Many Cuirassiers rode on native ponies, regiments straggled along and pillaged without check, Davout’s corps alone preserving anything like its usual order: the popular impression that the French disasters began with the winter’s snow is utterly false; the Army of the Centre alone, under Napoleon in person, having lost 105,500 in fifty-two days, and advancing on Moscow with only 182,000, after deducting 13,500 left at Smolensk.

Everything pointed to a decisive battle to restore the morale of the Grande Armée, and Napoleon seemed for the moment to pull himself together, if we may be permitted a homely phrase. Countless orders were despatched, every carriage was to be destroyed that was likely to retard the advance, and meeting with that of his aide-de-camp Narbonne, he had it burned before his eyes, without allowing the general to remove a single article.

A change came over the Russian tactics at the same time: all ranks clamoured for a leader who would fight and not retreat, and consequently De Tolly was replaced by old Kutusoff, who, notwithstanding his defeat at Austerlitz, was a Russian, and beloved by the army for his superstitious practices, and an affectation of Suvarrow’s eccentricity of manner.

The French advanced in three columns, and troops of Cossacks began to hover round them threateningly. Beyond Gjatz, Murat became so annoyed at the hordes of those filthy, unkempt horsemen, that he rushed forward, and standing in his stirrups, with the very sublimity of conceit, waved them back with his sword, and they retired in astonishment and admiration.

But soon the high road debouched on to a natural battle-ground, and dark masses of troops were seen drawn up in solid bodies, there being no longer any doubt that the Russians intended fighting to cover “The Holy City,” Moscow, a large field-work commanding the road itself, bristling with cannon in a threatening manner.

The army attacked without delay, and drove the foe back to a range of hills, General Compans leading the 61st, with bayonets fixed, against the fortification.

Three times they took it, and three times they were dislodged; but at length, other positions being forced in their rear, the brave garrison evacuated the blood-stained ramparts, and Compans retained possession.

Among the heaped-up slain inside, a Russian artilleryman, decorated with several crosses, lay beside his gun, grasping it even in death with one hand, and clenching the hilt of his broken sword with the other; while next day, when Napoleon reviewed the survivors of the 61st, he asked, with surprise, what had become of the 3rd Battalion.

“It is in the redoubt,” said the colonel grimly.

A cold drizzle began to fall that night, and Napoleon, through the striped curtains of his tent, pitched in a square of the “Old Guard,” saw a great semi-circle of fire from the Russian bivouacs.

He slept little, and went early in his grey riding-coat to reconnoitre once more, afraid even then that the foe might retreat; but when morning came the huge force was still in position, extending for six miles, the flanks retired, and the centre advanced towards him.

Its right was protected by a marsh, its centre strongly entrenched, a strong redoubt mounting twenty-two guns frowned near the left centre, and the entire left wing was on lower ground, terminating on the old Moscow road, with two more redoubts before it. To turn that left wing, storm the works, and drive the Russians into the marshes on the opposite flank was the Emperor’s plan, the battle proving one of the most murderous ever fought by the Grande Armée, and known afterwards by them as the “Battle of the Generals,” from the number who fell there, or, officially, the Mosqua, from the river flowing near—the Russians naming it after the village of Borodino, where some of the hardest fighting took place.

Marmont’s aide-de-camp arrived with the news of that marshal’s defeat at Salamanca, but the disaster was forgotten in another incident—namely, the unexpected receipt of a portrait of Napoleon’s little son, the King of Rome, which he showed to the grenadiers at his tent door.

A proclamation was issued to the army, beginning: “Soldiers! behold the battle which you have so ardently desired! Victory now depends on yourselves,” and concluding with the words, “Let it be said of you—‘he was in the great battle under the walls of Moscow’;” but being distributed late, many regiments went into action without reading it.

It was the 7th September. A sky of cloudless blue stretched over the amphitheatre of hills, where the leaves were already falling, and at six o’clock Count Sorbier opened fire. Pernetty and Compans were in full march; the Russian processions of priests in glittering vestments that had chanted hymns and invoked the aid of Heaven retired precipitately, and an hour later Davout had his first horse killed under him as the fighting became general.

Compans’ division found itself before one of the enemy’s works, and Charriere, colonel of the famous 57th, gave the simple command, “To the redoubt!” the regiment running briskly forward up the slope with a shout.

Compans fell wounded, Dessaix had his arm broken a little later, and Rapp took command.

