wrote to Davoust: "Send for Latour-Maubourg. If the enemy
remain at Smolensk, as I have reason to suppose, it will be a decisive
affair, and we cannot have too much numerical strength. Orcha will
become the pivot of the army. Every thing leads me to believe that there
will be a great battle at Smolensk; hospitals will, therefore, be
requisite; they will be necessary at Orcha, Dombrowna, Mohilef,
Kochanowo, Bobr, Borizof, and Minsk."

It was then particularly that he manifested extreme anxiety about the
provisioning of Orcha. It was on the 10th of August, at the very moment
when he was dictating this letter, that he gave his order of march. In
four days, all his army would be assembled on the left bank of the
Boristhenes, and in the direction of Liady. He departed from Witepsk on
the 13th, after having remained there a fortnight.

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

It was the check at Inkowo which decided Napoleon; ten thousand Russian
horse, in an affair with the advanced guard, had overthrown Sebastiani
and his cavalry. The intrepidity and reputation of the defeated general,
his report, the boldness of the attack, the hope, nay the urgent
necessity, of a decisive engagement, all led the emperor to believe,
that their numbers alone had carried the day, that the Russian army was
between the Duena and the Dnieper, and that it was marching against the
centre of his cantonments: this was actually the fact.

The grand army being dispersed, it was necessary to collect it together.
Napoleon had resolved to defile with his guard, the army of Italy, and
three of Davoust's divisions, before the front of attack of the
Russians; to abandon his Witepsk line of operation, and take that of
Orcha, and, lastly, to throw himself with 185,000 men on the left of the
Dnieper and of the enemy's army. Covered by the river, his plan was to
get beyond it, for the purpose of reaching Smolensk before it; if
successful, he should have separated the Russian army not only from
Moscow, but from the whole centre and south of the empire; it would be
confined to the north; and he would have accomplished at Smolensk
against Bagration and Barclay united, what he had in vain attempted at
Witepsk against the army of Barclay alone.

Thus the line of operation of so large an army was about to be suddenly
changed; 200,000 men, spread over a tract of more than fifty leagues,
were to be all at once brought together, without the knowledge of the
enemy, w