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Updated: May 31, 2025
Appointed to 23rd Chasseurs. The intrigues of Count Czernicheff. Chap. 4. War becomes inevitable. Warnings given to Napoleon. The Imperial court at Dresden. Faulty composition of army. Chap. 5. Review by the Emperor. The army at the Nieman. Bernadotte's attitude. The Poles. Chap. 6. Crossing of Nieman. Entry into Wilna. I meet the enemy. The 23rd at Wilkomir. Problems in Lithuania. The advance.
My proposition was accepted by the monks, who benefitted greatly by being able to sell alcohol in the camps, while I had the advantage of being able to distribute a daily ration to my men who, since crossing the Nieman, had drunk nothing but water.
One of the greatest faults of the French at war, is to go, without reason, from the most meticulous caution to limitless confidence. Now, since the Russians had allowed us to cross the Nieman, invade Lithuania and occupy Wilna without opposition, it had become the done thing, amongst certain officers to say that the enemy would always retreat and would never stand and fight.
In any case he would not have been able to stand the harsh climate. The army was soon to reach the frontier of the Russian empire, and see once more the river Nieman, where we had stopped in 1807. The Emperor positioned his troops on the left bank of this river as follows: on the extreme right was the Austrian Corps of Prince Schwartzenberg, on the border of Galicia near Drogitchin.
Napoleon, however, full of confidence in his army and in his own ability, decided to cross the Nieman, and so on the 23rd of June, accompanied by General Haxo and dressed in the uniform of a Polish soldier of his guard, he rode along its bank, and that same evening at ten o'clock, set in motion the crossing of the river by the pontoon bridges, the most important of which had been laid across the river opposite the little Russian town of Kovno, which our troops occupied without encountering any resistance.
Three days after the battle the French army reached the town of Tilsit and the river Nieman, which at this point is only a few leagues from the frontiers of the Russian empire. The rear of a victorious army presents a most dismal spectacle.
The Russians too, every bit as superstitious as some of the French, had an unpropitious omen, for during the night of 23rd-24th of June the Emperor Alexander escaped with his life when, at a ball in Wilna, the floor of a room collapsed under the chair on which he was sitting, at the very hour when the first French boat, carrying a detachment of Napoleon's troops, reached the right bank of the Nieman and Russian soil.
During the first days of our invasion of Russia, the enemy had made the very serious mistake of allowing Napoleon to split their forces, so that the greater part of their army, led by the Emperor Alexander and Marshal Barclay, had been driven back to the Duna, while the remainder, commanded by Bagration, was on the upper Nieman around Mir, eighty leagues from the main body.
On the 14th, Platov's Cossacks, followed by two battalions of Russian infantry, mounted on sledges together with several guns, appeared at Kovno which they attacked at a number of points; but Marshal Ney, helped by General Gérard, held them off until nightfall, when he took us across the frozen Nieman, and was the last to leave Russian territory.
The first two managed to fight their way through to join the Emperor, who was very distressed at the absence of Ney, of whom he had had no news for several days. On the 19th of November Napoleon reached Orscha. It was now a month since he had left Moscow and there was still a hundred and twenty leagues to cover before reaching the Nieman. The cold was intense.
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