina was to be made, was captured almost without resistance. Well might Napoleon when he heard the news exclaim in despair: "Will there never be an end to this blundering?" Great as the cold had been before, it increased day by day in severity.
Almost at the same moment the second corps, under Oudinot, was attacked by part of Tchitchakoff's army, which had collected at Pahlen, on the left bank of the Berezina.
And finally the frightful, unpardonable Russian campaign, wherein his fortune came at last to utter shipwreck amid the ice of the Berezina and the snow-bound Polish steppes.
To cut off an army to bar its road is quite impossible, for there is always plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can be seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the example of Krasnoe and of the Berezina.
Kutusow's army was still far behind, and although Wittgenstein and the Admiral hung on their rear, the French army still inspired sufficient respect to deter them from attacking it in force. As the army approached the Berezina, scarce a hundred men of the Grenadiers of the Rhone still hung together, and these were so feeble that they staggered rather than marched along.
The sole importance of the crossing of the Berezina lies in the fact that it plainly and indubitably proved the fallacy of all the plans for cutting off the enemy's retreat and the soundness of the only possible line of action the one Kutuzov and the general mass of the army demanded namely, simply to follow the enemy up.
We were now approaching the most critical moment; Victor was in the rear with 15,000 men; Oudinôt in front with 5,000, and already on the Berezina; the Emperor, between them, with 7,000 men, 40,000 stragglers, and an enormous quantity of baggage and artillery, the greatest part of which belonged to the second and the ninth corps.
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