When the rains had passed, the sun blazed down on the Grand Army. The roads dried out, and then in place of mud there were choking clouds of dust that clogged the lungs and stung the men’s eyes. Despite the season the nights were cool and the men huddled around their camp fires. Many of the soldiers were unseasoned and the long marches quickly exhausted them. When the rations started to run out they lacked the experience of veterans in foraging and began to starve. Before July came to an end a long line of graves stretched back behind the army, and here and there lay an occasional naked body: stragglers killed and stripped by the bands of Cossacks that began to shadow and harass the French columns like jackals.

Nor were the men alone in their suffering. The horses were equally exhausted, and once the feed had been consumed they were forced to eat whatever green corn they could find as they passed through the sparsely inhabited Russian landscape. At the end of July Napoleon halted the army at Vitebsk to allow the supply convoys to catch up. There, Berthier updated the notebooks that recorded the strength of every regiment in the army. Nearly a hundred thousand men were absent from the lists of effectives. Many of these were sick, some were stragglers, and the rest had died on the march.

After eight days the army continued the advance, and still the Russians fell back, burning crops and destroying farms and villages in the path of the French columns. Then, at last, in the middle of August, the enemy made a stand at Smolensk. For two days Ney’s infantry fought their way into the suburbs of the city, only to see the bridge over the Dnieper river blown up in their faces. The army had to wait another day while the bridge was repaired. By then the Russians were again in retreat towards Moscow.

Napoleon gave the order for the army to halt and rest while reinforcements and supplies came forward. While the weary soldiers scoured the city for food and plunder, Napoleon summoned his marshals to his temporary headquarters to consider the situation. The Russian summer was at its height and the windows of the mansion overlooking the Dnieper were wide open to admit what little breeze there was. The commanders of the central army group were as tired as their Emperor and when Berthier spread the campaign map before them Napoleon could see the dull despair in their eyes as they contemplated the two hundred and eighty miles that still stretched between Smolensk and Moscow.

An orderly served wine, chilled in the mansion’s ice house, and Napoleon waited for him to leave the room before he addressed the others.