“Grape shot, grape shot—nothing but grape shot!” cried Belliard to the artillery, as a heavy column of Russians poured down to resist the attack. Within sixty minutes Rapp was hit four times, the fourth time on the left hip—the twenty-second wound received in his exciting career; and while Poniatowski struggled with his weak corps among the pine-trees on the Russian left, Delzon advanced with drums beating, on the village of Borodino, where Plauzonne was killed at the head of the 116th, and where the 30th had to fight its way out, leaving General Bonnomy badly wounded, Morand’s eighty guns tearing the dense mass before him, and Ney seizing the heights of Chewarino.

The fiercest conflict raged about the redoubts. Two were retaken by the Russians, and the third was in danger, when Murat dismounted and, waving his plumed cap with one hand, laid about him with a private’s musket.

So terrible was the carnage that one colonel ordered his men to retire, and Murat, seizing him by the collar, demanded what he was doing.

“We can stay here no longer,” said the colonel, pointing to half his regiment dead on the trampled ground.

“I can stay here very well myself,” exclaimed Murat.

“Eh bien,” replied the officer, looking steadily at him: “soldiers, face to the foe—to be slain!”

Rapp, carried wounded before the Emperor, had said to him, “The Guard is required to finish it,” but Napoleon shook his head, saying, “No, I will not have that destroyed—I will gain the battle without it.”

It was noon, and though the Russian left had been forced, they still stood their ground obstinately. Murat sent four times for the Guard, but Napoleon paced slowly up and down, always returning to his chair, some cannon shot rolling almost to his feet; and it was obvious that he was not himself, he saying repeatedly during the day that “he did not see the moves clearly on his chess board,” the old activity of mind and body having apparently forsaken the greatest warrior that Europe has ever produced.

The thunder of a thousand guns boomed and echoed far and near, the French alone firing ninety thousand rounds and many millions of ball cartridge.

The Russians re-formed for the third time, and General Montbrun, at the head of the heavy cavalry, was killed by a ball from the great redoubt.

“Do not weep,” said Auguste Caulaincourt, who took command, to Montbrun’s aides. “Follow me, and avenge him!” and crying to Murat, “You shall see me there immediately, dead or alive!” he placed himself at the head of the 5th Cuirassiers, whose long swords gleamed in the bright sunshine, and turning to the left, entered by a gorge, and took the work, falling mortally wounded at the moment of victory, and dying within an hour. He was only thirty, and had left Paris to join the army on his wedding day.

Dense smoke clouded the heights, rolling into the ravines to shroud the wretched wounded; flames showed where villages were blazing, the crash of muskets and the shouts of 250,000 men only diminishing as they fell by thousands to redden the soil, or to crawl shrieking to the rear, where the surgeons, under Baron Larrey, were busy from morning until long after darkness came.

Kutusoff had made so sure of victory that he was feasting with his staff well out of danger, the bulletin announcing a French defeat already written, when officers came crying for reinforcements, the conceited old man at first refusing to listen to any details that differed from his own idea of what ought to be taking place, his long pigtail wagging incredulously the while. But the reports were true. The French had won the plain, and were battling for the heights with irresistible fury.

Eugène improved Caulaincourt’s success; Belliard shattered the last Russian attack with the concentrated fire of thirty guns; Lauriston galloped up the reserve artillery, and did tremendous execution; and Grouchy—so well known in after years from the undeserved abuse showered on his brave head—had swept the high road and the plain beside it. The Russians, beaten in detail, retired to a second range of heights, from which the army was too exhausted to dislodge them without the assistance of the Guard, and night saw the two battered and bleeding forces still facing each other amid a fearful débris of slain.

On the French side Davout had been hit three times; Generals Montbrun, Caulaincourt, Plauzonne, Huard, Compere, Marion, and Lepel were killed; Nansouty, Grouchy, Rapp, Cempans, Dessaix, Morand, Lahoussaye, and many more—some forty in all—had been hit; and of the soldiers 35,000 lay dead and wounded, mangled by the showers of grape and the large musket balls used by the Russians.

They, on their side, counted three generals, 1,500 officers, and 36,000 men killed and wounded, accounts varying greatly as to the number of prisoners taken by the French, some making them 5,000, others 700 or 800 at the most.

Riding slowly across the battle-field, when the surgeons and the burial-parties were doing their ghastly work, the hoof of Napoleon’s charger brought a groan from a prostrate form, and one of the staff remarked in his hearing, that “it was only a Russian”!

“After a victory,” exclaimed Napoleon severely, “none are enemies, all are men.”

The army advanced and fought a sharp action at Mojaisk, where the Emperor lay for three days, burnt up with fever, and compelled, notwithstanding, to transact enormous arrears of business—dictating to seven people at once, and, when his voice left him, explaining with difficulty by writing and signs.

