CHAPTER XXIII. AGAINST THE STREAM.
Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten.
In the mean time the last of the Great Army had reached the Niemen, that narrow winding river in its ditch-like bed sunk below the level of the tableland, to which six months earlier the greatest captain this world has ever seen rode alone, and, coming back to his officers, said—
“Here we cross.”
Four hundred thousand men had crossed—a bare eighty thousand lived to pass the bridge again. Twelve hundred cannons had been left behind, nearly a thousand in the hands of the enemy, and the remainder buried or thrown into those dull rivers whose slow waters flow over them to this day. One hundred and twenty-five thousand officers and men had been killed in battle, another hundred thousand had perished by cold and disaster at the Beresina or other rivers where panic seized the fugitives.
Forty-eight generals had been captured by the Russians, three thousand officers, one hundred and ninety thousand men, swallowed by the silent white Empire of the North and no more seen.
As the retreat neared Vilna the cold had increased, killing men as the first cold of an English winter kills flies. And when the French quitted Vilna, the Russians were glad enough to seek its shelter, Kutusoff creeping in with forty thousand men, all that remained to him of two hundred thousand. He could not carry on the pursuit, but sent forward a handful of Cossacks to harry the hare-brained few who called themselves the rearguard. He was an old man, nearly worn out, with only three months more to live—but he had done his work.
Ney—the bravest of the brave—left alone in Russia at the last with seven hundred foreign recruits, men picked from here and there, called in from the highways and hedges to share the glory of the only Marshal who came back from Moscow with a name untarnished—Ney and Girard, musket in hand, were the last to cross the bridge, shouting defiance at their Cossack foes, who, when they had hounded the last of the French across the frontier, flung themselves down on the bloodstained snow to rest.
All along the banks of the Vistula, from Konigsberg and Dantzig up to Warsaw—that slow river which at the last call shall assuredly give up more dead than any other—the fugitives straggled homewards. For the Russians paused at their own frontier, and Prussia was still nominally the friend of France. She had still to wear the mask for three long months when she should at last openly side with Russia, only to be beaten again by Napoleon.