s retiring, incomparably greater forces than the
Russians possessed would have been required.

Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term "to cut off" has no
meaning. One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. To cut
off an army--to bar its road--is quite impossible, for there is always
plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can
be seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the
example of Krasnoe and of the Berezina. It is only possible to capture
prisoners if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible
to catch a swallow if it settles on one's hand. Men can only be taken
prisoners if they surrender according to the rules of strategy and
tactics, as the Germans did. But the French troops quite rightly did not
consider that this suited them, since death by hunger and cold awaited
them in flight or captivity alike.

Fourthly and chiefly it was impossible, because never since the world
began has a war been fought under such conditions as those that obtained
in 1812, and the Russian army in its pursuit of the French strained its
strength to the utmost and could not have done more without destroying
itself.

During the movement of the Russian army from Tarutino to Krasnoe it
lost fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is a number equal to the
population of a large provincial town. Half the men fell out of the army
without a battle.

And it is of this period of the campaign--when the army lacked boots
and sheepskin coats, was short of provisions and without vodka, and
was camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees
of frost, when there were only seven or eight hours of daylight and
the rest was night in which the influence of discipline cannot be
maintained, when men were taken into that region of death where
discipline fails, not for a few hours only as in a battle, but for
months, where they were every moment fighting death from hunger and
cold, when half the army perished in a single month--it is of this
period of the campaign that the historians tell us how Miloradovich
should have made a flank march to such and such a place, Tormasov to
another place, and Chichagov should have crossed (more than knee-deep
in snow) to somewhere else, and how so-and-so "routed" and "cut off" the
French and so on and so on.

The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been
done to attain an end worthy of the natio