He left Mojaisk on the 12th of September to join the advance-guard in that famous travelling-carriage which Londoners know so well, his legions reduced to 198,000; and two days later, having mounted his horse once more, he saw the goal of his ambition, the ancient capital of Russia, glowing in the light of the afternoon sun.

In the centre of a vast plain, and built, like Rome, on seven hills, the two hundred and ninety-five churches and countless magnificent buildings of the “city of the gilded cupolas,” twenty miles in circumference, with a river meandering through it, burst on the view of the army as it crested the “Mount of Salvation,” and a shout went up of “Moscow! Moscow!” as the soldiers cheered and clapped their hands; whole regiments of Poles falling on their knees to thank the God of Battles for delivering it into their grasp.

Fairy-like it stretched before them, dazzling with the green of its copper domes and the minarets of yellow stone. Oriental in its architecture, and constructed in Asiatic style with five enclosures one within the other, it was like some fabled city of the Arabian Nights, sparkling with brilliant colours, the famous Kremlin towering above the palaces and gardens.

The advance-guard under Murat mingled with bands of Cossacks, who applauded him for his known valour, and the King distributed his jewellery and that of his staff among them; but an officer arrived from Miloradowitch with a threat of burning the city if his rear-guard were not allowed time to evacuate it.

Napoleon stayed his march therefore, and the day wore on. When Murat at last entered by the Dorogomilow Gate, he found that Moscow was deserted: the streets were empty, the houses closed, a few loathsome wretches released from the prisons, and a handful of the lowest of the low, alone surged round their horses near the Kremlin; but the inhabitants were gone, in a cloud of dust that hid the retreating Russian army, towards Voladimir. The gates of the Kremlin were battered open by cannon shot, a convoy of provisions captured, some thousands of stragglers were afterwards taken, but that was all; and on the gate of the Governor’s mansion at Voronowo, the following notice was found in French:—

With the army singing the “Marseillaise” Napoleon entered at night, and appointed Marshal Mortier governor, saying: “No pillage—your head shall be responsible for it.” And though several French residents acquainted him with the Russian intention of burning the city—that the senate had agreed to it with only seven dissentient voices, that all the engines had been removed, and they were treading on the brink of a volcano—he refused to believe it, and tried in vain to sleep.

At two o’clock in the morning they brought him news that Moscow was on fire!

When daylight came he hurried to the spot to reprimand Mortier and the Young Guard, but the marshal showed him that black smoke was issuing from houses that had not been opened, and the whole affair had evidently been carefully planned.

He went to the Kremlin—a vast structure, half palace, half castle, surmounted by the great Cross of Ivan, and built on a hill—from which he wrote overtures of peace to the Czar, overtures that received no attention.

In spite of the efforts of the soldiers the flames spread, a ball of fire had been let down into Prince Trubetskoi’s palace, the bazaar was in a blaze, and the strong north wind blew towards the Kremlin itself, which, report whispered, was undermined.

Murat, Eugène, and Berthier urged the Emperor to leave the city, without success: he had come there, and there he would remain—a conqueror in the very centre of the Russian empire. But the cry arose that the Kremlin itself was on fire: a police-agent was discovered near the burning tower, and bayoneted by the Old Guard almost in Napoleon’s presence. There was no longer time for hesitation, or dreams of empty glory, and passing down the northern staircase, where the massacre of the Strelitzes took place under Peter the Great, he left the city for the castle of Petrowsky, a league on the St. Petersburg road.

The army also marched out, encamping in the fields, eating their horseflesh from silver dishes and swathing their wounds with costly silks, the rain falling in torrents, and Moscow a sheet of fire for four days.

Much has been written of Napoleon’s escape by a postern, of hurried wanderings through burning lanes, past convoys of powder, which the whirling sparks might have ignited at any moment, and various dramatic situations dear to the French historian. In point of fact, he ran little personal risk, and left the Kremlin by the great gate, returning thither when the flames had abated, and ordering the Guard to occupy the ruins of the city on the 20th and 21st.

About a tenth of the houses remained intact, especially in the Kitaigorod, or Chinese quarter; many rich merchants’ dwellings, and here and there a palace or church reared their barbaric forms amid the general chaos; gay flower-beds still bloomed in the suburbs, and the old red wall that surrounded the Kremlin was comparatively unharmed; but the aspect of the place, which should have furnished winter quarters for the Grande Armée, struck a chill into the hearts of all, and caused the Emperor to say that “the commerce of Russia was ruined for a century, and the nation had been put back fifty years.” In six, however, a new Moscow had arisen and Napoleon was a captive in St. Helena!

