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By the first months of 1811, the emperor had ordered his Topographical Department to supply him with accurate maps of western Russia.
    Early in 1811, Napoleon assured both his advisers and Alexander’s representatives that his intentions were peaceful. “It would be a crime on my part,” he told Prince Shuvalov in May, “for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thank God, lost my head. I am not mad.” But he contradicted himself by returning to the language of threat and provocation again and again. Indecision, which would plague every phase of his conduct of the war, also muddied his thinking when it came to starting it.
    The first unit to move on his command was a Polish cavalry regiment, which left Spain on January 8, 1812. On January 13, Napoleon ordered his War Administration department to be ready to provision an army of 400,000 frontline troops for fifty days. That broke down to 20 million rations of bread and 20 million rations of rice, along with 2 million bushels of oats for the horses and oxen. Some 6,000 wagons, either horse-or ox-drawn, were requisitioned to carry enough flour for 200,000 men for two months. The customary card index, which Napoleon kept on all opposing armies, detailing strengths and weaknesses down to the battalion level, was quickly pulled together.
    The emperor wrote Alexander on February 28, 1812, warning him to abide by the Continental System or face dire consequences, a threat that Alexander brushed off by saying he was only protecting Russian business interests. Alexander included a list of demands required for his return to the Continental System, including a French evacuation of Prussia, which Napoleon regarded as impertinent. The emperor railed at his advisers and predicted that a prospective war would last only twelve days. “I have come to finish once and for all with the colossus of Northern barbarism,” he shouted. Napoleon’s advisers were horrified. He had never approached a campaign with so few backing opinions from those around him.
    “Whether he triumphs or succumbs,” observed the German-Austrian diplomat Count von Metternich, “in either case the situation in Europe will never be the same again.” The emperor ratcheted up the rhetoric against Alexander, and he began to embroider his vision of a quick war with grand designs: if the tsar fell or was assassinated, the Grande Armée could pivot south and march to the Ganges, taking India and its rich markets and dealing a crushing blow to English maritime commerce, crippling the trade that funded the British Empire. Napoleon was wandering even deeper into self-delusion.
    The emperor wasn’t the same man he had been ten years before. He had grown stout, his skin had turned sallow, the lean, hawklike face had developed the hint of jowls, and his almost forbiddingly intense expressions had mellowed and grown more querulous. “He spoke more slowly and took longer to make decisions,” writes historian Adam Zamoyski. “Something was eating away at the vital force of this Promethean creature.” Whether this decline was caused by the effects of middle age or physiological problems, but Napoleon was a less commanding figure, physically and intellectually, just as he began his most exhausting mission.
    I N R USSIA, THE CALLS for war escalated almost monthly. The country was, in its own way, deeply imperialistic, a rising power probing west (in Sweden) and south (toward the increasingly feeble Ottoman Empire) for new sources of wealth and territory. Its upper classes and its army officer corps were fluent in French, the only language many of them spoke, and their bookshelves were lined with volumes of Voltaire and Montesquieu. Still, they deeply resented Napoleon’s encroachment upon Russian power and national pride.
    As rumors of war spread, waves of revolt rippled through the society. French tutors lost their jobs and it became fashionable for boyars and aristocrats to spice their conversations