Valentina
“On the Russian side of that river an army of close on half a million men was waiting, the soldiers of the Czar Alexander I, and across, in Poland, the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, ended their long march across Europe and came to rest, waiting for the order to advance. They too numbered half a million men, a hundred thousand of them cavalry. The world had been waiting all through the spring, while the Emperor of France brought his great fighting forces into position for his attack upon his old ally the Russian Czar, and the peace moves went on at the same time as the troop movements, but they came from France, and they found no response in the silent, menacing Russians. Russia wanted Napoleon to go to war, and in the last spring month of June, war was inevitable. Only one country with real ties of loyalty to France welcomed the prospect, and that was Poland, dismembered and partitioned three times in twenty-three years. What remained of the ancient Kingdom was n...ow a Duchy of Warsaw with the King of Saxony as its ruler; it existed under the patronage of Napoleon, and Poles followed him and fought in his European wars because they believed he meant to restore independence and unify their country.MoreLess
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