road, would certainly not have been diminished if double the number of mouths had remained to be fed. If the artillery had not been disabled by the perishing of its horses from cold, it would have been as seriously impeded by the impossibility of maintaining them; and if the night bivouacs had not thinned the ranks of the French army, they would not have weakened the force of the enemy who was to assail them. 127. (X.) The French army lost onethird of its number by the march through Lithuania in summer before the bloodshed began, when the resources of the country were still untouched, and the army fresh and in high spirits; what had it to expect in a retreat for double the distance in autumn, over a country perfectly exhausted, with depressed and wearied troops, and a victorious enemy pressing its rear? On the other hand, the French Emperor had every ground for believing that the occupation of Moscow would terminate the war gloriously for his arms. He had uniformly found that the capture of a metropolis had led, sooner or later, to the subjugation of a country; and his former experience of the character of Alexander gave him no reason to believe that he would be able to resist the force of circumstances which had repeatedly brought Austria and Prussia to submission. It may reasonably be doubted, therefore, whether Napoleon would have judged wisely in commencing his retreat at an earlier period, and thereby losing at once the chance which he had, by a protracted stay in the capital, of vanquishing the firmness of the Russian government. By so doing, he would have certainly incurred the evils of a disastrous retreat, and of a general insurrection against him in Europe, and thrown away the probable chance of a submission which would, during his lifetime at least, have placed his power beyond the reach of attack. 128. (XI.) The conflagration of Moscow, though a sublime example of patriotism by the Russians, cannot be considered as the cause of the ruin of the French. It may have rendered the continued residence of the army around the Kremlin unadvisable; though we have Napoleon's authority for asserting, that after the fire the greater part of the army were still cantoned in Moscow, amply supplied with furs, provisions, and every species of necessary, and that the neighbourhood contained two thousand houses, and chateaus still in preservation. General Mathieu Dumas, as already mentioned, says the burning of Moscow was rather an advantage than the reverse, as it sooner forced the Emperor to a retreat. But, unquestionably, if the French cavalry and light troops had preserved their ascendancy in the field, and had been able to forage successfully for the army, they might have secured ample and comfortable winter quarters in Novgorod, Tver, or Kalouga, in one of the richest countries in the world. 129. (XII.) It follows from these considerations, that the real causes of the disasters of Napoleon were: 1st, His imprudence in advancing so far from the base of his operations, and thereby exposing himself to the hazard of having a temporary disaster converted into a lasting defeat: or, in plain language, in risking his army so far from its magazines, depots, and reinforcements. 2d, His advance to Moscow after the bloody battle of Borodino, and when his cavalry had suffered so severely as to preclude it from taking an efficient part for the remainder of the campaign. 3d, The alarming and extraordinary increase in the Russian light horse from the junction of the Cossacks of the Don, and the approximation of the seat of war to the nomad tribes of the eastern frontier of the empire, which immediately prevented the French from foraging, and threatened their vast army with destruction, from the very magnitude of its own numbers. 4th, The conducting of the retreat by separate corps, with an interval of miles between them, which enabled the Russian army, though not superior in number upon the whole to the accumulated strength of their enemies, to fall with an overwhelming force on their detached columns, and pass their long line over the sword's edge, with hardly any injury to them. ritory, proves the immediate cause of its ruin, by augmenting its encumbrances, and hastening the period when, from being surrounded by the light horse of the enemy, it must perish from want. The enterprise of Napoleon against Russia thus proved abortive from the same cause which, in every age, has defeated the attempts of refined nations to penetrate the Eastern wilds; and it is a striking proof of the lasting influence of general causes on the greatest of human undertakings, that the overthrow of the mightiest armament which the power of matured knowledge ever hurled against the forces of infant civilisation, was in reality owing to the same causes which in every age have given victory to the arms of the shepherd kings. 131. Justice also requires that due credit should be given to the Russian mode of pursuit by a parallel march: a measure which was unquestionably one of the greatest military achievements of the last age. Had Kutusoff pursued by the same road as the French, his selves. If this method of retreating | titude of the carriages with which a was unavoidable for the supply of the European army invades an Asiatic terarmy, it only demonstrates the more clearly the imprudence of advancing such a distance, when no better method of escape was practicable, and the strength of the feeling of inferiority which must have existed to compel so great a captain to hazard such a retreat. 