_Napoleon's Plan of the Campaign against Russia--Understood and provided against by Barclay de Tolly, the Russian Generalissimo--Statement of the Grand French Army--Of the Grand Russian Army--Disaster on the river Wilia--Difficulties of the Campaign, on the part of the French--Their defective Commissariat and Hospital Department--Cause of Buonaparte's determination to advance--His forced marches occasion actual delay--Napoleon remains for some days at Wilna--Abbé de Pradt--His intrigues to excite the Poles--Neutralized by Napoleon's engagements with Austria--An attempt to excite Insurrection in Lithuania also fails._ In ancient history, we often read of the inhabitants of the northern regions, impelled by want, and by the desire of exchanging their frozen deserts for the bounties of a more genial climate, breaking forth from their own bleak regions, and, with all the terrors of an avalanche, bursting down upon those of the south. But it was reserved for our generation to behold the invasion reversed, and to see immense hosts of French, Germans, and Italians, leaving their own fruitful, rich, and delightful regions, to carry at once conquest and desolation through the dreary pine forests, swamps, and barren wildernesses of Scythia. The philosopher, Hume, dedicated an essay to consider, whether futurity might expect a new inundation of barbarian conquerors; a fresh "living cloud of war," from the northern hives; but neither to him nor any one else had it occurred to anticipate the opposite danger, of combined hundreds of thousands from the fairest and most fertile regions of Europe, moving at the command of a single man, for the purpose of bereaving the wildest country of Europe of its national independence. "Russia," said Buonaparte, in one of his Delphic proclamations, "is dragged on by her fate; her destiny must be accomplished. Let us march; let us cross the Niemen; let us carry war into her territories. The second war of Poland will be as glorious to the French arms as the first; but the peace we shall conclude shall carry with it its guarantee, and terminate that haughty influence which Russia has exercised for more than fifty years on the affairs of Europe."[111] Napoleon's final object was here spoken out; it was to thrust Russia back upon her Asiatic dominions, and deprive her of her influence in European politics.