the
tableland, to which six months earlier the greatest captain this world
has ever seen rode alone, and, coming back to his officers, said--

"Here we cross."

Four hundred thousand men had crossed--a bare eighty thousand lived
to pass the bridge again. Twelve hundred cannons had been left behind,
nearly a thousand in the hands of the enemy, and the remainder buried or
thrown into those dull rivers whose slow waters flow over them to this
day. One hundred and twenty-five thousand officers and men had been
killed in battle, another hundred thousand had perished by cold
and disaster at the Beresina or other rivers where panic seized the
fugitives.

Forty-eight generals had been captured by the Russians, three thousand
officers, one hundred and ninety thousand men, swallowed by the silent
white Empire of the North and no more seen.

As the retreat neared Vilna the cold had increased, killing men as the
first cold of an English winter kills flies. And when the French quitted
Vilna, the Russians were glad enough to seek its shelter, Kutusoff
creeping in with forty thousand men, all that remained to him of two
hundred thousand. He could not carry on the pursuit, but sent forward a
handful of Cossacks to harry the hare-brained few who called themselves
the rearguard. He was an old man, nearly worn out, with only three
months more to live--but he had done his work.

Ney--the bravest of the brave--left alone in Russia at the last with
seven hundred foreign recruits, men picked from here and there, called
in from the highways and hedges to share the glory of the only Marshal
who came back from Moscow with a name untarnished--Ney and Girard,
musket in hand, were the last to cross the bridge, shouting defiance at
their Cossack foes, who, when they had hounded the last of the French
across the frontier, flung themselves down on the bloodstained snow to
rest.

All along the banks of the Vistula, from Konigsberg and Dantzig up to
Warsaw--that slow river which at the last call shall assuredly give up
more dead than any other--the fugitives straggled homewards. For the
Russians paused at their own frontier, and Prussia was still nominally
the friend of France. She had still to wear the mask for three long
months when she should at last openly side with Russia, only to be
beaten again by Napoleon.

Murat was at Konigsberg with the Imperial staff, left in supreme command
by the Emperor, and already thinking of his own sunny kin