Six thousand Russian wounded are said to have been in the city when the French entered: what became of them one dare not contemplate.

On the return of the troops universal pillage became the order of the day, and readers of the early French editions of Labaume’s narrative will understand why I pass much over in silence. Some of the inhabitants had returned, others had been concealed in the vaults of churches and the cellars of their homes; but the grenadiers routed them out and committed unmentionable excesses.

In the camps and quarters all the wealth of the East lay scattered about under foot: priceless carpets, velvet hangings, lamps of gold and silver set with gems, ecclesiastical vestments and works of art, became the prey of settlers and the riff-raff of Parisian slums; choice wines and liqueurs flowed like water; lace, linen, and ladies’ jewellery were taken from carved chests and coffers of exquisite workmanship, for the household effects had been left untouched when the city was abandoned.

Drunken sappers lolled on sofas covered with costly satin, and muddy boots were cleansed on rich furs and Cashmere shawls of enormous value: seldom had an army, famed for its rapacity, had such an opportunity for its gratification, while, with the Russian forces, white bread was six shillings a loaf, sugar ten shillings a pound, and butter unprocurable at any price.

In the midst of this disorder, the real originator of it all dated his correspondence from the Kremlin Palace, and thought of pushing on to St. Petersburg. A march of nine hundred leagues, with sixty conflicts en route, had produced nothing, difficulties were increasing, winter was coming fast. Still the Czar kept an ominous silence, and although an armistice had been declared, the Russians daily cut off the foraging parties, and the peasantry rose to arms.

“Take your three-pronged forks,” wrote Rostopschin in his proclamation to them. “A Frenchman is no heavier than a sheaf of corn!”

Murat, always to the front, had followed Kutusoff in his circuitous march round Moscow, and lay observing him between that city and Kalouga, fighting two sharp but indecisive actions—Czerikowo and Winkowo.

During the truce the Russian officers asked the French if they had not corn, and air, and graves enough in their own country; adding, “In a fortnight the nails will drop from your fingers.”

The little pale-faced man grew visibly paler with anxiety, and went on hoping against hope; discussing poetry just arrived from Paris, drawing up regulations for the Comédie Française, and trying to reassure himself that the winter was still far off by poring over the almanacks for forty years back, and trusting to the hot sun that still shone in a blue sky above him.

Chef d’escadron Marthod, with fifty Dragoons of the Guard—his Guard, so seldom defeated—had been cut off while foraging. A slight fall of snow lay white for a few hours on the plain—a foretaste of what was coming. No message arrived from Alexander, and one day, to crown all, while he was reviewing some troops, young Beranger galloped in with the alarming news that Murat had been overthrown at Tarutina, near Winkowo, two generals being killed, the King wounded, and the advance guard almost destroyed.

It was clearly time to go, and dismissing the troops, Napoleon issued orders for immediate departure, leaving Moscow late the same evening, October 18th, or, as some say, before dawn on the 19th, Marshal Mortier remaining behind with the Young Guard to cover the retreat and blow up the Kremlin.

Where are the words that will paint that enormous and disorderly throng moving in a ragged column over the plain to the south of the ruined city? Coats and gaiters were patched and mended; shakoes assumed every shape but the regulation one; brass no longer shone, and steel had grown rusty, as the troops straggled onward, their knapsacks bulging with plunder; bearskin-capped grenadiers pushing wheelbarrows full of gold and silver plate, and the ambulance waggons creaking and groaning with costly brocade, household furniture, pictures, statuary, and every conceivable articles of value the pillagers could carry away.

Napoleon set the example; for the huge Cross of Ivan, torn down by his orders, lumbered along with many other trophies, under a strong escort, and miles of carts of every description thronged the road and the fields on either side.

The French residents fled in the wake of the army; delicate ladies, clad in thin dresses and stuff shoes, peering at the strange procession from the windows of travelling-carriages; wounded soldiers jolted by, lying on piles of loot, their aching limbs ill-tended amid the lavish profusion of spoil, for never has man’s selfishness displayed itself more forcibly than during that terrible retreat.

Night fell, and the host halted only a league from the city. With the 103,000 men who marched, more than 500 guns were dragged by lean horses, the Emperor insisting that they should not be abandoned; but at the present moment the bulk of them are ranged in rows in the great square of the Kremlin—a lasting memorial of that awful war.

