did not perceive that they had only to do
with unarmed men.

Winter, that terrible ally of the Muscovites, had sold them his
assistance dearly. Their disorder pursued our disorder. We often saw
prisoners who had escaped several times from their frozen hands and
looks. They had at first marched in the middle of their straggling
column without being noticed by it. There were some of them, who, taking
advantage of a favourable moment, ventured to attack the Russian
soldiers when isolated, and strip them of their provisions, their
uniforms, and even their arms, with which they covered themselves. Under
this disguise, they mingled with their conquerors; and such was the
disorganization, the stupid carelessness; and the numbness into which
their army had fallen, that these prisoners marched for a whole month in
the midst of them without being recognised. The hundred and twenty
thousand men of Kutusoff's army were then reduced to thirty-five
thousand. Of Wittgenstein's fifty thousand, scarcely fifteen thousand
remained. Wilson asserts, that of a reinforcement of ten thousand men,
sent from the interior of Russia with all the precautions which they
know how to take against the winter, not more than seventeen hundred
arrived at Wilna. But a head of a column was quite sufficient against
our disarmed soldiers. They attempted in vain to tally a few of them,
and he who had hitherto been almost the only one whose commands had been
obeyed in the rout, was now compelled to follow it.

He arrived along with it at Kowno, which was the last town of the
Russian empire. Finally, on the 13th of December, after marching
forty-six days under a terrible yoke, 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
allied bank of the Niemen, turned round. There, when they, cast a last
look on that land of suffering from which they were escaping, when they
found themselves on the same spot, whence five months previously their
countless eagles had taken their victorious flight, it is said that
tears flowed from their eyes, and that they uttered exclamations of
grief.

"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 united army, and