130. Of these causes, the most important place, in a military point of view, undoubtedly must be assigned to the immense preponderance which, when the French arrived at Moscow, was obtained by the clouds of light horse who crowded to the Russian standards from the banks of the Don, and the other nomad provinces of the empire. The more the memorable campaign of 1812 is studied, the more clearly it will appear that this was the real cause of the destruction of the French army, and that it must have proved equally fatal to them, even though Moscow had not been burned, or the frosts of winter had never set in. If a European army advances in good order, forming magazines as it goes, it may doubtless be able to withstand the utmost attacks of the Asiatic cav-army, moving on a line wasted by the alry; and it was because they took triple curse of three previous marches, these precautions that the armies of would have melted away even more Alexander and the Romans in ancient, rapidly than his enemy's. Had he hazand of the British and Russians in arded a serious engagement before the modern times, have so often prevailed French were completely broken by their over the innumerable swarms of the sufferings, his own loss would probably Eastern horse. But when an army have been so severe as to have disabled rushes headlong into the middle of the him from taking advantage of them. Scythian cavalry without having the Despair rapidly restores the courage of means, from resources of its own, of an army: a disorderly crowd of stragproviding itself with subsistence and glers often resumes the strictest miliforage, it is certain to be destroyed. tary order, and is capable of the greatAlexander the Great wisely avoided est efforts, when the animation of a such a danger, and, contenting himself battle is at hand. The passage of the with a barren victory over the Scyth- Beresina, the battle of Corunna, the ians on the banks of the Oxus, turned victory of Hanau, are sufficient to deaside from their inhospitable territory. monstrate this important truth. Well Darius, with all the forces of Persia, knowing that a continued retreat would penetrated into it and perished. The of itself weaken his enemies, the Ruslegions of Mark Antony and Crassus sian general manœuvred in such a mansank under the incessant attacks of the ner as, with hardly any loss to himself, Parthian horse; the genius of Julian except what necessarily arose from cold proved inadequate to the encounter; and fatigue, to make prisoners above half the heroism of Richard Coeur-de-Lion their army; and that at a time when was shattered against the innumerable the storms of winter were making as squadrons of Saladin. The very mul- | great ravages in his own troops as in those of his antagonists. Had he not | nounce that the history of the world pursued at all, Napoleon would have does not afford an example of higher halted at Smolensko, and soon repaired moral grandeur. his disasters; had he fought a pitched battle with him on the road, his army, already grievously weakened by the cold, would have probably been rendered incapable of pursuing him to the frontier. By acting a bolder part, he might have gained more brilliant, but he could not have secured such lasting success: he would have risked the fate of the empire, which hung on the preservation of his army: he might have acquired the title of conqueror of Napoleon, but he would not have deserved that of saviour of his country. 132. But it would have been in vain that all these advantages lay within the reach of Russia, had their constancy and firmness not enabled her people to grasp them. Justice has not hitherto been done to the heroism of their conduct. We admire the Athenians, who refused to treat with Xerxes after the sack of their city, and the Romans, who sent troops to Spain after the defeat of Canne; what, then, shall we say of the generals, who, while their army was yet reeking with the slaughter of Borodino, formed the project of enveloping the invader in the capital which he had conquered? what of the citizens, who fired their palaces and their temples lest they should furnish even a temporary refuge to the invader? and what of the sovereign, who, undismayed by the conflagration of Moscow, announced to his people, in the moment of their greatest agony, his resolution never to submit, and foretold the approaching deliverance of his country and of the world? Time, the great sanctifier of events, has not yet lent its halo to these sacrifices; separate interests have arisen: jealousy of Russia has come in place of dread of Napoleon; and those who have gained most by the heroism of their allies are too much influenced by momentary considerations to acknowledge it. But when these fears and jealousies shall have passed away, and the pageant of Russian, like that of French ascendancy, shall have disappeared, the impartial voice of posterity will pro 133. But all the heroism of Alexander, and all the devotion of the Russians, great and memorable as they were, would have failed in producing the extraordinary revolution which was effected in this campaign, if they had not been aided by the moral laws of nature, which impel guilty ambition into a boundless career of aggression, and provide a condign punishment in the vehement and universal indignation which its violence occasions. Madame de Stael has said, that Providence never appeared so near human affairs as in this memorable year; the faithful throughout Europe, struck with the awful nature of the catastrophe, repeated, with feelings of awe, the words of the Psalm: "Efflavit Deus, et dissipantur." The noble lines of Johnson written on Charles XII. seem a poetic prophecy of the far greater catastrophe of Napoleon, and may, by the alteration of a few words, be rendered precisely descriptive of his fate:War sounds the trump, he rushes to the field. "No joys to him pacific sceptres yield; Behold! surrounding kings their powers combine, And some capitulate and some resign. Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain. "Think nothing gained,' he cries, 'till naught And all be mine beneath the Polar sky.' A recent philosophic historian has declared that, after full reflection on the overthrow of Napoleon in Russia, he can ascribe it to nothing but the direct and immediate interposition of Heaven. Yet, while no reasonable mind will probably doubt the agency of Supreme power in this awful event, the system was of necessity adopted of it is perhaps more consonant to our ideas of the Divine administration, and more descriptive of the established order of the universe, to behold in it the consequence of the fixed moral laws of our being, rather than any special outpouring of celestial wrath. 