Two roads led from Moscow to Kalouga, and Napoleon pushed along the old one, on which Kutusoff awaited him; but at Krasno Pachra, the Emperor turned off to the right and crossed the fields to the new road, in the rain, which hampered the artillery and lost much time; but once on the causeway, which they gained on the 23rd, they set their faces towards Kalouga again, trusting to pass Kutusoff undetected in one day’s march.

Napoleon slept at Borowsk that night, and Delzons had occupied Malo Jaroslavetz, four leagues in advance.

In the early morning, however, Doctoroff, with the 6th Corps of Kutusoff’s army, came shouting out of the woods, drove Delzons down the steep hill, and commenced one of the fiercest battles of the campaign.

At sunrise Delzons forced the town again, and the victory seemed won, but a ball through the head slew him. His brother tried to carry him out of the mêlée, and another ball laid him lifeless. Guilleminot placed a hundred grenadiers in the churchyard on the left of the road, and for hours it became a mimic Hougoumont, the Russians alternately charging past it and being driven up again, exposed to a hot fire from the loopholed wall.

The whole of the 14th Division was engaged, and the fight surged along the high road, now on the heights, now in the valley by the river; the wooden town ignited by the howitzers, and burning the wounded, while the guns, breasting the hill at a gallop, scrunched the charred corpses, grinding the living and the dead into a sickening pulp.

The 15th Division, mostly Italians, attacked the burning town and suburbs, and took it for the fourth time, but were driven back to the foot of the slope, and as a last resource, Eugène advanced with his Guard. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Divisions rallying, and Colonel Peraldi charging bravely with the Italian Chasseurs, they gained the heights for the last time, and the Russians, 50,000 strong (some say 90,000), retired from their vantage ground before 18,000 men, who had fought uphill against the most stubborn resistance.

All the eye witnesses speak of the awful sight presented by the high road and churchyard. The brothers Delzons were buried in one grave, and the Grenadiers of the 35th fired a salute over General Fontane; while Napoleon himself had a narrow escape as he hurried towards the sound of the cannonading.

The road was blocked by the baggage train; stragglers marched along in safety in the midst of the army, when the Emperor, Rapp, Berthier, and a few officers, having outstripped the escort, saw bands of Cossacks darting out of the woods, between the rear of the advance-guard and the head of the Grande Armée.

“Turn back!” shouted Rapp; “it is they!” and grasping the bridle, he pulled the Emperor’s charger round.

Reining in by the roadside, Napoleon drew his sword, and they awaited the attack, Rapp riding forward to shield his Emperor.

A Cossack’s lance penetrated six inches into the chest of Rapp’s horse and brought him down, but the staff rescued him, and unconscious of the prize within their reach, the Cossacks rode for the baggage waggons, until the cavalry of the Guard came up and drove them into the woods again. They were 6,000 of Platoff’s men, and Napoleon’s life had hung in the balance!

That night, in a weaver’s hut, filthy beyond expression, an emperor, two kings, and three marshals of France held a stormy council of war, at which Murat and Davout quarrelled, as was their wont, and which Napoleon broke up by saying, “It is well, messieurs—I will decide,” electing eventually to retreat by the most difficult road—that which the army had wasted on its advance.

It was the last time that they had any option in the matter. A few days more, and the retreat became a disorderly rout—emperor, kings, marshals, and men glad to seize the first road that led them from their remorseless enemies.

On the 23rd, at half-past one in the morning, a hollow boom had startled their ears, even those who were expecting it. The capitaine Ottone, of the Naval Artillery, had fired his train. Mortier’s orders were executed, and the Kremlin had been partially blown up by 180,000 lbs. of gunpowder, Mortier rejoining, to the surprise of all, at Vereia with 8,000 men, mostly dismounted cavalry.

At Vereia there was another brush with Platoff, and his son, mounted on a magnificent white Ukraine horse, was killed by a Polish trooper.

On a hill covered with sombre fir trees the Cossacks buried the dead boy, riding slowly round him with lances lowered, uttering wild cries of grief, and then filing silently away with vengeance in their hearts.

Every village at which the French halted was burned on their departure, each succeeding corps helping to complete the devastation, so that the route was marked by ruined homes, huge dogs from each hamlet following the army until they increased to enormous packs, living on the dead who lined the road, and adding a new terror to the retreating invaders.

At Mojaisk the sky lost its intense blue, and the landscape became gloomy, the cold wind sobbing and wailing down the avenues of melancholy pines, and the men drawing closer to each other as they marched.

The columns debouched on to the field of Borodino, and sad memories were aroused at every step; for, although thousands of bodies had been burned by the Russians, the plain, the heights, and especially the redoubts were littered with broken weapons and innumerable accoutrements, the hands and feet of the hastily buried slain protruding from the sandy soil in all directions.

