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Updated: June 22, 2025
The marshal's first care was to secure the road to Zembin, by a detachment which chased some Cossacks from it; to push the enemy towards Borizof, and to keep him as far back as possible from the passage of Studzianka.
The wooden bridges, and long causeways, which, in order to approach it, had been thrown over the adjacent marshes, abut upon a town named Borizof, situated on its left bank, on the Russian side.
But Wittgenstein left Platof to pursue the French army along the high road, and directed his own march more to the right. He debouched the same evening on the heights which border the Berezina, between Borizof and Studzianka, intercepted the road between these two points, and captured all that was found there.
Meanwhile Marshal Oudinôt, who was already marching towards Minsk, totally ignorant of what had happened, halted on the 21st between Bobr and Kroupki, when in the middle of the night General Brownikowski arrived to announce to him his own defeat, as well as that of General Dombrowski; that Borizof was taken, and that the Russians were following hard at his heels.
It was on the day immediately subsequent to that fatal catastrophe, at the distance of three marches from Borizof, and upon the high road, that an officer arrived and announced to Napoleon this fresh disaster. The Emperor, striking the ground with his stick, and darting a furious look to heaven, pronounced these words, "It is then written above that we shall now commit nothing but faults!"
"He had thus allowed the admiral to take rest, and rally his sixty thousand men, to divide them into two, to leave one half with Sacken to oppose him, and to set out on the 27th of October with the other half to take possession of Minsk, of Borizof, of the magazine, of the passage of Napoleon, and of his winter quarters.
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