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Updated: July 4, 2025
After a pause for a couple of hours the French again made a serious and desperate assault, but the Russians sternly held their ground, and at seven o'clock made a sortie from behind the citadel, and drove the French out of the Krasnoi suburb. At nine the cannonade ceased.
Napoleon was most anxious to secure the passage of the Dnieper at Liady, and immediately gave Eugene the command of the van, with orders to march on this point; but he was warned by the losses which his son-in-law had undergone, of the absolute necessity of waiting at Krasnoi until Davoust and Ney should be able to come up with him.
But all this appears to have been set down, from the beginning, exactly for what it was worth. He who had chosen to outlive Krasnoi, and Leipzig, and Montmartre, and Waterloo, was not likely to die by his own hand in the Bellerophon.
On the 14th we resumed the route which we had traversed a few months before under far different auspices. The thermometer registered twenty degrees, and we were still very far from France. After a slow and painful march we arrived at Krasnoi. The Emperor was obliged to go in person, with his guard, to meet the enemy, and release the Prince of Eckmuhl.
He accordingly raises a storm which is most powerfully described. Napoleon bewails the inglorious fate for which he seems to be reserved. "Oh! thrice happy," says he, "those who were frozen to death at Krasnoi, or slaughtered at Leipsic. Oh, Kutusoff, bravest of the Russians, wherefore was I not permitted to fall by thy victorious sword?"
Although the retreat from Moscow was a bloody catastrophe for Napoleon, it was also glorious for him and the troops who were at Krasnoi and the Beresina, because the skeleton of the army was saved, when not a single man should have returned. In this ever-memorable event both parties covered themselves with glory.
The attack of Ney's corps was directed against the Krasnoi suburb, which faced them, and against an advanced work known as the citadel. For two hours a terrible struggle went on.
On the 14th we resumed the route which we had traversed a few months before under far different auspices. The thermometer registered twenty degrees, and we were still very far from France. After a slow and painful march we arrived at Krasnoi. The Emperor was obliged to go in person, with his guard, to meet the enemy, and release the Prince of Eckmuhl.
He himself, with his column, reached Krasnoi unmolested, although the whole of the Russian army, moving on a parallel road, were in full observation of his march. Eugene, who followed him, was, however, intercepted on his way by Milarodowitch, and after sustaining the contest gallantly against very disproportionate numbers, and a terrible cannonade, was at length saved only by the fall of night.
For instance, the march of Napoleon by the Saint-Bernard to fall upon the communications of Mélas, those made in 1805 by Donauwerth to cut off Mack, and in 1806 by Gera to turn the Prussians, the march of Suwaroff from Turin to the Trebbia to meet Macdonald, that of the Russian army on Taroutin, then upon Krasnoi, were decisive operations, not because of their relation to Logistics, but on account of their strategic relations.
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