For the first time, Smith was starting to see the situation whole: the terrain, the weather, the pressures from below and those from above, the enemy before him and the enemy within. As the pieces slowly came together, he could intuit the battlefield for what it would become—a perfect trap. It was starting to feel reminiscent, he thought, of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign into Russia, in which the French Grande Armée pushed ever deeper into hostile country, distancing itself from its supply lines as winter steadily approached.
