THE LAST CAMP-FIRES IN RUSSIA.
At Malodeczno, Napoleon suddenly determined to leave the wretched remnant of his army, and, accompanied by a few faithful officers, to return to France. Murat was left to command the army, and the greatest hopes of speedy relief and fresh triumph were excited by the Emperor before he departed. He journeyed very rapidly, and reached Paris on the 19th of December, two days after his memorable twenty-ninth bulletin had told France the disasters of the campaign. But the remains of the grand army—what was their fate?
On the 6th of December, the very day after Napoleon’s departure, the sky exhibited a more dreadful appearance. Icy particles were seen floating in the air, and the birds fell stiff and frozen to the earth. The atmosphere was motionless and silent; it seemed as if every thing in nature which possessed life and movement, even the wind itself, had been seized, chained, and, as it were, congealed by a universal death. Not a word or a murmur was then heard; there was nothing but the gloomy silence of despair, and the tears which proclaimed it.
“We flitted along,” says Segur, “in the midst of this empire of death like doomed spirits. The dull and monotonous sound of our steps, the crackling of the frost and the feeble groans of the dying, were the only interruptions to this doleful and universal silence. Anger and imprecations there were none, nor any thing which indicated a remnant of warmth; scarcely was strength enough left to utter a prayer; and most of them even fell without complaining, either from weakness or resignation, or because people complain only when they look for kindness, and fancy they are pitied.
“Such of our soldiers as had hitherto been the most persevering here lost heart entirely. Some times the snow sunk beneath their feet, but more frequently, its glassy surface refusing them support, they slipped at every step, and tottered along from one fall to another. It seemed as though this hostile soil were leagued against them; that it treacherously escaped from under their efforts; that it was constantly leading them into snares, as if to embarrass and retard their march, and to deliver them up to the Russians in pursuit of them, or to their terrible climate.”
And, in truth, whenever, for a moment, they halted from exhaustion, the winter, laying his icy hand upon them, was ready to seize his victims. In vain did these unhappy creatures, feeling themselves benumbed, raise themselves up, and, already deprived of the power of speech, and plunged into a stupor, proceed a few steps like automatons; their blood froze in their veins, like water in the current of rivulets, congealing the heart, and then flying back to the head; and these dying men staggered as if they had been intoxicated. From their eyes, reddened and inflamed by the constant glare of the snow, by the want of sleep, and the smoke of the bivouacs, there flowed real tears of blood; their bosoms heaved with deep and heavy sighs; they looked towards heaven and on the earth, with an eye dismayed, fixed, and wild, as expressive of their farewell, and, it might be, of their reproaches against the barbarous nature which was tormenting them. It was not long before they fell upon their knees, and then upon their hands; their heads still slowly moved for a few minutes alternately to the right and left, and from their open mouth some sounds of agony escaped; at last, in its turn, it fell upon the snow, which it reddened with livid blood, and their sufferings were at an end.
Their comrades passed by them without moving a step out of their way, that they might not, by the slightest curve, prolong their journey, and without even turning their heads; for their beards and hair were so stiffened with ice that every movement was painful. Nor did they even pity them; for, in fact, what had they lost by dying? who had they left behind them? They suffered so much, they were still so far from France, so much divested of all feelings of country by the surrounding prospect and by misery, that every dear illusion was broken, and hope almost destroyed. The greater number, therefore, had become careless of dying, from necessity, from the habit of seeing death constantly around them, and from fashion, sometimes even treating it with contempt; but more frequently, on seeing these unfortunates stretched upon the snow, and instantly stiffened, contenting themselves with the thought that they had no more wants, that they were at rest, that their sufferings were over. And, indeed, death, in a situation quiet, certain, and uniform, may be felt as a strange event, a frightful contrast, a terrible change; but in this tumult, this violent and ceaseless movement of a life of action, danger, and suffering, it appeared nothing more than a transition, a slight alteration, an additional removal, which excited little alarm.