of the Cossacks
who hung around them in clouds by day and by night, rushing on every
detached party, disturbing every bivouack, breaking up bridges before,
and destroying every straggler behind them, and the terrible severity of
the climate, the frost, the snow, the wind--the sufferings of this once
magnificent army were such as to baffle all description.

The accounts of the Russian authorities, of the French eye-witnesses who
have since told this story, and, it must be added, of the Emperor's own
celebrated "twenty-ninth bulletin," are in harmony with each other. The
enormous train of artillery which Napoleon had insisted on bringing away
from Moscow was soon diminished; and the roads were blocked up with the
spoils of the city, abandoned of necessity as the means of transport
failed. The horses, having been ill-fed for months, were altogether
unable to resist the united effects of cold and fatigue. They sank and
stiffened by hundreds and by thousands. The starving soldiery slew
others of these animals, that they might drink their warm blood, and
wrap themselves in their yet reeking skins. The discipline of these
miserable bands vanished. Ney was indeed able to keep together some
battalions of the rear guard, and present a bold aspect to the
pursuers--the marshal himself not disdaining to bear a firelock, and
share the meanest fatigues of his followers; but elsewhere there
remained hardly the shadow of military order. Small and detached bodies
of men moved, like soldiers, on the highway--the immense majority
dispersed themselves over the ice and snow which equalised the surface
of the fields on either side, and there sustained from time to time the
rapid and merciless charge of the Cossacks.

Beauharnois, meantime, discovered before he had advanced far on his
separate route, that Witgenstein, having defeated successively St. Cyr
and Victor on the Dwina, was already in possession of Vitepsk. The
viceroy therefore was compelled to turn back towards the Smolensko road.
Platoff turned with him, and brought him once more to action, "killing
many," said the Hetman's despatch, "but making few prisoners." The army
of Italy, if it could still be called an army, mingled with the few
troops who still preserved some show of order under Ney, before they
came in sight of Smolensko, and communicated to them their own terror
and confusion.

Meanwhile the Russian "army of Volhynia," after it was strengthened by
the arrival of Tchi