While
these were busy in collecting their plunder, Ney, at the head of a few
hundred French and Bavarians, supported the retreat as far as Eve. As
this was his last effort, we must not neglect to describe the close of
that retreat which he had continued uninterruptedly, and in the most
methodical manner, ever since he left Viazma on the 3d of November.

Sec. 24. Conclusion.

Finally Ney and his men arrived at Kowno, which was the last town of the
Russian empire. On the 13th of December, after marching forty-six days
under the most terrible sufferings, they once more came in sight of a
friendly country. Instantly, without halting, or looking behind them,
the greater part plunged into, and dispersed themselves in, the forests
of Prussian Poland. Some there were, however, who, on their arrival on
the friendly bank of the Niemen, turned round; and there, when they cast
a last look on that land of horrors from which they were escaping, and
found themselves on the same spot whence, five months before, their
countless eagles[179] had taken their victorious flight, tears gushed
from their eyes and they broke out into exclamations of the most
poignant sorrow.

"This, then, was the bank which they had studded with their bayonets!
this the allied country which had disappeared, only five months before,
under the steps of their immense army, and which then seemed to them to
be metamorphosed into moving hills and plains of men and horses! These
were the same valleys from which, under the rays of a brilliant sun, had
poured forth the three long columns of dragoons and cuirassiers,
resembling three rivers of glittering iron and brass. And now, men,
arms, eagles, horses, the sun itself, and even this frontier river,
which they had crossed replete with ardor and hope, had all disappeared.
The Niemen was now only a lengthened line of masses of ice, arrested and
chained to each other by the increasing severity of the winter. Instead
of the three French bridges, brought from a distance of five hundred
leagues, and thrown across it with such audacious promptitude, a Russian
bridge alone was standing. Finally, in place of those innumerable
warriors, of their four hundred thousand comrades, who had been so often
their partners in victory, and who had dashed onward with so much pride
and joy into the territory of Russia, they now saw issuing from these
pale and frozen deserts only a thousand infantry and horsemen still
under arms, nine ca