hese
brave armies, and not placing a military leader at Wilna or Minsk, with
a force sufficient either to supply the insufficiency of the Austrian
army to meet the combined armies of Moldavia and Volhynia, or to prevent
its betraying us."

Those who made such complaints were not unaware of the presence of the
Duke of Bassano at Wilna; but notwithstanding the talents of that
minister, and the great confidence the Emperor placed in him, they
considered that being a stranger to the art of war, and overloaded with
the cares of a great administration, and of every thing political, the
direction of military affairs should not have been left to him. Such
were the complaints of those, whose sufferings left them the leisure
necessary for observation. That a fault had been committed, it was
impossible to deny; but to say how it might have been avoided, to weigh
the value of the motives which had occasioned it, in so great a crisis,
and in the presence of so great a man, is more than one would venture to
undertake. Who is there besides that does not know, that in these
hazardous and gigantic enterprises, every thing becomes a fault, when
the object of them has failed?

Although the treachery of Schwartzenberg was by no means so evident, it
is certain, that, with the exception of the three French generals who
were with him, the whole of the grand army considered it as beyond a
doubt. They said, "that Walpole's only object at Vienna was to act as a
secret agent of England; that he and Metternich composed between them
the perfidious instructions which were sent to Schwartzenberg. Hence it
was that ever since the 20th of September, the day when the arrival of
Tchitchakof and the battle of Lutsk closed the victorious career of
Schwartzenberg, that marshal had repassed the Bug, and covered Warsaw by
uncovering Minsk; hence his perseverance in that false manoeuvre:
hence, after a feeble effort towards Bresk-litowsky on the 10th of
October, his neglect to avail himself of Tchitchakof's inaction by
getting between him and Minsk, and hence his losing his time in military
promenades, and insignificant marches towards Briansk, Bialystok, and
Volkowitz.

"He had thus allowed the admiral to take rest, and rally his sixty
thousand men, to divide them into two, to leave one half with Sacken to
oppose him, and to set out on the 27th of October with the other half to
take possession of Minsk, of Borizof, of the magazine, of the passage of
Napol