In June 1812, Napoleon crossed the Niemen River into Russia with roughly six hundred thousand men, the largest army Europe had ever assembled. He had spent a decade winning. Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, one triumph stacked on the next until victory felt less like an outcome than a birthright. Nothing in his experience told him to stop.

He marched them toward Moscow. The Russians refused to give him the decisive battle he wanted. They retreated, burned their own crops, emptied the land. Napoleon took a scorched and abandoned Moscow, sat in it waiting for a surrender that never came, and finally turned back into the teeth of winter. Of the six hundred thousand who went in, about a hundred thousand came out. The empire never recovered. The man who could not stop winning had won his way into the greatest military catastrophe of the age.