o meet him. When, on the
twentieth, they effected a junction, Ney had only eight hundred men in
the ranks with him; perhaps two thousand more were trudging behind in
disorder.

On the eighteenth a thaw had set in; it had begun to rain, the crust
broke under the men's feet, and the roads were lines of icy clods. The
soldiers had no foot-gear but rags; every step was an agony, and
thousands who had so far endured now gave up, and flung away their
guns and equipments. There were not more than twenty-five thousand
regularly marching. Already on the previous day the guard had shown
signs of demoralization. The Emperor alone seemed impassive. For days
he had shared the common hardships; clad in a long Polish coat of
marten fur, a stout birch staff in his hand, without a sign of either
physical or nervous exhaustion he had marched silently for long
distances among his suffering men. If we picture him standing at
Krasnoi, weighing how long he dared to brave an enemy which if
consolidated and hurled upon his lines would have annihilated them, we
must feel that collapse was prevented then only by his nerve and by
the terror of his name. Once more he threw the influence of his
presence into the scale, and, stepping before the guard on this
dreadful day, he said simply: "You see the disorganization of my army.
In unhappy infatuation most of the soldiers have thrown away their
guns. If you follow this dangerous example no hope remains." The state
of the men was, if possible, worse than ever; in fact, it was
indescribable. Night after night they had bivouacked in the snow. What
with the wet, the dazzling glitter, and the insufficient food,--for at
best they had only a broth of horse-flesh thickened with flour,--some
were attacked with blindness, some with acute mania, and some with a
prostrating insensibility. Those who now remained in the ranks were
clad in rags and scarcely recognizable as soldiers. It seemed,
therefore, as if such an appeal could only awaken an echo in an empty
vault; but such was the French character that, desperate as were the
circumstances, the cry was heard. The response was grim and sullen,
but the call was not in vain; and reaching Orcha on the nineteenth,
there was still an army. As yet, however, there was no news of Ney.

The sky seemed dark and the prospect blank when it was learned that
both Victor and Schwarzenberg had been steadily thrown back. The
Russian plan was for Wittgenstein and Tchitchagoff t