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Updated: June 11, 2025
When at length the river, the town of Viazma, night, mutual fatigue, and Marshal Ney had established a barrier between them and the enemy, the danger being adjourned and the bivouacs established, the numbers were counted. Several pieces of cannon which had been broken, the baggage, and four thousand killed or wounded were found missing. Many of the soldiers, too, had dispersed.
While these were busy in collecting their plunder, Ney, at the head of a few hundred French and Bavarians, supported the retreat as far as Évé. As this was his last effort, we must not neglect to describe the close of that retreat which he had continued uninterruptedly, and in the most methodical manner, ever since he left Viazma on the 3d of November. Conclusion.
Ney then entered Kowno, accompanied only by his aids-de-camp, for all besides had given way or fallen around him. From the time of his leaving Viazma, this was the fourth rear guard which had been worn out and disappeared in his hands. But winter and famine, far more than the Russians, had destroyed them.
This sad reorganization took place by the light of the conflagration of Viazma, and during the successive discharges of the cannon of Ney and Miloradovitch, the thunders of which were prolonged amid the double gloom of the night and of the forests. Several times the remnants of these brave battalions, conceiving they were attacked, crawled to their arms.
Prince Eugene, who was not so briskly attacked, was able to effect his retreat more rapidly through Viazma; but the Russians followed him thither, and had penetrated into the town at the very time when Davoust, pursued by 20,000 men, and overwhelmed by eighty pieces of cannon, in his turn attempted to pass.
After the reduction of Smolensk, and when Napoleon reached Viazma, a town about one hundred and seventy miles from Moscow, consternation reigned in Moscow. The great battle had not yet been lost, and already people began to abandon that capital.
Should the enemy escape this danger, he would at least no longer have an asylum or resources; and the horror of this tremendous calamity, charged to his account, as had been the disasters of Smolensk, Viazma, and other towns, would not fail to rouse the whole of Russia.
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