In 1998, I was invited to join the Napoleonic Society of America by an eccentric man who had converted his large office into a shrine dedicated to the French general and emperor. A vast conference table was decked with models of Napoleon’s famous victories at Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram, which the peculiar man showed me with extraordinary enthusiasm.
“What do you think about Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812?” I asked.
“A regrettable mistake,” the man said, suddenly becoming sober. “He underestimated the resolve of Alexander I and the hardness of the Russian winter.”
“How many of his soldiers paid the price for his underestimation?” I asked.
“No one knows exactly,” he replied.
This is true. Estimates of the size of the Grande Armée that crossed the Neman River into Russia in June 1812 vary widely between 500 and and 600 thousand. Six months later, only 120,000 returned, and most of these had suffered severe injuries and amputations from frostbite.
In other words, around 400,000 young soldiers from Western Europe were condemned to suffer unfathomably painful deaths to serve the monstrous vanity and ambition of a single man.
These were mostly conscripted farm boys and tradesmen from all over Napoleon’s European possessions—sons, husbands, and fathers who were needed back home to take care of their parents, wives, and children. The suffering they endured before death finally took them is unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.......
.....The bloody-minded fools in charge of U.S. and European foreign policy should have thought about these historical facts before they armed and trained the Ukrainian military to serve as NATO’s attack dog against Russia.
Especially bizarre has been the German government’s decision to repudiate the excellent and mutually beneficial German-Russian friendship cultivated by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Vladimir Putin, and the great and useful fruit of their friendship, the Nord Stream Pipeline.
I am confident that an Austrian-style neutrality deal for Ukraine would have averted the disaster of the last four years. With Russian forces now just 75 miles east of the great Black Sea port of Odessa, it appears that the West is now on the cusp of suffering its greatest strategic defeat since December 1812.
Europe’s leaders apparently learned nothing from Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign, and they now seem determined to pursue war with Russia. President Trump should tell them to cease their agitations and mind their own business before they get a lot more people killed.
