During the advance, the Russians had regularly retired, frequently to the extreme mortification of Napoleon, who had ardently longed for a battle, resting his hopes on a decisive victory, and a speedy termination to the campaign. Barclay, the Russian General, had frequently taken up a position as if with the resolution of risking a battle, and as often did he disappoint the French by sounding a retreat, and leaving scarcely a vestige of his route. But at length exhaustion and stinted rations began to commit their ravages on Napoleon's soldiers. No sooner did they leave Smolensko, on the march to Moscow, than disorder began to prevail :

The truth is, that wine first failed them, then beer, even spirits; and, lastly, they were reduced to water, which in its turn was frequently wanting. The same was the case with dry provisions, and also with every necessary of life; and in this gradual destitution depression of mind kept pace with the successive debilitation of the body. Agitated by a vague inquietude, they marched on amid the dull uniformity of the vast and silent forests of dark pines. They crept along these large trees, bare and stripped to their very tops, and were affrighted at their weakness amid this immensity. They then conceived gloomy and absurd notions respecting the geography of these unknown regions; and, overcome by a secret horror, they hesitated to penetrate farther into such vast deserts.

From these sufferings, physical and moral, from these privations, from these continual bivouacs, as dangerous near the pole as under the equator, and from the infection of the air by the putrified carcases of men and horses that strewed the roads, sprang two dreadful epidemics-the dysentery and the typhus fever. The Germans first felt their ravages; they were less nervous and less sober than the French; and they were less interested in a cause which they regarded as foreign to them. Out of 22,000 Bavarians who had crossed the Oder, 11,000 only reached the Düna; and yet they had never been in action. This military march cost the French one-fourth, and the allies half of their army.

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Every morning the regiments started in order from their bivouacs; but scarcely had they proceeded a few steps, before their widening ranks became lengthened out into small and broken files; the weakest, being unable to follow, dropped behind: these unfortunate wretches beheld their comrades and their eagles getting farther and farther from them: they still strove to overtake, but at length lost sight of them, and then sank disheartened. The roads and the margins of the woods were studded with them: some were seen plucking the ears of rye to devour the grain; and they would then attempt, frequently in vain, to reach the hospital, or the nearest village. Great numbers thus perished.' The battle of Borodino was fought on the 7th of September. It cost the French upwards of 20,000 men. "The losses,"

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says our author, were immense, and out of all proportion to the advantages gained. Every one around him had to lament the loss of a friend, a relation, or a brother; for the fate of battles had fallen on the most distinguished. Forty-three Generals had been killed or wounded!" On the 14th of September, Murat entered Moscow, Bonaparte followed, and on the same night that noble city was on fire from one extremity to the other.

After disorder and famine had prevailed, till it was no longer endurable, after the armistice which Bonaparte had sought with the Russian General Kutusoff had terminated, and when it was found that Alexander did not even deign a reply to his proposals for peace, Napoleon at last resolved on leaving Moscow. He began his retreat on the 19th of October, from which time, till the middle of December, when the remnant of his army entered Wilna, there is nothing but a repetition of horrors. The weather had been previously cold but on the 6th of November the winter set in with a snow-storm, a powerful and annoying enemy hung upon the flanks and rear of Napoleon's ragged and famished troops, the cold rains impeded their march, hunger wasted their strength, and they sunk down and perished by thousands. The Grand Army, which passed the Niemen upwards of 400,000 strong, returned to Wilna composed of only forty thousand famished unarmed stragglers, and eight thousand effective troops. Independent of losses on their advance, on the road, in rivers, and in fields of battle, they lost alone in that ever-memorable and disastrous retreat all their baggage, 500 pieces of cannon, 31 eagles, 27 Generals, forty thousand prisoners, and sixty thousand dead!'

The conduct of Marshal Ney, who commanded the rearguard on the retreat, would of itself have rendered his name immortal. He often drew up,' says Count Segur, two thousand men against eighty thousand Russians: he returned the fire of two hundred cannon with eight pieces !'

We cannot resist extracting two of the concluding scenes of this terrible drama. The first is the passage of the Bérézina by Napoleon in person on the 28th of November:

'During the whole of that day, the situation of the ninth corps was so much more critical, as a weak and narrow bridge was its only means of retreat; in addition to which its avenues were obstructed by the baggage and the stragglers. By degrees, as the action got warmer, the terror of these poor wretches increased their disorder. First of all they were alarmed by the rumours of a serious engagement, then by seeing the wounded returning from

it, and last of all by the batteries of the Russian left wing, some bullets from which began to fall among their confused mass.

They had all been already crowding one upon the other, and the immense multitude heaped upon the bank pell-mell with the horses and carriages, there formed a most alarming incumbrance. It was about the middle of the day that the first Russian bullets fell in the midst of this chaos; they were the signal of universal despair.

Then it was, as in all cases of extremity, that dispositions exhibited themselves without disguise, and actions were witnessed, most base, and others most sublime. According to their different characters, some furious and determined, with sword in hand, cleared for themselves a horrible passage. Others, still more cruel, opened a way for their carriages by driving them without mercy over the crowd of unfortunate persons who stood in the way, whom they crushed to death. Their detestable avarice made them sacrifice their companions in misfortune to the preservation of their baggage. Others, seized with a disgusting terror, wept, supplicated, and sunk under the influence of that passion, which completed the exhaustion of their strength. Some were observed, (and these were principally the sick and wounded,) who, renouncing life, went aside and sat down resigned, looking with a fixed eye on the snow which was shortly to be their tomb.

Numbers of those who started first among this crowd of desperadoes missed the bridge, and attempted to scale it by the sides, but the greater part were pushed into the river. There were seen women in the midst of the ice, with their children in their arms, raising them as they felt themselves sinking, and even when completely immerged, their stiffened arms still held them above them.

