He made a boast of “advancing only by short marches; of allowing his soldiers to rest every third day; he would blush, and halt immediately, if they wanted bread or spirits for a single moment.”  Then, with great self-gratulation, he pretended that “all the way from Wiazma, he had been escorting the French army as his prisoners; chastising them whenever they wished to halt, or strike out of the high road; that it was useless to run any risks with captives; that the Cossacks, a vanguard, and an army of artillery, were quite sufficient to finish them, and make them pass successively under the yoke; and that in this plan, he was admirably seconded by Napoleon himself.  Why should he seek to purchase of Fortune what she was so generously giving him?  Was not the term of Napoleon’s destiny already irrevocably marked? it was in the marshes of the Berezina that this meteor would be extinguished, this colossus overthrown, in the midst of Wittgenstein, Tchitchakof, and himself, and in the presence of the assembled Russian armies.  As for himself, he would have the glory of delivering him up to them, enfeebled, disarmed, and dying; and to him that glory was sufficient.”

To this discourse the English officer, still more active and eager, replied only by entreating the field-marshal “to leave his head-quarters only for a few moments, and advance upon the heights; there he would see that the last moment of Napoleon was already come.  Would he allow him even to get beyond the frontiers of Russia proper, which loudly called for the sacrifice of this great victim?  Nothing remained but to strike; let him only give the order, one charge would be sufficient, and in two hours the face of Europe would be entirely changed!”

Then, gradually getting warmer at the coolness with which Kutusoff listened to him, Wilson, for the third time, threatened him with the general indignation.  “Already, in his army, at the sight of the straggling, mutilated, and dying column, which was about to escape from him, he might hear the Cossacks exclaiming, what a shame it was to allow these skeletons to escape in this manner out of their tomb!” But Kutusoff, whom old age, that misfortune without hope, rendered indifferent, became angry at the attempts made to rouse him, and by a short and violent answer, shut the indignant Englishman’s mouth.

It is asserted that the report of a spy had represented to him Krasnoe as filled with an enormous mass of the imperial guard, and that the old marshal was afraid of compromising his reputation by attacking it.  But the sight of our distress emboldened Beningsen; this chief of the staff prevailed upon Strogonof, Gallitzin, and Miloradowitch, with a force of more than fifty thousand Russians, and one hundred pieces of cannon, to venture to attack at daylight, in spite of Kutusoff, fourteen thousand famished, enfeebled, and half-frozen French and Italians.