position they found it convenient to retire, and the two great bodies of the Russian army, so long divided, now converged towards each other, and at length effected a junction near Witepsk.

The centre of the French army advanced towards that city while the corps of Oudinot (Duke of Reggio) and Macdonald (Duke of Tarentum) remained in Courland, for the purpose of attempting the siege of Riga. In this object, however, they were frustrated by the skill, activity, and valour of Prince Witgenstein, who defeated the corps of Oudinot with great loss.

On advancing to Smolensko, two actions were fought; one at Witepsk, and another at Ostrowno, in both of which the victory was claimed by either party; but geographical evidence proves that the advantages of conquest remained with Napoleon. Having proceeded thus far, he deemed it prudent to refresh his troops with a short relaxation from the fatigues of war. He accordingly halted the army for ten days, when it was again put in motion, and on the 16th of August reached Smolensko, a point of the greatest importance. It was the centre of the communication between Lithuania, Moscow, and St. Petersburgh. Here the Russian army resolved to make a stand. A part of it occupied the city, which is extremely ancient, and enclosed by walls 30 feet high and 15 broad. Napoleon, having reconnoitered the place and the positions of the Russians below it, resolved to storm the entrenched suburbs. The battle soon became murderous. The Russians possessed a fine train of artillery, admirably served. determination to conquer or die pervaded every breast. Notwithstanding, however many impediments, the French troops gained ground, although with prodigious loss, and the suburbs were finally abandoned.

The

A tremendous fire was also opened against the walls, where, at length, breaches were effected; but these were successively filled by Russian soldiers, who exhibited on this day a spirit worthy of the cause for which they contended. It being at length resolved by the Russian commander to abandon

the city, it was set on fire, and relinquished on the morning of the 18th.

Napoleon now formed a plan to outflank the Russian army in its retreat from Smolensko, at Valentina; but Junot (Duke of Abrantes), who was charged with the execution of the most important part of it, did not arrive with his corps in time. A battle here took place, which was of a very sanguinary description, and in which, as usual, each side claimed the victory; but the French still continued to advance, and the Russians to retire. It is well known that Napoleon was most strongly urged by his marshals to content himself with the ground he had gained, secure his left flank by the conquest of Riga, and reserve active operations for the next campaign. There had been a period when Napoleon would have listened to counsels so fraught with prudence; but the lust of power, the intoxication of prosperity, and the wrath of heaven, determined him to proceed.

The reader cannot fail of being struck with the vast difference between this and the former campaigns of Buonaparte. The Russians not only fought with heroic valour, and were commanded by able generals, but the whole country, as Napoleon advanced, was laid waste; the towns were burned, the magazines destroyed or removed. The subsistence of the French army became daily more difficult, as their distance from the Duchy of Warsaw and Germany increased. Besides this, if the Russians were driven back, they were neither routed, dispersed, nor deprived of their artillery. The shadow of victory only attended the presence of the French Emperor.

Deaf to all these considerations, he followed the Russian army; and on the 26th August entered the town of Viasma, which was burned by the inhabitants. Prince Kutusoff, who had now assumed the command of the entire Russian army, caused it still to retreat until it arrived at Borodino, a small village about five miles from Mojaisk, on the high road to Moscow, where he awaited the approach of the French.

Napoleon arrived in front of the Russian lines on 4th Sep

tember, and found the enemy most strongly entrenched on a plateau on the summit of a hill, defended by two very large redoubts, besides smaller ones on the right and left flanks of his position. The Russians had, moreover, constructed a redoubt which strengthened their left wing, and rendered the approach to their lines exceedingly dangerous.

On 5th September this redoubt was carried, after a most desperate opposition, and the French army was then enabled to advance, and take up a position for the great battle which, it was imagined in Napoleon's camp, would decide the fate of the war. The whole of the 6th was occupied in mutual reconnoissances, and on the 7th, in the morning, the action began.