In the midst of this horrible disorder, the artillery-bridge burst and broke down. The column, entangled in this narrow passage, in vain attempted to retrograde. The crowds of men who came behind, unaware of the calamity, and not hearing the cries of those before them, pushed them on, and threw them into the gulph, into which they were precipitated in their turn.

Every one then attempted to pass by the other bridge. A number of large ammunition-waggons, heavy carriages, and cannon crowded to it from all parts. Directed by their drivers, and carried along rapidly over a rough and unequal declivity, in the midst of heaps of men, they ground to powder the poor wretches who were unlucky enough to get between them; after which, the greater part, driving violently against each other and getting overturned, killed in their fall those who surrounded them. Whole rows of these desperate creatures being pushed against these obstacles, got entangled among them, were thrown down and crushed to pieces by masses of other unfortunates who succeeded each other uninterruptedly.

• Crowds of them were rolling in this way, one over the other, nothing was heard but cries of rage and suffering. In this frightful medley, those who were trod under and stifled, struggled under the feet of their companions, whom they laid hold of with

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their nails and teeth, and by whom they were repelled without mercy, as if they had been enemies.

Among them were wives and mothers, calling in vain, and in tones of distraction, for their husbands and their children, from whom they had been separated but a moment before, never more to be united: they stretched out their arms and entreated to be allowed to pass in order to rejoin them; but being carried backwards and forwards by the crowd, and overcome by the pressure, they sunk under without being even remarked. Amidst the tremendous noise of a furious hurricane, the firing of cannon, the whistling of the storm and of the bullets, the explosion of shells, vociferations, groans, and the most frightful oaths, this infuriated and disorderly crowd heard not the complaints of the victims whom it was swallowing up.'

The next scene exhibits the effects of the climate in the early part of December, and immediately subsequent to the departure of the Emperor from Smorgoni to Paris:

On the 6th of December, the very day after Napoleon's departure, the sky exhibited a still more dreadful appearance. You might see icy particles floating in the air; the birds fell from it quite stiff and frozen. The atmosphere was motionless and silent; it seemed as if every thing which possessed life and movement in nature, the wind itself, had been seized, chained, and as it were frozen by an universal death. Not the least word or murmur was then heard nothing but the gloomy silence of despair, and the tears which proclaimed it.

We flitted along in this empire of death like unhappy spirits. The dull and monotonous sound of our steps, the cracking of the snow, and the feeble groans of the dying, were the only interruptions to this vast and doleful silence. Anger and imprecations there were none, nor any thing which indicated a remnant of heat scarcely did strength enough remain to utter a prayer; most of them even fell without complaining, either from weakness or resignation, or because people only complain when they look for kindness, and fancy they are pitied.

Such of our soldiers as had hitherto been the most persevering, here lost heart entirely. Sometimes the snow opened under their feet, but more frequently its glassy surface affording them no support, they slipped at every step, and marched from one fall to another. It seemed as if this hostile soil refused to carry them, that it escaped under their efforts, that it led them into snares, as if to embarrass and slacken their march, and deliver them to the Russians who were in pursuit of them, or to their terrible climate.

And really, whenever they halted for a moment from exhaustion, the winter, laying his heavy and icy hand upon them, was ready to seize upon his prey. In vain did these poor unfortunates, feeling themselves benumbed, raise themselves, and already deprived of the power of speech and plunged into a stupor, proceed a few steps like automatons; their blood freezing in their veins,

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like water in the current of rivulets, congealed their heart, and then flew back to their head; these dying men then staggered as if they had been intoxicated. From their eyes, which were reddened and inflamed by the continual aspect of the snow, by the want of sleep, and the smoke of bivouacs, there flowed real tears of blood; their bosom heaved heavy sighs; they looked at heaven, at us, and at the earth, with an eye dismayed, fixed, and wild; it expressed their farewell, and perhaps their reproaches to the barbarous nature which tortured them. They were not long before they fell upon their knees, and then upon their hands; their heads still wavered for a few minutes alternately to the right and left, and from their open mouth some agonizing sounds escaped; at last they fell in their turn upon the snow, which they reddened immediately with livid blood; and their sufferings were at an end.'

These specimens will satisfy the reader of the Count de Segur's talents as a writer. They are of no ordinary cast. The fervor of his images, the elegance of his diction, the forcible and perspicuous language in which he arrays his recollections, all combine to increase the interest of events, which in themselves were awfully momentous.

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As to the work of his literary antagonist, General Gourgaud, it consists of many close columns of fastidious criticism, of frivolous objections obviously penned in a paroxysm of ill humor, of exceptions and denials palpably contradictory. General Gourgaud is well known as having been an active Orderly Officer" in the staff of Napoleon, and of having followed the fortunes of that great man, even after his " of Austerlitz" had ceased to shine propitiously. He is therefore passionately zealous in watching the fame of his master. Not content with protecting him from detraction, he seems equally fearful of commendation, as if he were jealous that it should proceed from any lip or pen but his own.

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His Critical Examination,' therefore, is the most finished piece of hypercriticism we ever read. Every sentence, every syllable of the work of the Count de Segur, displeases him. He impugns every fact, he carps at every opinion, he adds an item to, or deducts one from, every summary. The critic sneers at the historian's knowlege of geography in the following manner. He says,

The geographical knowledge which he (Segur) displays on the occasion is likewise defective when he states, that “all the rivers which in this country (Russia) run in the diction from one pole to another have their eastern bank com anding the western, as Asia commands Europe." Europe, in its northern part forms an elevated plane, of which Moscow may be considered the centre. Beyond this capital the slope of the plane has therefore the contrary effect of making the eastern banks of all the rivers in that quarter less elevated than their western banks.' Ff 4

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