defending armies.  There must be two armies of defence, and at least one great intrenched camp.  One army must oppose the invader on a line near, or leading up to, the camp; while the other army must manoeuvre on his rear or flanks.  And the camp must be so placed as to stretch its protecting influence over one, or more, important roads.  It need not be on any one of them:  in fact, it was better that it should be some distance away; for it thus fulfilled better the all-important function of a “flanking position.”

Such a position Phull had discovered at Drissa in a curve of the River Dwina.  It was sufficiently far from the roads leading from the Niemen to St. Petersburg and to Moscow efficiently to protect them both.  There, accordingly, he suggested that vast earthworks should be prepared; for there, at that artificial Torres Vedras, Russia’s chief force might await the Grand Army, while the other force harassed its flank or rear.[259]

Napoleon had not probed this absurdity to its inmost depths:  but he early found out that the Russians were in two widely separated armies; and this sufficed to decide his movements and the early part of the campaign.  Having learnt that one army was near Vilna, and the other in front of the marshes of the Pripet, he sought to hold them apart by a rapid irruption into the intervening space, and thereafter to destroy them piecemeal.  Never was a visionary theory threatened by a more terrible realism.  For Napoleon at midsummer was mustering a third of a million of men on the banks of the Niemen, while the Russians, with little more than half those numbers as yet available for the fighting-line, had them spread out over an immense space, so as to facilitate those flanking operations on which Phull set such store.[260]

On the morn of June 23rd, three immense French columns wound their way to the pontoon bridges hastily thrown over the Niemen near Kovno; and loud shouts of triumph greeted the great leader as the vanguard set foot on Lithuanian soil.  No Russians were seen except a few light horsemen, who galloped up, inquired of the engineers why they were building the bridges, and then rode hastily away.  During three days the Grand Army filed over the river and melted away into the sandy wastes.  No foe at first contested their march, but neither were they met by the crowds of downtrodden natives whom their fancy pictured as thronging to welcome the liberators.  In truth, the peasants of Lithuania had no very close racial affinity to the Poles, whose offshoots were found chiefly among the nobles and the wealthier townsfolk.  Solitude, the sultry heat of a Russian mid-summer, and drenching thunderstorms depressed the spirits of the invaders.  The miserable cart tracks were at once cut up by the passage of the host, and 10,000 horses perished of fatigue or of disease caused by the rank grass, in the fifty miles’ march from the Niemen to Vilna.