had announced in his bulletins, he thought fit to retire, and place his
troops in winter quarters. He himself took up his residence at Warsaw,
and the army occupied cantonments in various towns to the eastward.

But General Bennigsen, having proved at Pultusk what Russian troops
could do when under a determined commander, no sooner found himself at
the head of an army of nearly 100,000 men, than he resolved to disturb
the French in their quarters, and at all events give them such
occupation as might enable the King of Prussia to revictual Konigsberg,
where the few troops, gathered round that unfortunate sovereign, were
already beginning to suffer many privations. With this view Bennigsen
advanced as far as Mohrungen, where the French sustained considerable
damage in a skirmish, and from whence his Cossacks spread themselves
abroad over the country--creating such confusion, that the leaguer of
Konigsberg being for the moment relaxed, the Prussian garrison received
welcome supplies of all kinds, and Napoleon himself perceived the
necessity of breaking up his cantonments, and once more concentrating
the army for active war.

His design was to occupy Willensberg, to the rear of the great Russian
camp at Mohrungen; thus cutting off the new enemy's communications with
his own means of resource, in the same manner which had proved so fatal
to the Austrians at Ulm, and the Prussians at Jena. But Bennigsen,
having learned the plan from an intercepted despatch, immediately
countermarched his army with masterly skill, and thus involved Napoleon
in a long series of manoeuvres, not to be executed in such a country at
that dismal season without the extremity of hardship. The Russians
themselves, inured as they were to northern climates, and incapable of
even dreaming that a soldier could seek safety in flight, were reduced
to the border of frenzy by the privations of these long marches. Their
commissariat was wretched: the soldiers had often no food, except such
frozen roots as they could dig out of the ground; and, tortured with
toil and famine, they at length demanded battle so vehemently, that,
against his own judgment, General Bennigsen consented to grant the
prayer. He selected the town of Preuss-Eylau, and a strong position
behind it, as his field of battle; and--after two skirmishes, one at
Landsberg, the other nearer the chosen ground, in the former of which
the French, in the latter the Russians, had the advantage,--the wh