The Two Great Retreats of History

Two of the most famous military withdrawals ever recorded sit side by side in this compilation, edited for classroom use by D. H. Montgomery. The first selection, taken from George Grote’s History of Greece, retells the Retreat of the Ten Thousand: the long march of a stranded Greek mercenary army back to the Black Sea after the death of Cyrus the Younger in 401 BC, a story first set down by Xenophon in the Anabasis. The second, abridged from Count Ségur’s memoir of the 1812 campaign, follows Napoleon’s ruined Grande Armée as it staggered out of Russia through snow and starvation. Reading the two accounts together makes for a pointed study of endurance, command, and catastrophe across more than two thousand years of warfare.