river and the Borysthenes that his thoughts rested:
he was sensible that it was not with a harassed and reduced army that he
could guard the interval between those two rivers and their courses,
which the ice would speedily efface. He placed no reliance on a sea of
snow six feet deep, with which winter would speedily cover those parts,
but to which it would also give solidity: the whole then would be one
wide road for the enemy to reach him, to penetrate into the intervals
between his wooden cantonments, scattered over a frontier of two hundred
leagues, and to burn them.

Had he at first stopped there, as he declared he should on his arrival
at Witepsk; had he there taken proper measures for preserving and
recruiting his army; had Tormasof, Tchitchakof and Hoertel been driven
out of Volhynia; had he raised a hundred thousand Cossacks in those rich
provinces; his winter-quarters would then have been habitable. But now,
nothing was ready for him there; and not only was his force inadequate
to the purpose, but Tchitchakof, a hundred leagues in his rear, would
still threaten his communications with Germany and France and his
retreat. It was therefore at a hundred leagues beyond Smolensk, in a
more compact position, behind the morasses of the Berezina, it was to
Minsk, that it was necessary to repair in search of winter-quarters,
from which he was forty marches distant.

But should he arrive there in time? He had reason to think so.
Dombrowski and his Poles, placed around Bobruisk, would be sufficient to
keep Ertell in check. As for Schwartzenberg, that general had been
victorious; he was at the head of forty-two thousand Austrians, Saxons,
and Poles, whom Durutte, and his French division, from Warsaw, would
augment to more than fifty thousand men. He had pursued Tormasof as far
as the Styr.

It was true that the Russian army of Moldavia had just formed a junction
with the remnant of the army of Volhynia; that Tchitchakof, an active
and resolute general, had assumed the command of fifty-five thousand
Russians; that the Austrian had paused and even thought it prudent, on
the 23d of September, to retire behind the Bug; but he was to have
recrossed that river at Bresk-litowsky, and Napoleon knew no more.

At any rate, without a defection, which it was too late to foresee, and
which a precipitate return could alone prevent, he flattered himself
that Schwartzenberg, Regnier, Durutte, Dombrowski, and twenty thousand
men, divide