…but an interesting one. A mass graveyard from one of history’s most famous and monumental military disasters.

The stunned, frozen and starving spectres who had managed to stagger to Vilnius, many of them to end their days there, had come from all over French-occupied Europe. Eventually, at most some 20,000 soldiers – of the 400,000 who’d marched into Russia at midsummer – finally recrossed the Niemen into Poland. They were meant to rejoin Napoleon, but he’d already gone ahead to Paris to give the news of the catastrophe, and to raise new armies. Men could easily be replaced, but not horses. Tens of thousands of soldiers had died in Russia, but it was because of his lack of cavalry that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia, in 1813.

It’s grisly, and sobering reading for those who act as though our casualties in Iraq are anything but trivial on any rational historical scale (though of course devastating, as are all such, to the affected families and loved ones). By any historical measure, Iraq is in fact a dramatic success, considering the accomplishments and relative loss of life of both our own troops and innocent civilians.