ned to fare like many others, which
are won in the mass, and lost in detail.

Murat himself at length grew uneasy. In these daily skirmishes he saw
half of the remnant of his cavalry melted away. At the advanced posts,
or on meeting with our officers, those of the Russians, either from
weariness, vanity, or military frankness carried to indiscretion,
exaggerated the disasters which threatened us. They showed us those
"wild-looking horses, scarcely at all broken in, whose long manes swept
the dust of the plain. Did not this tell us that a numerous cavalry was
joining them from all quarters, while ours was gradually perishing? Did
not the continual discharges of fire-arms within their line apprise us
that a multitude of recruits were there training under favour of the
armistice?"

And in fact, notwithstanding the long journies which they had to make,
all these recruits joined the army. There was no occasion to defer
calling them together as in other years, till deep snows, obstructing
all the roads excepting the high road, rendered their desertion
impossible. Not one failed to obey the national appeal; all Russia rose:
mothers, it was said, wept for joy on learning that their sons had been
selected for soldiers: they hastened to acquaint them with this glorious
intelligence, and even accompanied them to see them marked with the sign
of the Crusaders, to hear them cry, _'Tis the will of God!_

The Russian officers added, "that they were particularly astonished at
our security on the approach of their mighty winter, which was their
natural and most formidable ally, and which they expected every moment:
they pitied us and urged us to fly. In a fortnight, your nails will drop
off, and your arms will fall from your benumbed and half-dead fingers."

The language of some of the Cossack chiefs was also remarkable. They
asked our officers, "if they had not, in their own country, corn enough,
air enough, graves enough--in short, room enough to live and die? Why
then did they come so far from home to throw away their lives and to
fatten a foreign soil with their blood?" They added, that "this was a
robbery of their native land, which, while living, it is our duty to
cultivate, to defend and to embellish; and to which after our death we
owe our bodies, which we received from it, which it has fed, and which
in their turn ought to feed it."

The Emperor was not ignorant of these warnings, but he would not suffer
his resolution to