“Garde, how were you separated from the rest?”
“You will see to-morrow that I am lame. In a skirmish near Moscow I got a ball in my leg and a sabre cut on my shoulder. We who were wounded were all put into waggons by the Emperor’s orders, to be sent on to Smolensko; but those in charge of us, thinking our lives less precious than the plunder they were bringing from Moscow, flung us out by the wayside to die.”[40]
“Wretches! May the Emperor punish them as they deserve.”
“The Emperor has much more important things to think about. We of the Old Guard do not die easily; what would kill conscripts like you, only hardens us. I contrived to live and to creep along, picking up every day a comrade or two in distress, until we formed the little coterie you see now. I hope to overtake the Old Guard at Smolensko—if not, farther on. All I live for is to rejoin my colours, and to fight once more for the Emperor. But you are almost asleep. Sleep on, my boy; to-night, at least, you shall neither freeze nor starve.”
Henri was almost asleep. But he roused himself for a moment or two to breathe a thanksgiving to Almighty God for the help sent him in his need; together with an earnest prayer that he would be pleased to bring him through all dangers again to his native land, to see the face of his mother and of Clémence.
All succeeding generations will ask in half incredulous wonder how it came to pass that a splendid army, numbering over six hundred thousand men, and commanded by perhaps the greatest military genius that ever existed, could fall so suddenly and swiftly into a state of utter disorganization and abject misery. Certainly never, since those ancient days when the Red Sea rolled over the hosts of Pharaoh, or the angel of the pestilence smote the sleeping myriads of Sennacherib, was the arm of the Lord stretched out more visibly in the sight of the nations. Yet it is the glory of Infinite Wisdom, not to interpose amongst the wheels of human action with arbitrary breaks and changes, but so to direct the whole stupendous machine that wrong works out its own punishment and right its ultimate justification by the operation of everlasting laws. In gaining Moscow, Napoleon expected to gain everything—food and shelter for his troops, stores of all descriptions, treasures enough to satisfy the greed of those soldiers of fortune whom the hope of plunder had attracted to his standards. He expected to dictate a humiliating peace to the crushed and trembling Czar, and to make yet one more submissive tributary of hitherto unconquered Russia. But in the flames of Moscow and the heroic resolution of Alexander he found the destruction of his plans. Retreat became a necessity; and it had to be made through a country already devastated by the license of his armies—license for which he made himself responsible, which indeed he forced upon them, by neglecting to provide them with the necessaries of life. This cruel neglect recoiled upon his own head: even before the severities of a northern winter set in[41] the hosts of Napoleon were perishing with hunger. “If he expected us to fight for him, he ought to have fed us,” was the mournful accusation that fell from the dying lips of many a gallant soldier, who, faithful to the end, would allow himself to utter no other reproach. What famine and pestilence—the result of insufficient and unwholesome food—had begun, was completed by the arrows of the winter in the hand of God himself. As, on the occasion of another memorable national deliverance, “he blew with his wind,” and the foes of his people were scattered; so now he cast forth his ice like morsels, and who was able to abide his frost? Snow and vapour and stormy wind fulfilled his word. Of the six hundred thousand warriors who crossed the Niemen in the pride of their strength, only about forty thousand miserable fugitives—diseased, forlorn, and famished—straggled back again five months later.
CHAPTER XXI.
OVER THE BERESINA.
“Milder yet thy snowy breezes
Pour on yonder tented shores,
Where the Rhine’s broad billow freezes,
Or the tent-brown Danube roars.
Oh, winds of winter, list ye there
To many a deep and dying groan;
Or start, ye demons of the midnight air,
At shrieks and thunders louder than your own!
Alas! even your unhallowed breath
May spare the victim, fallen low;
But man will ask no truce to death,
No bounds to human woe.”