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Updated: June 18, 2025
This marshal continued it from Königsberg, by Labiau and Tente. His rear was protected by Mortier, and Heudelet's division, whose troops, newly arrived, still occupied Insterburg, and kept Tchitchakof in check. On the 3d of January he effected his junction with Mortier and covered Königsberg.
But the general objected to him the presence of Tchitchakof on the right bank; the Emperor then pointed to another passage below the first, and then to a third, still nearer to the Dnieper. Recollecting, however, that he was then approaching the country of the Cossacks, he stopped short, and exclaimed, "Oh yes! Pultawa! that is like Charles XII.!"
At that moment, a Lithuanian nobleman, disguised as a peasant, arrived from Wilna with the news of Schwartzenberg's victory over Sacken. Napoleon appeared pleased in proclaiming it aloud, with the addition, that "Schwartzenberg had immediately returned upon the heels of Tchitchakof, and that he was coming to our assistance."
He then stated that he knew of a road to the right of that town, constructed on wooden bridges, and passing across the marshes of Lithuania. This was the only road, by his account, by which the army could reach Wilna by Zembin and Malodeczno, leaving Minsk on the left, its road a day's journey longer, its fifty broken bridges rendering a passage impracticable, and Tchitchakof in possession of it.
By favour of this prolonged contest, he gained the night, and withdrew his army from the field of battle, where a rapid and simultaneous effort might have destroyed it. Still, he lost some pieces of cannon, a great quantity of baggage, and four thousand men, and retired behind the Styr, where he was joined by Tchitchakof, who was hastening with the army of the Danube to his succour.
He declared, that, "in order to preserve the fertile provinces of the south, and his communication with Tormasof and Tchitchakof, he had been obliged to abandon Moscow, but emptied of the inhabitants, who were the life of it; that as the people are the soul of every empire, so wherever the Russian people were, there would be Moscow and the whole empire of Russia."
On the 18th of October, at the very moment that the cannon of Kutusoff were destroying Napoleon's illusions of glory and of peace, Wittgenstein, at one hundred leagues in the rear of his left wing, had thrown himself upon Polotsk; Tchitchakof, behind his right, and two hundred leagues farther off, had taken advantage of his superiority over Schwartzenberg; and both of them, one descending from the north, and the other ascending from the south, were endeavouring to unite their forces at Borizof.
At Wilna, they appeared to have had no suspicion of the real state of affairs; and at a time when the garrisons, the depôts, the marching battalions, and the divisions of Durutte, Loison, and Dombrowski, between the Berezina and the Vistula, might have formed at Minsk an army of thirty thousand men, three thousand men, headed by a general of no reputation, were the only forces which Tchitchakof found there to oppose him.
He had hardly spoken the words, when a Polish officer arrived with the news, that Minsk itself, his magazine, his retreat, his only hope, had just fallen into the hands of the Russians, Tchitchakof having entered it on the 16th.
All hope of passing between the Russian armies was thus lost; driven by the armies of Kutusoff and Wittgenstein upon the Berezina, there was no alternative but to cross that river in the teeth of the army of Tchitchakof, which lined its banks. Ever since the 23d, Napoleon had been preparing for it, as for a desperate action. And first he had the eagles of all the corps brought to him, and burnt.
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