Others would not agree in attributing the calamities we at present suffered to that incursion.  Without wishing to excuse the sacrifices to which we had submitted, by the hope of terminating the war in a single campaign, they asserted, “that that hope had been well founded; that in pushing his line of operation as far as Moscow, Napoleon had given to that lengthened column a base sufficiently broad and solid.”

They showed “the trace of this base marked out by the Duena, the Dnieper, the Ula, and the Berezina, from Riga to Bobruisk; they said that Macdonald, Saint Cyr and De Wrede, Victor and Dombrowski were there waiting for them; there were thus, including Schwartzenberg, and even Augereau, (who protected the interval between the Elbe and the Niemen with fifty thousand men,) nearly two hundred and eighty thousand soldiers on the defensive, who, from the north to the south, supported the attack of one hundred and fifty thousand men upon the east; and from thence they argued, that this point upon Moscow, however hazardous it might appear, had been both sufficiently prepared, and was worthy of the genius of Napoleon, and that its success was possible; in fact, its failure had been entirely occasioned by errors of detail.”

They then brought to mind our useless waste of lives before Smolensk, Junot’s inaction at Valoutina, and they maintained, “that in spite of all these losses, Russia would have been completely conquered on the field of battle of the Moskwa, if Marshal Ney’s first successes had been followed up.

“Even at the last, although the expedition had failed in a military point of view, by the indecision of that day, and politically by the burning of Moscow, the army might still have returned from it safe and sound.  From the time of our entrance into that capital, had not the Russian general and the Russian winter allowed us, the one forty, and the other fifty days, to recover ourselves, and to make our retreat?”

Deploring afterwards the rash obstinacy of losing so much time at Moscow, and the fatal hesitation at Malo-Yaroslawetz, they proceeded to reckon up their losses.  Since their leaving Moscow, they had lost all their baggage, five hundred cannon, thirty-one eagles, twenty-seven generals, forty thousand prisoners, sixty thousand dead:  all that remained were forty thousand stragglers, unarmed, and eight thousand effective soldiers.

Last of all, when their column of attack had been destroyed, they asked, “by what fatality it had happened, that the remains of this column, when collected at its base, which had been vigorously supported, were left without knowing where to halt, or to take breath?  Why could they not even concentrate themselves at Minsk and at Wilna, behind the marshes of the Berezina, and there keep back the enemy, at least for some time, take advantage of the winter and recruit themselves?

“But no, all is lost by another side, by the fault of entrusting an Austrian to guard the magazines, and cover the retreat of all these 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.”