The Retreat from Moscow

These memoirs of Sergeant Adrien Bourgogne of the Imperial Guard record the 1812 Russian campaign, with the weight on the retreat from Moscow. He describes the occupied city, the fire, and then the march west through snow: abandoned wagons, horses eaten, night bivouacs, Cossack raids, and the struggle at the Berezina. Companions from the Guard appear and vanish; peasants, stragglers, and officers cross the path. The narrative stays with one non-commissioned soldier's hunger, frost, and will to reach the Niemen. First circulated in the nineteenth century, it is a ranker's winter testimony, not a staff history of Napoleon's strategy.

Bound in blue-green cloth blocked with a wrap-around contemporary etching in black. Pale brown slipcase.