proaching
Koenigsberg and Warsaw; and on reinforcements to the amount of 80,000,
all of which would enter Russia before the middle of November.

He should thus have 280,000 men, including the Lithuanian and Polish
levies, to support him, while, with 155,000 more, he made an incursion
of 93 leagues; for such was the distance between Smolensk and Moscow.

But these 280,000 men were commanded by six different leaders, all
independent of each other, and the most elevated of them, he who
occupied the centre, and who seemed to be appointed to act as an
intermediate link, to give some unity to the operations of the other
five, was a minister of peace, and not of war.

Besides, the same causes which had already diminished, by one-third, the
French forces which first entered Russia, could not fail to disperse or
to destroy a still greater proportion of all these reinforcements. Most
of them were coming by detachments, formed provisionally into marching
battalions under officers new to them, whom they were to leave the first
day, without the incentive of discipline, _esprit de corps_, or glory,
and traversing an exhausted country, which the season and the climate
would be rendering daily more bare and more rude.

Meanwhile Napoleon beheld Dorogobouje in ashes, like Smolensk,
especially the quarter of the merchants, those who had most to lose,
whom their riches might have detained or brought back amongst us, and
who, from their situation, formed a kind of intermediate class, a
commencement of the third estate, which liberty was likely to seduce.

He was perfectly aware that he was quitting Smolensk, as he had come
thither, with the hope of a battle, which the indecision and discord of
the Russian generals had as yet deferred; but his resolution was taken;
he would hear of nothing but what was calculated to support him in it.
He persisted in pursuing the track of the enemy; his hardihood increased
with their prudence; their circumspection he called pusillanimity, their
retreat flight; he despised, that he might hope.

BOOK VII.

CHAP. I.

The emperor had proceeded with such expedition to Dorogobouje, that he
was obliged to halt there, in order to wait for his army, and to leave
Murat to pursue the enemy. He set out again on the 26th of August; the
army marched in three columns abreast; the Emperor, Murat, Davoust, and
Ney in the centre, on the high-road to Moscow; Poniatowski on the right;
and the army of Ita