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Updated: May 29, 2025
In this letter Prince Andrew pointed out to his father the danger of staying at Bald Hills, so near the theater of war and on the army's direct line of march, and advised him to move to Moscow. At dinner that day, on Dessalles' mentioning that the French were said to have already entered Vitebsk, the old prince remembered his son's letter.
He therefore left Gloubokoe on the 23rd July, advancing upon Vitebsk; and two brilliant engagements of the advance-guard, by Murat and Ney, on the 25th and 26th, redoubled the ardor of our troops. On reaching Vitebsk after another engagement, the Russian army was seen, drawn up in order of battle, beyond a small tributary of the Dwina. Napoleon urged forward the march of all his forces.
In the year 1823, on the first day of the Christian Passover, a boy of three years, Theodore Yemelyanov, the son of a Russian soldier, disappeared in the city of Velizh, in the government of Vitebsk. Ten days later the child's body was found in a swamp beyond the town, stabbed all over and covered with wounds.
Before passing judgment upon him in this matter, however, we ought to know the real motives which induced him to pass Smolensk, instead of wintering there as he had intended, and whether it would have been possible for him to remain between that city and Vitebsk without having previously defeated the Russian army.
They were all tired of a war which imposed upon them unheard-of efforts without any glory coming to console them with its accustomed intoxication. "The war is not a national one," said Count Daru recently at Vitebsk; "the importation of a few English goods into Russia, or even the rising of the Polish nation, is not a sufficient reason for so remote an enterprise.
Perhaps I had spent my time in Vitebsk to better advantage than at the milliner's, from any point of view. When I returned to my native town I saw things. I saw the narrowness, the stifling narrowness, of life in Polotzk. My books, my walks, my visits, as teacher, to many homes, had been so many doors opening on a wider world; so many horizons, one beyond the other.
Even "fallen family state" could be interpreted in terms of money absent money and that, as once established, was a trifling matter. Hadn't I earned money myself? Heaps of it! Only look at this, and this, and this that I brought from Vitebsk, bought with my own money! No, I did not remain old. For many years more I was a very childish child.
Following Marshal Davout's advice, after mature consideration the emperor resolved at Vitebsk to advance with his main body from the banks of the Dwina upon those of the Dnieper, cross the latter at Rassasna, and ascend quickly to Smolensk.
Mazeppa insisted on certain conditions, and these conditions Charles thought too heavy. The hetman agreed that Poland should take the Ukraine and White Russia, and that the Swedes should have the fortresses of Mglin, Starodoub, and Novgorod-Sievierski, but he himself insisted on being apportioned Polotsk, Vitebsk, and the whole of Courland, to be held in fief. Thus the negotiations were delayed.
Bayonets and sabres, cuirasses and helmets flash in the sunlight as the invincible army camps with band and music and song above the Niemen. Half a million of soldiers are on their way to the old capital of Russia, Moscow. The Russian roads from Vilna to Vitebsk are full of endless lines of troops, squadrons of cavalry in close formation, and enormous baggage trains.
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