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Updated: June 27, 2025
He was at liberty to avoid this fatal engagement; to gain Orcha and Borizof by rapid marches along with Eugene and his guard; there he could rally his forces with thirty thousand French under Victor and Oudinôt, with Dombrowski, with Regnier, with Schwartzenberg, and with all his depôts, and be might again, the following year, make his appearance as formidable as ever.
It was then particularly that he manifested extreme anxiety about the provisioning of Orcha. It was on the 10th of August, at the very moment when he was dictating this letter, that he gave his order of march. In four days, all his army would be assembled on the left bank of the Boristhenes, and in the direction of Liady.
It runs from east to west as far as Orcha, where it appears as if it would penetrate into Poland; but there the high lands of Lithuania oppose its farther progress, and compel it to turn abruptly towards the south, and to become the frontier of the two countries. Kutusoff and his eighty thousand Russians halted before this feeble obstacle.
And this brave and unfortunate troop, dragging with them some of their wounded, under a shower of balls and grape-shot, retired as deliberately from this field of carnage as they would have done from a field of manoeuvre. Napoleon reaches Dombrowna and Orcha; he holds a council. As soon as Mortier had succeeded in placing Krasnoë between him and Beningsen, he was in safety.
If the enemy remain at Smolensk, as I have reason to suppose, it will be a decisive affair, and we cannot have too much numerical strength. Orcha will become the pivot of the army. Every thing leads me to believe that there will be a great battle at Smolensk; hospitals will, therefore, be requisite; they will be necessary at Orcha, Dombrowna, Mohilef, Kochanowo, Bobr, Borizof, and Minsk."
The old town, occupying the plateau and slopes of the left bank, is surrounded by a wall twenty-five feet high, eighteen thick, three thousand fathoms in length, and defended by twenty-nine massive towers, a miserable earthen citadel of five bastions, which commands the Orcha road, and a wide ditch, which serves as a covered way.
Platoff and the Cossacks were hard on his heels; but fighting and marching throughout the weary, bitter day, at night the undaunted marshal found himself in touch with Eugène, who had turned out on the highway from Vitebsk to Orcha to meet him.
He was anxious, like Davoust at the beginning of the retreat, to hide the traces of it from the Cossacks of Kutusoff, who were at his heels. This fruitless attempt, the attacks of Platof by the high road of Orcha, and those of Tchitchakof by the burnt bridge of Borizof, detained him in that place until the close of the day.
The army was thus quartered on the banks of these two rivers, and in the interval between them; Poniatowski and his Poles at Mohilef; Davoust and the first corps at Orcha, Dubrowna, and Luibowiczi; Murat, Ney, the army of Italy and the guard, from Orcha and Dubrowna to Witepsk and Suraij.
They then all proceeded together in company, towards Orcha, all impatient, Eugene's soldiers to hear, and Ney's to tell their story.
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