One ghastly incident, vouched for by the great majority of writers, occurred as the head of the army traversed the field. Cries were heard, and a mutilated spectre crawled towards the startled soldiers. It was a Frenchman, whose legs had been broken during the battle more than seven weeks before, and who, unaided, had lived on the putrid flesh around him, sleeping in the stinking carcase of a disembowelled horse.

Taking him tenderly up, the army hurried on. The skeletons they were leaving behind grinned silently as the straggling band passed by. A little further on, the wounded at the abbey of Klotskoi held out their hands beseechingly, and an order was issued that every vehicle should carry at least one of them, the weakest being left to the tender mercies of the Russians.

Every now and again a dull explosion came from the line of march as caisson after caisson was blown up when the horses became too weak to drag them; and a few miles on the road to Gjatz a terrible outcry arose as wounded men were found lying on the ground, having been thrown out of the sutler’s carts in order that the vile wretches might save their plunder—one sufferer, a general, living just long enough to tell the tale.

As evening drew down and Napoleon approached Gjatz a fresh horror awaited him; for Russian dead, still warm, and with their brains battered out in a peculiar manner, were met with at every few yards. The escort of Poles, Portuguese, and Spaniards told off to guard the prisoners had chosen that method of ridding themselves of the weakly ones who lagged behind.

A stringent order went forth, and the murders ceased; but every night the miserable captives were herded together like cattle, without fire, on the bare ground, a meagre ration of raw horseflesh served out to them, and when that failed the frantic wretches turned cannibals and devoured each other.

The 4th Corps, under Eugène, meanwhile followed the Imperial column, and Davout commanded the rear-guard, five days’ march behind.

Intense cold had now set in, and the land was icebound; violent winds fluttered the ragged uniforms, the fifteen days’ rations brought from Moscow were exhausted, and the depth of misery seemed to have been reached. Yet all this was as nothing to the sufferings in store.

Napoleon waited thirty-six hours at Wiazma for the rear-guard to come up, and seeing no sign of it, left Ney there to relieve it, and marched for Dorogobouje on the 1st November; while Eugène and Davout, arriving at Wiazma on the 3rd, found Ney hotly engaged with Miloradowitch, the Russian Murat, who opposed further advance.

A battle ensued, lasting many hours. Great heroism was displayed, especially by the 25th, 57th, and 85th Regiments, and at length Eugène got away through the town; Davout, in his turn, retiring step by step before 20,000 men and the crashing fire of twenty-four guns, was met by another force in the winding streets, and only extricated himself after tremendous loss, the bulk of the Russians under old Kutusoff remaining motionless within earshot, in spite of all the efforts of Sir Robert Wilson to induce him to attack.

During the fourteen days since the Grande Armée left Moscow it had lost 43,000 men, reducing its numbers to 60,000; and its condition may be understood from the fact that the day after Wiazma a little flour, carefully measured out in a spoon, formed the only food of the officers of the 4th Corps.

The dogs howled round the tail of the straggling columns, croaking ravens followed in black flocks. When a horse fell the hungry soldiers rushed upon it and tore it to pieces before life was extinct; and on the 6th November the sun disappeared, a grey fog enveloped the troops, the wind dashed them one against the other as they stumbled mechanically along, AND IT BEGAN TO SNOW!

Whirled on the storm wind, the flakes shut out the country on either hand. No sooner had a waggon—a gun carriage—a decimated regiment gone by than it was instantly lost to sight. The road vanished, the hollows were filled up; one could pass within twenty yards of a log hut and not see it. Everything became white—a pitiless, monotonous, dead level of snow, and strong men sobbed struggling onward—as they hoped—towards that Belle France that not a third of their number were destined to reach again.

Napoleon was on the heights above Mikelewska when the snow began, and news of the most serious import reached him at the same moment, Count Daru arriving with the account of General Mallet’s attempted conspiracy in Paris.

Surrounded by a circle of his Chasseurs, shivering in their scarlet pelisses, the Emperor listened to the startling narrative, the storm howling round him as he bent over the neck of his horse; and even when he retired into a posthouse to digest the alarming intelligence his cup of bitterness was not full, for Colonel Dalbignac came from the rear-guard, which Ney had taken over, with a terrible report of the disorder that the marshal had discovered at Dorogobouje.

“I do not ask you for these details, colonel,” said Napoleon; but some waggons arriving from Smolensk laden with provisions, he waved Bessières, who wished to keep them for the Guard, aside, and sent them on to Ney, saying, “Those who fight shall eat before the rest,” begging him, if possible, to check the foe, and allow the main body some time to reorganise at Smolensk.

