urging towards it like a wave.

Then the Russians came down upon them, swift as a conflagration. Men,
women, children, and horses all crowded towards the river. Luckily for
the major and the Countess, they were still at some distance from the
bank. General Eble had just set fire to the bridge on the other side;
but in spite of all the warnings given to those who rushed towards the
chance of salvation, not one among them could or would draw back. The
overladen bridge gave way, and not only so, the impetus of the frantic
living wave towards that fatal bank was such that a dense crowd of human
beings was thrust into the water as if by an avalanche. The sound of a
single human cry could not be distinguished; there was a dull crash as
if an enormous stone had fallen into the water--and the Beresina was
covered with corpses.

The violent recoil of those in front, striving to escape this death,
brought them into hideous collision with those behind then, who were
pressing towards the bank, and many were suffocated and crushed. The
Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to the carriage. The
horses that had trampled and crushed so many dying men were crushed and
trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which eddied from
the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the grenadier.
They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human faces and
living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left the bank
of the Beresina clear for a few moments. The multitude had hurled
themselves back on the plain. Some few men sprang down from the banks
of the river, not so much with any hope of reaching the opposite shore,
which for them meant France, as from dread of the wastes of Siberia.
For some bold spirits despair became a panoply. An officer leaped from
hummock to hummock of ice, and reached the other shore; one of the
soldiers scrambled over miraculously on the piles of dead bodies and
drift ice. But the immense multitude left behind saw at last that the
Russians would not slaughter twenty thousand unarmed men, too numb
with the cold to attempt to resist them, and each awaited his fate
with dreadful apathy. By this time the major and his grenadier, the
old general and his wife, were left to themselves not very far from
the place where the bridge had been. All four stood dry-eyed and silent
among the heaps of dead. A few able-bodied men and one or two officers,
who had recovered all their energy