rve of the River
Dwina. It was sufficiently far from the roads leading from the Niemen
to St. Petersburg and to Moscow efficiently to protect them both.
There, accordingly, he suggested that vast earthworks should be
prepared; for there, at that artificial Torres Vedras, Russia's chief
force might await the Grand Army, while the other force harassed its
flank or rear.[259]

Napoleon had not probed this absurdity to its inmost depths: but he
early found out that the Russians were in two widely separated armies;
and this sufficed to decide his movements and the early part of the
campaign. Having learnt that one army was near Vilna, and the other in
front of the marshes of the Pripet, he sought to hold them apart by a
rapid irruption into the intervening space, and thereafter to destroy
them piecemeal. Never was a visionary theory threatened by a more
terrible realism. For Napoleon at midsummer was mustering a third of a
million of men on the banks of the Niemen, while the Russians, with
little more than half those numbers as yet available for the
fighting-line, had them spread out over an immense space, so as to
facilitate those flanking operations on which Phull set such
store.[260]

On the morn of June 23rd, three immense French columns wound their way
to the pontoon bridges hastily thrown over the Niemen near Kovno; and
loud shouts of triumph greeted the great leader as the vanguard set
foot on Lithuanian soil. No Russians were seen except a few light
horsemen, who galloped up, inquired of the engineers why they were
building the bridges, and then rode hastily away. During three days
the Grand Army filed over the river and melted away into the sandy
wastes. No foe at first contested their march, but neither were they
met by the crowds of downtrodden natives whom their fancy pictured as
thronging to welcome the liberators. In truth, the peasants of
Lithuania had no very close racial affinity to the Poles, whose
offshoots were found chiefly among the nobles and the wealthier
townsfolk. Solitude, the sultry heat of a Russian mid-summer, and
drenching thunderstorms depressed the spirits of the invaders. The
miserable cart tracks were at once cut up by the passage of the host,
and 10,000 horses perished of fatigue or of disease caused by the rank
grass, in the fifty miles' march from the Niemen to Vilna.

The difficulties of the transport service began at once, and they were
to increase with every day's march. With his