ONE:During the eighteen days that Buonaparte halted at Wilna he was actively employed in endeavouring to cut asunder the Russian host. Whilst Barclay de Tolly, under the Czar, commanded the main force, which had now fallen back from Wilna to Drissa, Prince Bagration was lying far to the south-east in Poland, at Volkovisk, with seven thousand Cossacks under Platoff at Grodno, and another body of men under Dorokhoff as far as Lida. Buonaparte ordered Murat, with his cavalry, to drive the rear of the main Russian army in the direction of Drissa. Murat was followed by a division of infantry, under Oudinot and Ney, whilst the King of Westphalia was ordered to advance eastward to cut off Bagration's division from all chance of junction with De Tolly, and Davoust was to attack him in the rear. He[43] himself proposed to push forward between these bodies towards Vitebsk, and thus threaten both St. Petersburg and Moscow. By this arrangement he made himself sure of destroying Bagration's division, or compelling it to surrender. But contrary to his wont, Buonaparte was found not to advance with his usual rapidity; and the fact was that there were sufficient reasons for the delay. His supplies had failed already. The country, already impoverished by a bad harvest in the preceding year, was swept by the Russians of all possible provisions; and the vast horde of French, Germans, and Italians now advanced treading down the unripe corn of the present. Owing to the state of the roads, flooded by torrents of rain, the provision-waggons could not get along. Twenty thousand sick men had to be left behind wherever they could, for they had no good hospitals; and, in crossing Lithuania, one hundred thousand men fell from fatigue, from exhaustion, from surprises by the Cossacks, and from diseases which they brought with them.
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ONE:The great financial questions of 1786 were the Duke of Richmond's plan of fortifying Portsmouth and Plymouth, and Pitt's proposal of a sinking fund to pay off the national debt, an excise duty on wines, and Pitt's commercial treaty with France. During the previous Session the Duke of Richmond, Master-General of the Ordnance, had proposed a plan of fortifying these large arsenals, so that, in the supposed absence of our fleet on some great occasion, they would be left under the protection of regiments of militia, for whom enormous barracks were to be erected. A board of officers had been appointed to inquire into the advantages of the plan, and their report was now brought up on the 27th of February, and introduced by Mr. Pitt, who moved that the plan be adopted. This scheme was strongly opposed by General Burgoyne, Colonel Barr, and others. Mr. Bastard moved an amendment declaring the proposed fortifications inexpedient. He said the militia had been called the school of the army, but to shut them up in these strongholds, separate from their fellow-subjects, was the way to convert them into universities for pr?torian bands. He protested against taking the defence of the nation from our brave fleet and conferring it on military garrisons; tearing the ensign of British glory from the mast-head, and fixing a standard on the ramparts of a fort. The Bill was rejected, Fox, Sheridan, Windham, and all the leading Oppositionists declaiming against it.To contend against this enormous force, Buonaparte, by the most surprising exertions, had again collected upwards of two hundred thousand men of considerable military practice; but he dared not to name the conscription to a people already sore on that point; and he endeavoured to raise further reinforcements by an enrolment of National Guards all over France. For this purpose commissioners were sent down into the Departments, on the authority of an Imperial decree of April the 5th; and he proposed to raise as many federates, or volunteers of the lower ordersthe only class which had raised a cheer for him on his return. But these schemes proved, for the most part, abortive. In the northern Departments, where heretofore the commands of Buonaparte had been most freely obeyed, the inhabitants showed a sullen and dogged resistance, and the same was the case in Brittany. Farther south matters were worse. In the Departments of Gard, Marne, and Nether Loire, the white flag and cockade were openly displayed; and wherever the tree of liberty was plantedfor it was now the trick of Buonaparte to associate the sacred name of liberty with his, a name and a thing on which he had so uniformly trampledit was cut down and burnt. It was in such circumstances that Buonaparte had to put his frontiers into a state of defence against the advancing hosts. He had defended the northern side of Paris with a double line of fortifications; strongly fortified Montmartre, and on the open southern side cast up some field-works, relying, however, on the Seine as the best barrier. Paris he placed under the command of General Haxo; and the fortresses on the side of Alsace, the Vosges, and Lorraine were all strongly garrisoned. Lyons, Guise, Vitry, Soissons, Chateau-Thierry, Langres, and other towns were made as strong as forts, redoubts, field-works, and garrisons could make them; and trusting by these to retard the slow Austrians, and even the Russians, till he could have given a desperate blow to the Allies in the Netherlands, of whom he was most afraid, on the 11th of June he quitted Paris, saying, "I go to measure myself with Wellington!"
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