ssia, and designated, from
its importance as a shrine, "The Sacred," was then a town of about
thirteen thousand inhabitants. Around the inner city was a line of
thick but dilapidated walls, and these were surrounded outside by
densely built faubourgs. The first attempt of Ney to storm the walls
failed, and a bombardment was ordered. By evening of the seventeenth
the French army were all drawn up on the north bank between the city
and the river; the Russians were opposite on the heights. During the
night of the seventeenth the Russian army began to cross the Dnieper
by the permanent bridge, which they held; a fresh garrison was thrown
into Smolensk, and at four in the morning of the eighteenth the van
began to retreat toward Moscow. Napoleon, foiled in his attempt to
carry Smolensk by storm, had hoped that Barclay would offer battle
under the walls of the town. He, therefore, waited until afternoon for
the expected appearance of his foe, but in vain. Puzzled and uneasy,
he then determined to force the fighting by a fresh assault. The
suburbs were captured late in the evening, but the walls were
impregnable. Barclay then set fire to the quarter opposite that
attacked by the French, and in the resulting confusion safely drew out
his garrison; the next morning saw his rear well beyond Napoleon's
reach, with the bridges destroyed behind it. On the twenty-third he
halted and drew up for battle behind the Uscha.

[Illustration: Map of the Russian Campaign 1812.]

Technically Napoleon had won, since an important frontier fortress was
captured; but he had not fought his great battle, nor had he cut off
his enemy's retreat. Ney and Murat were despatched in pursuit, but it
is charged on good authority that they acted recklessly, without
concert, and gave the first exhibition of a demoralization destined
later to be disastrous. In another land and under ordinary
circumstances the fight at Smolensk would have been, if not a decisive
victory, at least an effective one. But while Russia is despotic
politically, socially she is the least centralized of all lands, and a
wound in one portion of her loose organism does not necessarily reach
a vital point nor affect the seat of life and action. This Napoleon
perfectly understood. He could either summon back the patience he had
vaunted first at Dresden, then at Vitebsk, or he could yield to his
impulse for swift action and go on to Moscow in the hope, before
entering the capital, of fight