Marshal Desai's "doing absurdly" behavior in the Danze Corridor was soon spread to Napoleon by his dissatisfied colleagues. The emperor breathed a sigh of relief, which at least showed that Desai had found an effective way to vent his anger, rather than hiding all kinds of grievances and resentment, and secretly planning a conspiracy that was unfavorable to Napoleon.

When he went to Russia, Napoleon admitted that it was his selfishness to deal with the injustice of the use of Desai. He wanted to try his best to suppress the development momentum of Desai, and was unwilling to let the "Good Lucky Desai" win another award that was within his reach on the Russian battlefield.

However, Napoleon could not allow Desai to stay in Danze or go south to Krakow, because the emperor's Polish general, Poniatovsky, once spoke to Napoleon on behalf of the Warsaw Parliament during the Emperor's stay in Danze: He believed that his Majesty Desai, whose power was growing, was no longer suitable to stay in the Principality of Warsaw, and well, it should be officially called the Kingdom of Poland now.

As of April this year, Desai had already had the Baltic Navy in Poland, the Silesian Legion and the Vivas Legion, and the powerful strength of more than 100,000 soldiers. In addition, Desai also dispatched a naval fleet from Catalonia that was only loyal to him, and had caused a siege to the Polish Conference from the south, north and west.

At the same time, most of the armed forces loyal to the Warsaw Parliament will enter Russian land to fight. As one goes up and down, Desai is likely to forcibly break the fact that Polish politics divides north and south by force during Napoleon's expedition to Russia.

Therefore, Napoleon ordered Desai and his Baltic Army to accept the command of Marshal Macdonald (Duke Taranto), because the 10th Army, which was directly commanded by the Scottish descendants, would never accept Desai's political deception and money temptation. That was the 10th Army, which was composed entirely of the Prussians, and many of the officers and soldiers were from the previous Danze and Silesian regions. These Prussians had unforgettable hatred with the Polish king who embezzled their homes.

In the essay written to the Duke of Taranto, Napoleon asked MacDonald to "care" and take care of the young Polish king, and to lead the Baltic Legion to St. Petersburg, and not allow Desai to return to Poland privately after the war began. As for the final task of the Northern Road Division, the capture of St. Petersburg was no longer deliberately emphasized. The confident Napoleon believed that he would completely defeat the main force of Tsar Alexander in Lithuania or Belarus, forcing the Russians to re-sign the peace treaty one month later.

Compared with the 500,000 European coalition forces integrated and mobilized by the emperor, the tsar could use was not so scary.

Due to the humiliation of the failure of the Battle of Austerlitz, Tsar Alexander more or less needed to reorganize and strengthen his army and set up 36 recruitment and training centers throughout Russia.

Of course, Russian cavalry, especially the powerful Cossack cavalry, can dominate the entire Europe.

However, after 1807, the Tsar paid more attention to artillery construction, especially 18-pound howitzers and 12-pound artillery.

However, the total number of Russian ** teams was only about 400,000, of which 210,000 were the main force, but the reserve force was only 45,000. The 140,000 of the main force of the Russian troops defending against the invasion of the French army was commanded by General Barclay De Tory, a Latvian from a Scottish family. Most of them gathered in the gap between the Neman River and the Bug River. Tens of kilometers away, General Pratov also led 8,000 Cossack cavalry to gather in the Grodno area to actively prepare for the war.

In addition, a team of 150,000 soldiers was scattered in various fortresses, and the fortresses were far apart. At present, Russia's most elite Moldavian Legion, led by Marshal Kutuzov, was still in war and harmonious with Ottoman Turkey. Due to the detriment of the time travelers, the Bucharest Peace Treaty originally scheduled to be signed with Turkey in May 1812 had to delay the backward for nearly a month, resulting in a serious shortage of troops in the Neman River and Lithuania.

Therefore, Napoleon had an absolute advantage in military strength, and his main legion was twice as many as Russia. One of the main weaknesses of the Russian army was that they were independent, had no contact with each other, lacked training, and were not familiar with the military. Their mutual suspicion and lack of loyalty among each other exacerbated this disadvantage.

As a descendant of Scotland, General Barclay was despised by his two senior subordinates, the arrogant Hanover General Bennygson and the withdrawn Russian prince General Bagragion. The relationship between Bennygson and Bagragion seemed incompatible. As for General Pratov, who commanded the intimidating Cossack Cavalry, he was also incompatible with the three colleagues. He never participated in military meetings, and of course he would not obey the deployment and dispatch of commander General Barclay, and was accustomed to being self-centered.