The bulk of the Russian spoil, including the great Cross of Ivan, had been sunk in the lake of Semlewo, and cannon were abandoned at every mile. Generals and staff officers marched in bands, without men, without thought of anything but their own preservation. Twelve to sixteen horses were required to draw a single gun up the slightest hill, slippery as glass, and, with the thermometer registering twenty-eight and thirty degrees of frost, 10,000 wretched animals died in a single night—the terrible night of sixteen hours of darkness. In some Italian villages they still speak with horror of “the night of the fifteen hundred frozen”—that being the number of Italians that died on one occasion between sunset and sunrise.

Even the Russian Miloradowitch suffered from a frozen eye, and men who sat to rest a moment on the snow fell back in a stupor, a little blood gushed from mouth and nose, and their earthly woes were over.

Horrible the fate of those who straggled from the track and fell in with the villagers. Sir Robert Wilson at one place saw sixty naked Frenchmen laid in a row, their necks on a felled tree, while men and women hopped round them, singing in wild chorus, and battering out their brains in succession with faggot sticks.

At Wiazma fifty were burned alive; at Selino the same number, still breathing, were buried, the dog belonging to one of them returning daily to the graveside for a fortnight before the peasants slew it.

Yet amid all this misery, his men wearing bed quilts, pieces of carpet, women’s clothes from the baggage waggons which they began to pillage on the 7th November, and existing too often on the bodies of their comrades roasted by the flames of a burning log hut. Marshal Ney, well styled “the bravest of the brave,” set his face to the foe, and fought for ten days and nights against Cossacks—artillery, horse, foot, and dragoons—and, worst of all, the terrible Général Morizov, as the Russians called the frost. Holding each wood, contesting every hill, knowing that he was virtually sacrificed to save the wreck of the army, his men deserting, despairing, dying, he fought on foot to give them courage, his face livid with the cold, and almost unrecognisable from the long red beard he had allowed to grow.

Some idea of the stubborn character of those wild Cossacks may be formed from one little incident. One of them came into the Russian camp, having ridden twenty miles after being hit by a cannon shot. His arm was taken out at the shoulder-joint by the famous Doctor Wiley, who afterwards amputated Moreau’s legs at Dresden. During the operation, which lasted four minutes, the man never spoke, the next morning walked about his room, and drank tea, and, getting into a cart which jolted him fourteen miles over a Russian road, was afterwards heard of, many hundreds of miles on his journey homeward to the Don, doing well!

Small wonder, then, that the hoarse hourra struck terror into the fugitives, and that half a dozen of the barbarians would send a battalion of bleeding conscripts flying for their lives down the glittering aisles of drooping birches, whose fairy-like branches glistened with magic beauty in the wintry sunshine.

Eugène was attacked as his corps crossed the Wop with five or six thousand soldiers under arms, double that number of stragglers and wounded, and more than a hundred guns. The ford became blocked, the current was very rapid, and the river only partially frozen. A shameful pillage of the waggons took place, gold, silver, and costly plunder being scattered in the mud; and it was not until a brave Italian colonel named Delfanti crossed up to his waist in the floating ice that the others took heart and followed him.

Colonel Labaume tells us that he picked up a magnificent cup of splendid workmanship, drank some muddy water out of it, and flung it aside with indifference; but others, thinking only of gain, exchanged silver money for gold at a great sacrifice, secretly laughing at their comrades, who soon sank under the weight, while they escaped with the lesser bulk.

One officer, apparently lifeless, felt a man pulling off his boots, and exclaimed, “Ah, rascal, I have still need of them. I am not quite dead.”

“Eh bien, mon général,” said the soldier, coolly sitting down beside him, “I can wait.”

Napoleon rested five days at Smolensk; but so neglected had been his orders that no meat was found there—only rye flour, rice, and brandy—and the army fought desperately at the doors of the magazines, killing many men, raging at the Guard, whom they accused, with great reason, of being unduly favoured, and breaking out into excesses of every kind.

On the 14th November, at four o’clock in the morning, the main column left for Krasnoë, leaving little or nothing behind them for Eugène, Davout, and the valiant Ney, who had instructions to evacuate the city with a day’s interval between each corps, Ney to blow up the place when he took his departure.

Out of 37,000 dashing cavalry who had crossed the Niemen only eight hundred remained mounted at Smolensk, the 20th Chasseurs being credited with a hundred; and this remnant was collected under Latour-Maubourg, a brave and very popular officer, who, on losing a leg at Leipzig the following year, said to his weeping servant, “Mon ami, why do you grieve? In future there’s only one boot to clean.”

