Word: gur
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Copy for Tolstoy. Ségur was seldom far from the Emperor's side during the five fearful months that it took to unravel Napoleon's grand design. He was close enough to hear Napoleon exclaim as he came within sight of the Muscovite capital of logs and gilded domes: "So here at last is that famous city! It was high time!" The remark was used by Tolstoy in War and Peace; probably one of the original French editions of Ségur's journal (first in 1824) was before Tolstoy as he wrote his masterpiece...
Always Ségur keeps before his eye the vision of the Grande Armée as a sort of international brigade marching to liberate (among others) the Poles from an Asiatic despotism. It was indeed not a French national force but a great group of armies-half a million men from 17 nations...
...gur wonderfully evokes the opening scenes of the disastrous war, with the Emperor surrounded by men whom he had named princes and dukes titled for victories in a dozen countries. The great host glittered with invincibility, and the men were still heady with the idea that they represented liberty under arms. They had only to cross the Niemen into Russian territory, and "love and gratitude" would welcome them...
Holy Horror. But sinister portents made the true picture clear. The Emperor's horse fell ("A Roman would turn back," someone said); a gigantic thunderstorm destroyed, among other things, 10,000 horses. Worst of all, there were no Russians to defeat. Ségur describes in familiar scenes how the Grande Armée advanced into silent wastes; the aristocrats burned their houses and took their serfs with them to the East. Napoleon snapped: "Do you think I have come all this way just to conquer these huts?" The Russians were inspired-not by liberty-but by what...
...nature, this is a book without surprises or scholarly caches of "new material." But it is presented in an admirable new translation by J. David Townsend, a Methodist clergyman in Cohasset, Mass. Above all, it gives evidence on every page that Author Ségur was a war chronicler ranking with Herodotus and Bernal...