Still thousands of stragglers had stayed to burn abandoned wagons, and make fires to warm them before they attempted the bridge. On these the Russians descended, but it was too late for flight, and of the hundreds who attempted to swim the river, not one reached the farther bank. To prevent the Russians from crossing, the bridge was set on fire, and so horror was piled on horror that it would be gross offense to add another word.
Of half a million men who had entered Russia, there were only twenty-five thousand left after that crossing of the Berezina. These were veterans for the most part, skilled plunderers, who foraged for themselves, gleaning a few potatoes from stripped fields, shooting stray Cossacks for the food they had in their wallets, trading with the Jews who lurked in ruined towns, or falling back at the worst on frozen horse-flesh. Garrisons left by Napoleon on his advance fell in from time to time with the retreating army, but unused to the new conditions, wasted rapidly. The veterans found their horses useful for food, and left afoot, they perished.
Even to the last, remnants of lost regiments rallied to the golden eagles upon their standards, but these little clusters of men no longer kept their ranks, for as they marched the strong tried to help the weak, and often comrades would die together rather than part. All were frozen, suffering the slow exhaustion of dysentery, the miseries of vermin and starvation, and those who lived to the end were broken invalids, who never again could serve the emperor.
From Smorgony, Napoleon went ahead, traveling rapidly to send the relief of sleighs and food which met the survivors on the German border. Thence he went on to Paris to raise a new army; for now there was conspiracy in France for the overthrow of the despot, and Europe rose to destroy him. So on the field of Leipsic, in the battle of the nations, Napoleon was overwhelmed.
Once again he challenged fate, escaped from his island prison of Elba, and with a third army marched against armed Europe. And so came Waterloo, with that last banishment to Saint Helena, where the great adventurer fretted out his few sore years, dreaming of glories never to be revived and that great empire which was forever lost.
LII
A. D. 1813 RISING WOLF
This is the story of Rising Wolf, condensed from the beautiful narrative in My Life as an Indian, by J. B. Schultz.
“I had heard much of a certain white man named Hugh Monroe, and in Blackfoot, Rising Wolf. One afternoon I was told that he had arrived in camp with his numerous family, and a little later met him at a feast given by Big Lake. In the evening I invited him over to my lodge and had a long talk with him while he ate bread and meat and beans, and smoked numerous pipefuls of tobacco.” White man’s food is good after years without any. “We eventually became firm friends. Even in his old age Rising Wolf was the quickest, most active man I ever saw. He was about five feet six in height, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and his firm square chin and rather prominent nose betokened what he was, a man of courage and determination. His father, Hugh Monroe, was a colonel in the British army, his mother a member of the La Roches, a noble family of French émigrés, bankers of Montreal and large land owners in that vicinity.
“Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at Three Rivers (Quebec) and attended the parish school just long enough to learn to read and write. All his vacations and many truant days from the class room were spent in the great forest surrounding his home. The love of nature, of adventure and wild life were born in him. He first saw the light in July, 1798. In 1813, when but fifteen years of age, he persuaded his parents to allow him to enter the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company and started westward with a flotilla of that company’s canoes that spring. His father gave him a fine English smoothbore, his mother a pair of the famous La Roche dueling pistols and a prayer book. The family priest gave him a rosary and cross and enjoined him to pray frequently. Traveling all summer, they arrived at Lake Winnipeg in the autumn and wintered there. As soon as the ice went out in the spring the journey was continued and one afternoon in July, Monroe beheld Mountain Fort, a new post of the company’s not far from the Rocky Mountains.
“Around about it were encamped thousands of Blackfeet waiting to trade for the goods the flotilla had brought up and to obtain on credit ammunition, fukes (trade guns), traps and tobacco. As yet the company had no Blackfoot interpreter. The factor perceiving that Monroe was a youth of more than ordinary intelligence at once detailed him to live and travel with the Piegans (a Blackfoot tribe) and learn their language, also to see that they returned to Mountain Fort with their furs the succeeding summer. Word had been received that, following the course of Lewis and Clarke, American traders were yearly pushing farther and farther westward and had even reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. The company feared their competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent it.