The French army's methods as we have seen assumed rapid campaigns in areas sufficiently wealthy and densely peopled for it to live off the land. But what worked in Lombardy or Rhineland, where such procedures had been first developed, and was still feasible in central Europe, failed utterly in the vast, empty and impoverished spaces of Poland and Russia. Napoleon was defeated not so much by the Russian winter as by his failure to keep the Grand Army properly supplied. The retreat from Moscow destroyed the Army. Of the 610,000 men who had at one time or another crossed the Russian frontier, 100,100 or so recrossed it.
(Eric Hobsbawm, «The Age of Revolution», VINTAGE BOOKS, 1996, p.87)
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