nishment, was turning its
back on them. It marched with downcast eyes, as if ashamed and humbled.
In the midst of it, its commander, gloomy and silent, seemed to be
anxiously measuring his line of communication with the fortresses on the
Vistula.

For the space of more than two hundred and fifty leagues it offered but
two points where he could halt and rest, the first Smolensk, the second
Minsk. He had made those towns his two great depots, where immense
magazines were established.

Napoleon, however, reckoned upon the Duke of Belluno and his thirty-six
thousand fresh troops. That corps had been at Smolensk ever since the
beginning of September. He relied also upon detachments being sent from
his depots, on the sick and wounded who had recovered, and on the
stragglers, who would be rallied and formed at Wilna into marching
battalions. All these would successively come into line, and fill up the
chasms made in his ranks by the sword, famine, and disease. He should
therefore have time to regain that position on the Dwina and the
Borysthenes, where he wished it to be believed that his presence, added
to that of Victor, Saint-Cyr, and Macdonald, would overawe
Wittgenstein,[163] check Kutusoff, and threaten the Czar Alexander even
in his second capital.

He accordingly announced that he was going to take post on the Dwina.
But it was not in truth, upon that river and the Borysthenes that his
thoughts rested: he was sensible that it was not with a harassed and
reduced army that he could guard the interval between those two rivers
and their courses, which the ice would speedily seal.

It was therefore a hundred leagues beyond Smolensk, in a more compact
position, behind the morasses of the Berezina--to Minsk, that it was
necessary to repair in search of winter quarters, from which he was then
forty marches distant.

Sec. 12. Napoleon's attempt to destroy the Kremlin: view of the
battle-field of Borodino.

Napoleon had arrived quite pensive at Vereia,[164] when Mortier
presented himself before him. But I here discover, that, hurried along
in the relation just as we then were in reality, by the rapid succession
of violent scenes and memorable events, my attention has been diverted
from occurrences worthy of notice. On the 23d of October, at half past
one in the morning, the air was shaken by a tremendous explosion, which
for a moment startled both armies, though amid such mighty anticipations
scarcely anything then muc