se nations whose
wounds, for which they were indebted to us, were not yet healed? What an
accumulation of enmity and revenge would he not, by so doing, interpose
between himself and France!

"And upon whom did he call, to be his _points d'appui_?--on Prussia,
whom for five years we had been devouring, and whose alliance was hollow
and compulsive? He was about, therefore, to trace the longest line of
military operations ever drawn, through countries whose fear was
taciturn, supple, and perfidious, and which, like the ashes of
volcanoes, hid terrific flames, the eruption of which might be provoked
by the smallest collision[10].

[Footnote 10: The Duke of Vicenza, the Count de Segur.]

"To sum up all[11], what would be the result of so many conquests? To
substitute lieutenants for kings, who, more ambitious than those of
Alexander, would, perhaps, imitate their example, without, like them,
waiting for the death of their sovereign,--a death, moreover, which he
would inevitably meet among so many fields of battle; and that, before
the consolidation of his labours, each war reviving in the interior of
France the hopes of all kinds of parties, and reviving discussions which
had been regarded as at an end.

[Footnote 11: The Count de Segur.]

"Did he wish to know the opinion of the army? That opinion pronounced
that his best soldiers were then in Spain; that the regiments, being too
often recruited, wanted unity; that they were not reciprocally
acquainted; that each was uncertain whether, in case of danger, it could
depend upon the other; that the front rank vainly concealed the weakness
of the two others; that already, from youth and weakness, many of them
sank in their first march beneath the single burden of their knapsacks
and their arms.

"And, nevertheless, in this expedition, it was not so much the war
which was disliked, as the country where it was to be carried on[12].
The Lithuanians, it was said, desired our presence; but on what a soil?
in what a climate? in the midst of what peculiar manners? The campaign
of 1806 had made those circumstances too well known! Where could they
ever halt, in the midst of these level plains, divested of every species
of position fortified by nature or by art?

[Footnote 12: The Duke of Frioul, the Count de Segur, the Duke of
Vicenza.]

"Was it not notorious, that all the elements protected these countries
from the first of October to the first of June? that, at any other time