Meanwhile Napoleon beheld Dorogobouje in ashes, like Smolensk, especially the quarter of the merchants, those who had most to lose, whom their riches might have detained or brought back amongst us, and who, from their situation, formed a kind of intermediate class, a commencement of the third estate, which liberty was likely to seduce.

He was perfectly aware that he was quitting Smolensk, as he had come thither, with the hope of a battle, which the indecision and discord of the Russian generals had as yet deferred; but his resolution was taken; he would hear of nothing but what was calculated to support him in it.  He persisted in pursuing the track of the enemy; his hardihood increased with their prudence; their circumspection he called pusillanimity, their retreat flight; he despised, that he might hope.

BOOK VII.

CHAP.  I.

The emperor had proceeded with such expedition to Dorogobouje, that he was obliged to halt there, in order to wait for his army, and to leave Murat to pursue the enemy.  He set out again on the 26th of August; the army marched in three columns abreast; the Emperor, Murat, Davoust, and Ney in the centre, on the high-road to Moscow; Poniatowski on the right; and the army of Italy on the left.

The principal column, that of the centre, found nothing on a road where its advanced guard itself had to subsist entirely on the leavings of the Russians; it could not digress from its direction, for want of time, in so rapid a march.  Besides, the columns on the right and left consumed every thing on either side of it.  In order to live better, it ought to have set out later every day, halted earlier, and then extended itself more on its flanks during the night; which could be done without imprudence when the enemy was so near at hand.

At Smolensk orders had been issued, as at Witepsk, to take, at starting, provisions for several days.  The emperor was aware of the difficulty of collecting them, but he reckoned upon the diligence of the officers and the troops; they had warning,—­that was sufficient; they would contrive to provide themselves with necessaries.  They had acquired the habit of doing so; and it was really a curious sight to observe the voluntary and continual efforts of so many men to follow a single individual to such great distances.  The existence of the army was a prodigy that was daily renewed, by the active, industrious, and intelligent spirit of the French and Polish troops, by their habit of surmounting all difficulties, and by their fondness for the hazards and irregularities of this dreadful game of an adventurous life.

In the train of each regiment there were a multitude of those diminutive horses with which Poland swarms, a great number of carts of the country, which required to be incessantly replaced with fresh ones, and a drove of cattle.  The baggage-waggons were driven by soldiers, for they turned their hands to every trade.  They were missed in the ranks, it is true; but here the want of provisions, the necessity for transporting every thing with them, excused this prodigious train:  it required a second army, as it were, to carry or draw what was indispensable for the first.