foreseen the Russian
character, or have foretold their heroic sacrifice of Moscow, for
which doubtless he himself would catch the blame? So now, if his
allies stood firm, he would have another great army, and still
conquer. Not all this was bluster, for his figures were in the main
correct. Moreover, Russia's strength was steadily diminishing, a fact
of which he was dimly aware. Of Kutusoff's two hundred thousand men
only forty thousand remained when he entered Vilna after the
Napoleonic forces had left it; Wittgenstein's army had suffered
proportionately, and the troops from the Danube still more. Kutusoff
wanted peace quite as much as did Napoleon, and the ineffective
Russian pursuit was intrusted to Yermoloff, an untried officer; to
Wittgenstein; and to the incapable Tchitchagoff. The bickerings and
insubordination of the French marshals had now become notorious, but
they were fully offset by the discord and inefficiency of the Russian
generals.

Alexander, however, was not for peace. Out of the rude experiences he
had been undergoing there had been formed two fixed ideas: that
Napoleon could not, even if he would, surrender his preponderance in
Europe, and that he himself might hope to appear as the liberator of
European nationality. For a moment it appeared possible for the Czar
to establish himself as king of Poland by the aid of the Jesuits and
of Czartoryski's friends. But the Jesuit leader knew that Napoleon's
strength was far from exhausted, and fled to Spain. Czartoryski
entertained the idea that in case of Napoleon's overthrow he might
unite Poland under his own leadership and demand a truly liberal
constitution, such as could not be worked by a Russian autocrat with
three hundred thousand Russian soldiers at his back. Should the
virtual independence of Poland be wrung from Alexander, and not be
secured by the French alliance, then the only available constitutional
ruler would, he thought, be a member of his own princely family and
not one of the rival Poniatowskis. The autocrat did not clearly
understand the drift of his boyhood friend, but he saw enough to
render the notion of reconstructing Poland in any form distasteful,
and finally abandoned it. He then took the sensible resolution to
recruit his strength, not by emptying his own lean purse, but by
securing the cooeperation with his forces of the strong armies built up
by Prussia and Austria. It was therefore with a fairly definite
purpose that, on D