elted snows, the iron-shod ranks flowed along the roads. From the
forests emerged black shakos, a row of bayonets glittered, and the
infantry, countless as ants, swarmed forth.

All were turned towards the north; you would have said that at that time,
coming from the Sunny South180 and following the birds, men too were
entering our land, driven on by the force of some instinct that they could
not comprehend.

Steeds, men, cannon, eagles flowed on day and night; here and there fires
glowed in the sky; the earth trembled, in the distance one could hear the
rolling of thunder.--

War! war! There was no corner in the Lithuanian land to which its roar did
not reach; amid dark forests, the peasant, whose grandfathers and kinsmen
had died without seeing beyond the boundaries of the wood, who understood
no other cries in the sky than those of the winds, and none on earth
except the roaring of beasts, who had seen no other guests than his
fellow-woodsmen, now beheld how a strange glare flamed in the sky--in the
forest there was a crash--that was a cannon ball that had wandered from the
battlefield and was seeking a path in the wood, tearing up stumps and
cutting through boughs. The hoary, bearded bison trembled in his mossy
lair and bristled up his long shaggy mane; he half rose, resting on his
forelegs, and, shaking his beard, he gazed in amazement at the sparks
suddenly glittering amid the brushwood: this was a stray bombshell that
twirled and whirled and hissed, and at last broke with a roar like
thunder; the bison for the first time in his life was terrified and fled
to take refuge in deeper hiding.

"A battle! Where? In what direction?" asked the young men, as they seized
their arms; the women raised their hands in prayer to Heaven. All, sure of
victory, cried out with tears in their eyes: "God is with Napoleon and
Napoleon is with us!"

O spring! Happy is he who beheld thee then in our country! Memorable
spring of war, spring of harvest! O spring, happy is he who beheld how
thou didst bloom with corn and grass, but glittered with men; how thou
wert rich in events and big with hope! I see thee still, fair phantom of
my dream! Born in slavery and chained in my swaddling bands, I have had
but one such spring in my whole life.

Soplicowo lay close by the highway along which two generals were pressing
forward from the Niemen. Our own Prince Joseph and Jerome, King of
Westphalia,181 had already occupied Lithuania from Grod