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HISTORY
OF THE
EXPEDITION TO RUSSIA,
UNDERTAKEN BY THE
EMPEROR NAPOLEON,
IN THE YEAR 1812.
BY GENERAL, COUNT PHILIP DE SEGUR.
Quamquam animus meminisse horret, luctuque refugit,
Incipiam--.
VIRGIL.
_SECOND EDITION, CAREFULLY REVISED AND CORRECTED._
IN TWO VOLUMES,
WITH A MAP AND SEVEN ENGRAVINGS.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
TREUTTEL AND WURTZ, TREUTTEL, JUN. AND RICHTER,
30, SOHO-SQUARE.
1825.
[Illustration: Portrait of Napoleon]
TO THE
VETERANS OF THE GRAND ARMY.
COMRADES,
I have undertaken the task of tracing the History of the Grand Army and
its Leader during the year 1812. I address it to such of you as the ices
of the North have disarmed, and who can no longer serve their country,
but by the recollections of their misfortunes and their glory. Stopped
short in your noble career, your existence is much more in the past than
in the present; but when the recollections are so great, it is allowable
to live solely on them. I am not afraid, therefore, of troubling that
repose which you have so dearly purchased, by placing before you the
most fatal of your deeds of arms. Who is there of us but knows, that
from the depth of his obscurity the looks of the fallen man are
involuntarily directed towards the splendor of his past existence--even
when its light illuminates the shoal on which the bark of his fortune
struck, and when it displays the fragments of the greatest of
shipwrecks?
* * * * *
For myself, I will own, that an irresistible feeling carries me back
incessantly to that disastrous epoch of our public and private
calamities. My memory feels a sort of melancholy pleasure in
contemplating and renewing the painful traces which so many horrors have
left in it. Is the soul, also, proud of her deep and numerous wounds?
Does she delight in displaying them? Are they a property of which she
has reason to be proud? Is it rather, that after the desire of knowing
them, her first wish is to impart her sensations? To feel, and to excite
feeling, are not these the most powerful springs of our soul?
* * * * *
But in short, whatever may be the cause of the sentiment which actuates
me, I have yielded to the desire of retracing the various sensations
which I experienced during that fatal war. I have employed my leisure
hours in separating, arranging, and combining with method my scattered
and confused recollections. Comrades! I also invoke yours! Suffer not
such great remembrances, which have been so dearly purchased, to be
lost; for us they are the only property which the past leaves to the
future. Single, against so many enemies, ye fell with greater glory than
they rose. Learn, then, that there was no shame in being vanquished!
Raise once more those noble fronts, which have been furrowed with all
the thunders of Europe! Cast not down those eyes, which have seen so
many subject capitals, so many vanquished kings! Fortune, doubtless,
owed you a more glorious repose; but, such as it is, it depends on
yourselves to make a noble use of it. Let history inscribe your
recollections. The solitude and silence of misfortune are propitious to
her labours; and let truth, which is always present in the long nights
of adversity, at last enlighten labours that may not prove unproductive.
As for me, I will avail myself of the privilege, sometimes painful,
sometimes glorious, of telling what I have seen, and of retracing,
perhaps with too scrupulous attention, its most minute details; feeling
that nothing was too minute in that prodigious Genius and those gigantic
feats, without which we should never have known the extent to which
human strength, glory, and misfortune, may be carried.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
VOLUME FIRST.
BOOK I.
CHAP. I.--Political relations of France and Russia since 1807 1
II.--Prussia.--Frederick William 6
III.--Turkey.--Sultans Selim--Mustapha--Mahmoud 18
IV.--Sweden.--Bernadotte 32