Silence Bernadotte! Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth! Even the last-signed drummer boy knows I crossed the Neiman into Russia at the head of my army near Kovno at the first opportunity on the 24th of June, 1812, the roads being too inundated to punish Russia's perfidy beforehand. I have long known you could not command a corps, but it seems you have no command over the basic facts either!
My plans for Russia I based upon the soundest calculations and meticulous preparation of all my campaigns. I knew this enterprise to be the greatest challenge I had yet undertaken. I studied the campaign of Charles XII in Russia, which miscarried to Poltava. I well understood the Russians would retreat before my unconquerable army and seek to deny us provisions. I knew the poverty of the country near the frontiers in Lithuania and Poland. As I wrote to the Prince of Eggmuehl, “The aim of all my moves will be to concentrate 400,000 men at a single point. We can hope for nothing from the countryside and accordingly must take everything with us.” One can hardly make war in Poland like in Austria, after all.
As a result, I planned an immense manoeuvre sur les derrières against the Russians. By advancing with my left through Vilna towards St. Petersburg and refusing my right under the King of Westphalia, the Viceroy of Italy's army securing the right flank of my main army, I would cut the Russian line of retreat and force them into the angle of the Bug, the Narew, and the Pripet near the frontier. With all component parts in full harmony, a chase to the Volga would be unnecessary.
To that end, I ensured every soldier would have twenty four days' rations, four of which would be carried on their person and twenty in army transport. I established no fewer than twenty six transportation battalions to shuttle forward supplies gathered in our Polish depots, dispensing with those miserable thieves called contractors. With these preparations, a victorious battle would give us easy winter cantonments, free from enemy molestations, from which we could resume the war in spring, unless Alexander sued for peace over winter.
I established treaties of alliance with Prussia and Austria, and guaranteed the territorial integrity of the Sublime Porte, Russia's enemy at the time. My error was in persisting in the invasion once Sweden and the Ottomans made peace with Russia, for these events freed up great bodies of troops, ineffective through Chichagov's army was at the Beresina. Even so, Russia's loss was no less than mine, and I may still have crowned the work with success if Junot had not blundered before Smolensk, or had I not been deceived by false negotiations into remaining in the ruins of Moscow so long.