134. It was the necessity of conquest to existence, which Napoleon throughout his whole career so strongly felt, and so often expressed, that was the real cause which precipitated him upon the snows of Russia; and we are not to regard the calamitous issue of the expedition as the punishment merely of his individual ambition, but as the inevitable result and just retribution of the innumerable crimes of the Revolution. The steps which brought about this consummation now stand revealed in imperishable light. The unbounded passions let loose during the first fervour of that convulsion, impelled the nation, when the French throne was overturn: ed, into the career of foreign conquest; the armed multitude would not submit to the cost which their armies required; the maxim that war must maintain war, flowed from the impatience of taxation in the Parisian, as it had done in the Roman people; and precipitating armies, without magazines or any other resources except warlike equipments, to seek for subsistence and victory in the heart of the enemy's territory. Thence the forced requisitions, the scourging contributions, the wasting of nations, the famishing of armies, the exasperation of mankind. Nothing was wanting, in the end, but the constancy to resist the vehemence of the onset; for the spirit of universal hostility was roused: and this was found in the tenacity of Wellington at Torres Vedras, and the heroism of Alexander in Russia. The faithful trembled and sank in silence, and almost doubted, in the long-continued triumph of wickedness, the reality of the Divine administration of the universe; but the laws of Providence were incessantly acting, and preparing in silence the renovation of the world. "Sæpe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem, Curarent Superi terras, an nullus inesset Rector, et incerto fluerent mortalia casu. CHAPTER LXXIV. RESURRECTION OF GERMANY. 1. FUTURE generations of men, living under the shadow of their own fig-trees, engrossed in the arts of peace, and far removed from the excitements and miseries of war, will hardly be able to credit the contemporary accounts of the sensation produced in Europe by the result of the Moscow campaign. The calamity was too great to be concealed; the blow too dreadful not to resound throughout the world. Napoleon himself, enamoured of powerful impressions, and strongly excited by the awful nature of the disaster he had sustained, revealed its magnitude in his twentyninth bulletin in its full proportions. His subsequent arrival in Paris, demonstrated to the world that he regarded the army as virtually destroyed, nothing was wanting but a leader and a royal standard, to occasion a general and irresistible outbreak against French oppression? Ever since the abortive attempt at liberation in 1809, the severity of the imperial rule had been materially increased in the states of Northern Germany. Mutual distrust prevailed. The French authorities, aware of the profound hatred with which they were universally regarded, sought, by additional acts of cruelty, to strike terror into the vanquished. The Germans, seeing no end to their miseries, sought refuge in deeper and more widespread conspiracy, and submitted to present suffering in the anticipation of approaching vengeance. and that all his hopes were centred | had been long enrolled in the secret in the new host which he was about bands of the Tugendbund, and where to collect in the French empire. The broken bands and woeful crowds which, bereft of everything, in tattered garb, and with haggard visages, traversed the Prussian territory, rather like ghosts or suppliants than armed enemies, gave confirmation strong of the extent of the calamity. A universal thrill was felt over all Europe at this awful catastrophe, which, commencing with the flames of Moscow, and terminating with the waves of the Beresina, seemed to have been sent to break, by a special messenger of the Almighty, the arm of the oppressor, and strike off the fetters of a captive world. In England, especially, the sense of deliverance gave rise to unbounded transports. The anxieties, the burdens, the calamities of twenty years' warfare were forgotten; and even the least sanguine ceased to despair in a cause in which Providence itself appeared to have at length declared against the aggressor; and the magnitude of the disaster he had sustained was such, that it seemed to be beyond the power of human exertion to repair. 3. Atrocious acts of cruelty had added a yet deeper hue to the general feelings of execration with which the government of Napoleon was regarded, from the never-ending weight of the military contributions. Twenty citizens of Vienna had been shot to repress the general effervescence, before the French armies evacuated that capital in 1809; and eleven officers of Schill's corps, all belonging to the first families at Berlin, had been executed for their adherence to his cause. They died, 2. But if these were the feelings with which those inhabitants of Europe who had known the war only by its excitements and its burdens regard-after embracing each other, singing ed this portentous event, what must have been the feelings with which it was regarded in Prussia and the north of Germany? In Prussia, yet prostrated by the thunderbolt of Jena, and groaning under six years of subsequent bondage which mourned its dead queen, its lost honour, its halved territory; which, as the last degradation in the cup of the vanquished, had been compelled to wear the colours and serve in the ranks of the oppressor, and strive to rivet on others the same chain by which itself was enthralled; and which had learned the terrible meaning conveyed in the words of the ancient annalist-" subjectos tanquam suos, viles tanquam alienos;"*-in Germany, in which every noble heart and every intrepid arm * "Subjected like his own: held worthless as strangers." patriotic hymns. But their fate, deplorable as it was, soon became an object of envy to their companions in that heroic enterprise whose lives had been spared. All the volunteers in the Queen's regiment, the noblest youths in Prussia, were conducted, with a chain about their necks, to the great depot of galley slaves at Cherbourg, and there employed in hard labour in the convict dress, with a four-and-twenty pound bullet fastened to the ankles of each, amidst the common malefactors, without being permitted any communication with their parents, or their even knowing whether they were dead or alive. The eleven noble Prussians, thus unworthily sacrificed to the jealous apprehensions of Napoleon, were in the first instance brought to Verdun as prisoners of war, but from thence they were speedily |