Synopsis
An immediate sensation when it was first published in 1824 under the title History of the Expedition to Russia, Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812, this remarkable chronicle offers an at once extraordinarily heroic and profoundly tragic narrative of the campaign that in a space of six months claimed 1,000,000 lives and set in motion the chain of events that culminated in the fall of France's First Empire. In the scores of decades since French General Philippe de Segur's firsthand account appeared in Paris, it has provided historians of the Napoleonic era with an unparalleled primary source for graphically detailed and dramatically related material, as it contains some of the most striking and poignant descriptions of war ever written. A member of the imperial staff during the Russian expedition, Segur also renders an intimate portrait of the charismatic and brilliant but hubristic and disastrously fallible Napoleon himself, his imperial eye always on glory as he trudged through gore.
Reviews
Summerville, an English bookseller and Napoleon buff, has donea thoroughly fine job of editing one of the classic Napoleonic memoirsinto a volume accessible to modern English-speaking readers. De Segur,a general in Napoleon's army, was an expressive eyewitness to thepartial triumphs and total tragedies. Many of these events are wellknown, so Summerville condenses the political and diplomaticbackground, as well as many of the battle reports, with editorialskill. He demonstrates, too, descriptive (sometimes irreverent) flair:Napoleon in 1812 was like "some ageing rock star embarking on afarewell tour"; General Mikhail Kutusov was "an overweight bon viveur;a one-eyed womanizer." Summerville also offers a chronology, aglossary and extensive annotation. Even the accounts of the highpoints give us new dimensions to a story often rather brusquelysummarized in general histories. We see Napoleon's belief in his"star," and his position in the eyes of his men weakening as hisphysical and mental health decline. We learn that Smolensk had stoutmedieval walls, that the Emperor narrowly escaped being blown up bystored gunpowder in the Kremlin during the burning of Moscow, and thatstarving soldiers sliced flesh out of living horses, who wereapparently too numb with cold to notice, on the last stage of theretreat. And the crossing of the Berezina-on improvised bridges withdiscipline breaking down and the Cossacks hovering around-is somethingno horror novelist would have dared to invent.
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