| An immediate sensation when it was first published in 1824 under the title History of the Expedition to Russia, Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812, this remarkable chronicle offers an at once extraordinarily heroic and profoundly tragic narrative of the campaign that in a space of six months claimed 1,000,000 lives and set in motion the chain of events that culminated in the fall of France's First Empire. In the scores of decades since French General Philippe de Segur's firsthand account appeared in Paris, it has provided historians of the Napoleonic era with an unparalleled primary source for graphically detailed and dramatically related material, as it contains some of the most striking and poignant descriptions of war ever written. A member of the imperial staff during the Russian expedition, Segur also renders an intimate portrait of the charismatic and brilliant but hubristic and disastrously fallible Napoleon himself, his imperial eye always on glory as he trudged through gore. Edited astutely by Christopher Summerville to add narrative momentum without sacrificing the power and drama of the original, this new one-volume edition of Segur's massive work concentrates on the campaign's key events -- from Napoleon's fateful crossing of the Niemen into Lithuania on June 24, 1812, with 500,000 men to the final retreat, with 10,000 survivors, on 14 December. Background material is paraphrased adeptly, while maps, a chronology, a biographical list of principal personalities, notes, and a bibliography further clarify the text and context of Segur's celebrated and unsparing history.
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