The man in the long gray coat stepped out of his tent on the steep bank of the Nieman and peered eastward through a spyglass. The men were expecting him, and as they came out of the woods the cry went out: “Vive l’Empereur! So these are the steppes of Asia!” It was June 1812, and writing some fifty years after the fact, Leo Tolstoy places Napoleon Bonaparte near the town of Kaunas…