Drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, this diagram tells the story of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. Edward Tufte, whose book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a key text on statistics (apparently), called it “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”.

“Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and direction of the army’s movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.

“The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of 422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression ‘C’est la Bérézina’ to describe a total disaster.”

The Economist / Worth a thousand words