The Russian Campaign of Napoleon is unquestionably the most wonderful episode in the history of war. We are not only interested, but astounded, by its study. It comprises a series of events gigantic and unparalleled in the annals of human strife. From the note of preparation to the final wail of despair, the reader’s imagination is continually on the stretch to realise and comprehend the prodigious scale of its circumstances. At the word of the great military magician, half-a-million of men, levied from half Europe, mustered in arms for aggression. From France they came, from Italy and Poland: Austria and Prussia dared not refuse their contingents; Illyria and Dalmatia sent forth their infantry; to their astonishment and dismay, Spanish and Portuguese battalions were marched into the dreary north under the banners of the man against whose generals their brothers and fathers were at that moment contending on the mountains of their native peninsula. The West was arrayed against the East. Since the birth of discipline and civilisation, such an army had never been seen. The events of its first and only campaign were in proportion to its unprecedented magnitude. In six months the mighty armament returned, a shattered wreck, having fought the most desperate battle the world ever saw, having witnessed the self-destruction of a vast and wealthy capital—suicide for the country’s salvation—and having endured sufferings which may have been equalled on a smaller scale, but which certainly never before or since fell to the lot of so numerous and powerful a host.