he nation attributed its sorry plight to the bad
advice of the Czar's German counselors, and such was the
demoralization at the capital that Alexander was compelled to hasten
thither in order to avert complete disaster. In spite of his personal
unpopularity, he met with considerable success. The nobility and
burghers of both St. Petersburg and Moscow caught the war fever,
opened their coffers, equipped a numerous militia, and by the end of
July all Russia was hopeful and eager for battle.

This, too, was the earnest desire of Napoleon. The advance from the
Vistula to the Niemen and from the Niemen to the Dwina had been
successfully carried forward--but at what a cost! "Since we have
crossed the Niemen," wrote the artist Adam, who was at the viceroy's
headquarters, "the Emperor and his entire army are occupied by a
single thought, a single hope, a single wish--the thought of a great
battle." Men talked of a great battle as of a great festival. If the
Russian army in its own territory shriveled as it did before the
summer heat by sickness and desertion, it may be imagined how that of
the French dwindled. Their terrible sufferings could be ended only by
a battle. Heat, dust, and drought wrought havoc in their columns; the
pitiless northern sun left men and animals with little resisting
power; the flying inhabitants devastated their fields, the horses and
oxen gorged themselves on the half-rotten thatch of the abandoned
huts, and died by the wayside; the gasping soldiery had no food but
flesh. Dysentery raged, and soldiers died like flies. For a time
Saint-Cyr's Bavarian corps lost from eight to nine hundred men a day,
and it was by no means a solitary exception. Such facts account for
the dilatoriness of Napoleon's movements in part; for the rest, his
imperial plans demanded that he should organize all the territories in
his rear, and he gave himself the utmost pains to do so. Besides, he
had never before had a task so heroic in all its dimensions, and every
detail of military and political procedure required time and care in
fullest measure, the more so when preparing for a decisive, uncommon
battle.

Vitebsk and Smolensk occupy analogous positions on the rivers Dwina
and Dnieper, the former of which is to the westward and flows north;
the latter, farther inland, flows in the opposite direction into the
very heart of Russia. Barclay had planned to await Bagration at
Vitebsk, and Napoleon, arriving on July twenty-seventh