The army was now 42,000 strong, having lost 18,000 in the previous eight days; but it was estimated that 60,000 unarmed stragglers still impeded the march. Before leaving Smolensk, however, a reinforcement brought the force up to 47,000, to meet four Russian armies, one of them with 90,000, under Kutusoff, another commanded by Miloradowitch with 20,000 men.

The artillery of the Guard took twenty-two hours to do the first five leagues out of Smolensk. One company of sturdy Wurtembergers mustered four men, and when Eugène reached the abandoned city in a furious gale his men had to mount the slippery hill literally on their knees.

Beyond Korythnia Miloradowitch opened on the Imperial column, and Napoleon rode in the centre of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard. He seemed to bear a charmed life, for three times a certain Captain Finkein had penetrated Moscow to kill him, and he was often under fire during the retreat. This time, however, he had to pass a hill bristling with cannon, and the band struck up a then well-known air, “Where can one be happier than in the bosom of his family?”

“Stop,” cried Napoleon, fearful of the memories it might raise in the minds of the men. “Rather play, ‘Let us watch over the safety of the Empire.’” And to that air they marched past the batteries, soon leaving the danger behind them.

When the column had gone, Miloradowitch descended from the hills, drew across the road, and cut off the rear corps, who had to fight their way through with terrible loss.

Eugène tried to force a passage, but failed; and leaving his fires burning—and what miserable fires they were!—turned the flank of the Russians, and got by in the night.

At the critical moment the moon shone out, and the wretched band was challenged.

“Hist, fool,” whispered a Polish officer named Klisby in Russian. “Do you not see that we belong to Suvarow, bound on a secret mission?” And so, without interruption save from the Cossacks, the Viceroy joined his stepfather at Krasnoë, where Napoleon made a retrograde march to succour Davout, who came in, his baggage gone, his marshal’s baton taken, his men reduced to a few platoons, and with no news of Ney, who was reluctantly left to his fate, the army moving on Orcha, Mortier and the wreck of the Young Guard retiring slowly in the rear, after holding Krasnoë as long as possible, Laborde saying to the troops, “The marshal orders the ordinary time—do you hear?—the ordinary time, soldiers,” although under a heavy fire of balls and grape shot.

At Orcha Napoleon destroyed his papers. At Lubna the twenty-one staff officers of the 4th Corps crouched round a miserable fire in a cart-shed, with their horses behind them. At Krasnoë the brave Delfanti limped along on the arm of Villeblanche. A round shot struck him between the shoulder blades, carried off Villeblanche’s head, and they fell dead on the snow. Wherever one turned it was horror upon horror. Delicate women and little children lay by the roadside. The Cossacks stripped everyone they found.

Wilson has some dreadful details in his interesting diary. At one place a number of naked men sat round a burning hut, their backs quite frozen, when, turning to warm them, the fire caught the congealed flesh and roasted it in his presence.

Again, he saw four wretches huddled together, hands and limbs immovable, but minds yet vigorous, with two dogs snarling and tearing at their frozen feet; while nearly all the dead he came across seemed to have been “writhing with some agony at the moment their heart’s blood congealed.”

Woe to the man who lost his bivouac, and strayed to another fire. He was driven away with blows and curses from one after another until he sank and died. If anyone fell on the march, and implored a helping hand, the passers-by shook their heads and passed on, although many were still laden with plunder.

An awful thing occurred as Ney left Smolensk, showing the depths to which human nature can sink, a female sutler being seen to throw her little five-year-old boy off her heavily-laden sledge and leave him. Twice the marshal had him placed in her arms, and twice she flung the child from her, saying, “He had never seen France, and would never regret it, while she was resolved to see it again.” The soldiers could stand it no longer, They carried the boy safely through the rest of the march, and left the unnatural woman to perish in the snow!

Ney’s retreat with the rear-guard was one of the great events in French history, and has never been exceeded by any general for courage, determination, and self-reliance.

With barely 6,000 men, twelve guns, and 300 crawling skeletons—which it is a mockery to call horses—and burdened with 7,000 stragglers, whose wants and selfishness added greatly to the difficulties, he followed the traces of the Grande Armée, easily recognisable by the burnt-out bivouacs with their circles of dead—the white mounds that indicated where a cuirassier, a dragoon, a barefooted voltigeur, slept his last sleep, and the patches of trampled, blood-stained snow strewn with helmets and corpses, over which the dogs wrangled and the ravens croaked in the dull light that showed a battle-ground.