We must here premise that the number of combatants on each side was nearly equal, about 130,000 men. The first efforts of the French were directed to carry the village of Borodino, which covered the Russian centre; in which they succeeded. Their next object was to get possession of the first redoubt; this point they also accomplished; but as the possession of the redoubt was of the greatest importance to the Russians, the French were driven out of it, and at the same moment their centre, under the Prince Viceroy of Italy, was attacked by the Russian reserve with the imperial guard. The impetuosity of the charge obliged the centre to recoil, and it would probably have been broken but for the personal bravery and exhortations of the Prince, and the timely arrival of Friand's divisions, which, with 24 pieces of cannon, kept the Russians in check. The centre then marched up to the redoubt, and here began a combat the most bloody of any that had been witnessed in modern times. Whole ranks of the French were mowed down by a fire of artillery and musketry kept up by the Russians; who were securely posted behind a ravine, which commanded, on that side, the approach to the redoubt; but at length it was stormed by the French, who paid for their trophy with rivers of blood. All the efforts of the Russians to regain possession of this redoubt were unavailing; but they still held another, separated from that part of the field of battle to

which we have just referred, by a deep ravine. This redoubt poured a most destructive fire upon the French centre, which remained inactive for some hours after the conquest it had achieved. On the right of the French line the success was very different; there Marshal Ney's corps was repulsed in repeated and sanguinary attacks upon the left wing of the Russian army, which, impregnably defended by its numerous batteries, scattered death in the ranks of the assailants. On this point, therefore, the Russians were successful, and at the close of the day maintained their ground.

Such is a brief sketch of this celebrated action, which is computed to have placed in killed, wounded, and prisoners, 80,000 men hors de combat. What were the exact proportions of this enormous loss sustained by either party, will never be accurately known; the Russians admit that they lost 30,000. The French are said to have experienced a defalcation of 50,000 men. The true character of the battle appears to have been this: that a part of the field remained until the next morning in the possession of the Russians; the remainder was gained by the French. The Russians fought to preserve Moscow, and were compelled to relinquish their design. The French anticipated the entire defeat of their enemies, and were disappointed.

The Russians retreated on the road to Moscow, followed by the French army. No action of consequence occurred; and on the 14th September Napoleon entered that city, or rather its mouldering ruins, for Count Rostopchin, the governor of the city, with a magnanimous courage unequalled in history since the sack of Saguntum, did not hesitate to burn the second metropolis of the empire, and for ages the seat of the Russian monarchy. This heroic deed, which will for ever form a splendid era in the annals of Russia, reduced the French army to the greatest difficulties. They were in extreme want of provisions, clothing, equipments of every kind, and above all, of shelter from the piercing severity of the Russian climate. Of all these they were suddenly and irretrievably deprived. Behind them were only the calcined and empty wrecks of

the towns they had conquered. Before them, the desolate wilderness of Siberia.

The army of Kutusoff, daily reinforced, hovered on their flanks, and was on the point of resuming offensive operations. To attempt to march to St. Petersburgh was to expose themselves to certain destruction; and the Russian forces, which had served in Moldavia against the Turks, were proceeding by rapid marches to cross the line of their communications, and cut off their reinforcements. Yet in a situation where speedy retreat could alone preserve the French army from utter ruin, posterity will hardly believe that Napoleon could be so infatuated as to linger for nearly six weeks on the site of what had been Moscow, amusing himself with the empty forms of a negociation with the Emperor Alexander; but his cup was full, and he who had remorselessly administered the last dregs of human suffering to so many nations, was himself most righteously doomed to quaff the bitter draught of direst humiliation.

Having called in the different corps of his army which had been encamped in a circle, of which the ruins of Moscow formed the centre, he commenced his retreat. On the 18th and 19th October the troops began their march. Aware of the difficulties which would attend his return through the provinces he had subdued, and which Russian and French troops had converted into a frightful desert, he formed the plan of wintering in the Ukraine. With this view the army made a detour to the south; but his designs were penetrated by the Russian commander, who, assembling his whole force, proceeded to the town of Malo Jaroslavitz, which had been already occupied by the advanced guard of the French. Here was fought a most desperate and long contested action. The principal object with both parties, was to obtain the possession of the heights, which were alternately occupied by either. At length, according to the French accounts, they were, at the close of the battle, wrested from the enemy. Admitting this to have been the case, still the action had for them all the consequences of a discomfiture, as they were outflanked