While Mr. Lieven’s depiction of the battles and maneuvers are as sure and as exciting as Hardy could wish for, his explanation of the realities of warfare in the pre-industrial world is equally interesting. It’s an old saying in the military that “amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” And the logistics of supplying an army as huge as Napoleon’s in Russia as it advanced a thousand miles from its bases were formidable to put it mildly.

An army of 120,000 men and 40,000 horses, according to Mr. Lieven, needed 850 carts just to carry a single day’s food and forage. Powder and shot for the artillery, medical care for the sick and wounded, tents and other supplies required many more. Napoleon’s vast army could not possibly have transported the food and fodder it needed and had to live off the resources of the lands he was invading. The Russians did their very considerable best to deny the French those resources.

And here was one of the Russians’ secret weapons, the Cossacks. Bred to irregular warfare, the Cossacks, along with Russia’s far superior light cavalry units, were the Russian forces most feared by the French (and admired by Napoleon, who wished they were on his side). Able to move quickly, informed by the local peasants of French units, they were able to harass the enemy’s foraging parties mercilessly.

When Napoleon reached Moscow, matters got even worse for him and his vital cavalry. A stationary army in this time quickly exhausted the local food supply for the horses, and foraging expeditions had to reach further and further, ever more exposed to partisan forces. Napoleon’s cavalry had been badly mauled at Borodino, but it was the six weeks in Moscow that largely destroyed it as a fighting force as well as decimated the artillery horses.

This had grave strategic consequences for the French, not just tactical ones. Napoleon had lost not only most of the men he had led to Russia but 175,000 horses as well. The men could be replaced, as indeed they largely were before the next year’s fighting, but the horses could not. In 1813, despite scouring the French Empire, only 29,000 could be procured, and most of them were not of top quality. This would cripple the French in the campaign of 1813 and be a considerable factor in Napoleon’s reverses of the summer and autumn of that year.

This is a story of great sweep and drama, played out over the map of Europe by larger-than-life characters whose names are still familiar to us today. And Dominic Lieven, a master of the material and a fine writer, tells it rattling well.