If we insist on saying what the above four people have in common, whether it is Barclay, Bennygsen, Bagragion, or Pratov, the front-line commanders tried their best to oppose the "1812 Russian Operation Plan" formulated by Prussian General Fur. As for the reason, naturally, everyone looked down on the Prussians who were defeated repeatedly under the iron hoof of the French army...

In view of the serious discord between the Russian front commanders and the poor situation of lack of cooperation between them, Napoleon instructed Marshal Dawu next to him on the second day after arriving at the Neman River: "After crossing the Neman River, our actions must be quick and fierce. The entire goal is to concentrate a huge force of 400,000 troops to attack Russia's chaos as soon as possible--Barclays' main force!"

Dawu frowned and retorted bluntly: "Your Majesty, you should consider the Cossacks, their free way of fighting, to harass and destroy our army's logistics supplies, just like the mistakes we have made on the Iberis Peninsula!"

On the east and west sides of the Neman River, there are dense forests everywhere, countless rivers intersecting tributaries, and endless swamp depressions, including a vast area that stretches nearly 300 kilometers from the swamp in the Pripiat River basin to the east of Warsaw. The Russian landform discovered by French spies showed that there were almost no roads here. The rapid deployment and combat of the large army was difficult to achieve, but it was very suitable for the Cossack cavalry to hide, jungle and swamp, waiting for an opportunity to invade the small French troops passing by, or logistics vehicles.

Marshal Dawu, known for his wisdom, had tried his best to oppose Napoleon's plan to send troops to Russia in Paris, but once the task was issued, Dawu was still working hard and did his best to assist the emperor in every military service.

On the front battlefield, Dawu's confident and brave French army was never afraid of any provocations from the Russians. However, if the other commander deliberately avoided fighting, took advantage of the wide area of ​​the Eastern European plain and the extremely strong strategic depth, and then took the initiative to retreat with great strides. During this period, he was accompanied by fierce and fierce Cossack cavalry with very fast movement to raid and supply along the way, and it was not impossible to eliminate the French army's sharpness and fighters with bad road conditions, harsh environment, diseases and plagues.

In Dresden, during the brief meeting between Desay and Davu, it was repeatedly mentioned that the Russians would be able to make a strong wall and clear the country, using the irresistible climate, disease and famine to fight against the 500,000 European Union forces that had the advantage.

Desai even made bold predictions that the discord and division between the Russian generals was more unfavorable to the French army. When Bagragian ran away in anger and led his subordinates to forcibly split from the main Russian army, namely the Barclays Legion, the hesitant Tsar Alexander then insisted on the initial policy of firming the walls and clearing the fields, using the delay strategy to lengthen, deepen and widen the supply line of the European army, starving hundreds of thousands of enemy troops to death, trapping, exhausting, and dying from the vast European wasteland.

Dawu believed in the Russians' policy of avoiding war, but he felt a little too cautious about Desai's last sentence. St. Petersburg has been promoting to European countries that the east bank of the Neman River belongs to Russia's sacred territory, and no inch of land should be lost. However, Desai told Dawu: Even if the Russians lose Moscow or St. Petersburg, they will continue to resist to the end.

Desai's absurd "prediction" will be verified in more than two months.

...

On the morning of June 23, the French army marched forward in three columns and arrived at the pontoon bridge that was hurriedly built on the Neman River near Kovno. They did not see any Russians, nor did they encounter resistance from the enemy. Only the Polish light cavalry were running back and forth. For three consecutive days, the French army crossed the river and gradually disappeared in the Russian desert.

The loneliness and desolation, the sultry and thunderstorms in the Russian midsummer made the European Union depressed and morale frustrated. The originally disastrous carriage path suddenly became even more bumpy due to the passing of the army. During the ninety-km march from the Neman River to Werner, ten thousand horses died of illness and death due to excessive fatigue or eating weeds.

The difficulty of logistics transportation immediately began to emerge, and it would become increasingly serious with the advancement of the army. Napoleon seemed to have foreseeed this and had ordered a large amount of supply reserves at Danze's main military stations to supplement the consumption of long-term combat, and the scale of military boots was also huge.

A large part of the supplies were never available in the Russian hundreds of thousands of French troops. The cargo ships from Danze to the Neman River and then drove military supplies from the Neman River. The horses on the way were consumed very shocking. In addition, the harassment of Russian guerrillas and Cossack cavalry, so only absolute necessities caught up with the supply of rapidly advancing troops, which led to many soldiers often starving, many people became deserters, and more soldiers had to live by looting residents' strongholds along the way.

Therefore, after Napoleon arrived in Werner, he had to order Marshal Ney to send a cavalry patrol to gather the soldiers who had left the team back to the team. These soldiers were doing "abnormal destructive activities" and might "fall into the hands of the Cossack cavalry."
Chapter completed!