ssian general,
Suwarrow, was placed in command of the armies of the two most powerful
empires then on the globe.

And who was Suwarrow? Behold his portrait. Born in a village of the
Ukraine, the boy was sent by his father, an army officer, to the
military academy at St. Petersburg, whence he entered the army as a
common soldier, and ever after, for more than sixty years, he lived in
incessant battles in Sweden, Turkey, Poland. In the storm of Ismael,
forty thousand men, women and, children fell in indiscriminate
massacre at his command. In the campaign which resulted in the
partition of Poland, twenty thousand Poles were cut down by his
dragoons. A stranger to fear, grossly illiterate, and with no human
sympathies, he appears on the arena but as a thunderbolt of war. Next
to the emperor Paul, he was perhaps the most fantastic man on the
continent. In a war with the Turks he killed a large number with his
own hands, and brought, on his shoulders, a sackful of heads, which he
rolled out at the feet of his general. This was the commencement of
his reputation.[26] His whole military career was in accordance with
this act. He had but one passion, love of war. He would often, even in
mid-winter, have one or two pailsful of cold water poured upon him,
as he rose from his bed, and then, in his shirt, leap upon an
unsaddled horse and scour the camp with the speed of the wind.
Sometimes he would appear, in the early morning, at the door of his
tent, stark naked, and crow like a cock. This was a signal for the
tented host to spring to arms. Occasionally he would visit the
hospital, pretending that he was a physician, and would prescribe
medicine for those whom he thought sick, and scourgings for those whom
he imagined to be feigning sickness. Sometimes he would turn all the
patients out of the doors, sick and well, saying that it was not
permitted for the soldiers of Suwarrow to be sick. He was as merciless
to himself as he was to his soldiers. Hunger, cold, fatigue, seemed to
him to be pleasures. Hardships which to many would render life a scene
of insupportable torture, were to him joys. He usually traveled in a
coarse cart, which he made his home, sleeping in it at night, with but
the slightest protection from the weather. Whenever he lodged in a
house, his _aides_ took the precaution to remove the windows from his
room, as he would otherwise inevitably smash every glass.

[Footnote 26: Histoire Philosophique et Politique de