ranks of
these starving men who had marched for two months beneath the glaring
sun, parched with dust, through a country that seemed to them a Sahara.
Every house they approached, they had found deserted. Every barn was
empty. The very crops ripening to harvest had been gathered in and
burnt. Near to the miserable farmhouses, a pile of ashes hardly cold
marked where the poor furniture had been tossed upon the fire kindled
with the year's harvest.

Everywhere it was the same. There are, as God created it, few countries
of a sadder aspect than that which spreads between the Moskwa and the
Vistula. But it has been decreed by the dim laws of Race that the ugly
countries shall be blessed with the greater love of their children,
while men born in a beautiful land seem readiest to emigrate from it and
make the best settlers in a new home. There is only one country in the
world with a ring-fence round it. If a Russian is driven from his home,
he will go to another part of Russia: there is always room.

Before the advance of the spoilers, chartered by their leader to
unlimited and open rapine--indeed, he had led them hither with that
understanding--the Prussians, peasant and noble alike, fled to the East.
A hundred times the advance guard, fully alive to the advantages of
their position, had raced to the gates of a chateau only to find, on
breaking open the doors, that it was empty--the furniture destroyed, the
stores burnt, the wine poured out.

So also in the peasants' huts. Some, more careful than the rest, had
pulled the thatch from the roof to burn it. There was no corn in this
the Egypt of their greedy hopes. And, lest they should bring the corn
with them, the spoilers found the mills everywhere wrecked.

It was something new to them. It was new to Napoleon, who had so
frequently been met halfway, who knew that men for greed will part
smilingly with half in order to save the residue. He knew that many,
rather than help a neighbour who is in danger by a robber, will join the
robber and share the spoil, crying out that force majeure was used to
them.

But, as every man must judge according to his lights, so must even the
greatest find himself in the dark at last. No man of the Latin race will
ever understand the Slav. And because the beginning is easy--because in
certain superficial tricks of speech and thought Paris and Petersburg
are not unlike--so much the more is the breach widened when necessity
digs deeper than