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TH

HE character of the Russian troops has been so little understood, and so unjustly calumniated, that an impartial statement of their manners, their discipline, and their military qualifications, and a comparison in these points between the organization of the Russian and the other armies of Europe, will at once do justice to a calumniated race of men, and assist the judgment while it gratifies the curiosity of the reader.

The Russian infantry is generally composed of athletic men, between the ages of eighteen and forty, endowed with great bodily strength, but generally of short stature, with martial countenance and complexion; inured to the extremes of weather and hardship, to the worst and scantiest food, to marches for days and nights, of four hours' repose and six hours' progress; accustomed to laborious toils, and the carriage of heavy burdens; ferocious, but disciplined; obstinately brave, and susceptible of enthusiastic excitements; devoted to their sovereign, their chief, and their country.-Patient, docile, and obedient; possessing all the energetic characteristics of a barbarian people, with the advantages engrafted by civilization.

The untrained Russian also, like the Briton, undaunted while he can front the danger, disdains the protection of favoring ground, or the example of his adversary, and presents his body exposed from head VOL. I.

to foot, either to the aim of the marksman or the storm of the cannonade.

No carnage intimidates the survivors; bullets may destroy, but the aspect of death awes not, even when a commander's evident error has assigned the fatal station. "Comrades, go not forward into the trenches!" cried out a retiring party to an advancing detachment; "retreat with us or you will be lost, for the enemy are in possession.""Prince Potemkin must look to that, for it was he that gave us the order: come on Russians," replied the commander. He and his men marched forward, and perished the victims of their courageous sense of duty.

The Russian, nurtured from earliest infancy to consider Russia as the supreme nation of the world, always regards himself as an important component part of the irresistible mass. Suwarrow professed the principle, and, profiting of the prejudice, achieved, with the most inadequate means, the most splendid success; and, whilst he was more regardless of their blood than any of his predecessors or contemporaries, he was affectionately endeared to every soldier as his parent; and national pride and personal admiration, have deified his memory as the presiding god of their battles

An acquaintance with the composition of his armies, a knowledge of their insignificant numerical strength, the assurance of the internal impediments that he had to encounter, so much augment the merit 4.U

of his exploits, that he is entitled to the reputation of one of the first captains of any age or nation. His very eccentricities were characteristics of his superiority of intelligence. They affected his estimation amongst superficial observers, but he disdained the sneer of the less enlightened, and steadily persevered in the course that his wisdom had traced for the attainment of his patriotic ambition. His unmerited disgrace broke a heart of which the vital principles were glory and loyalty, but neither the folly of the sovereign, nor the vultus instantis tyranni could restrain the tears or check the emotions of a soldiery who bewailed his loss as an irreparable affliction. Such was their enthusiastic affection for him, that when the coffin in which his body was conveying into the church of the citadel to be deposited near the remains of the great Catherine, was jammed in the doorway, and instruments were ordered to wrench a passage one of the grenadier bearers, indignant at the check, exclaimed "What is all this? Nothing could resist Suwarrow living, and nothing shall resist him dead." The sentiment was hailed as a just tribute to the invincible character of their chief. That consciousness supplied strength to zeal, and the remains of Suwarrow were borne triumphant to the grave!

Amidst the Russian qualities the love of country is also pre-eminent, and inseparable from the Russian soldier. This feeling is paramount, and in the very last hour his gaze is directed towards its nearest confines. The wounded drag their mangled bodies over the field to expire with more satisfaction in the effort of approaching their native boundaries, and the principle of patriotism has sometimes superseded even the impulse of humanity.

When general Beningzen was retiring upon Eylau, considerable numbers of stragglers formed, what they denominated, corps of marauders, who placing themselves under the orders of chiefs chosen by themselves, lived by violence till an opportunity offered for a return to Russia. A party of Russiar officers who had been taken at Landsberg, were marching to Prague on parole, but under the charge of some French

officers; a corps of marauders surprised them and after some violence the Russian soldiers were indiscriminately proceeding to despatch the French, when their officers interfered, and endeavoured to explain that as these French were but an amicable escort to them, who had given their parole, their lives must not only be preserved, but that. honor obliged the Russian officers to refuse the opportunity of release, and bound them to proceed as prisoners of war till regularly exchanged. The marauder captain stepped forward, "Will you" addressing himself to the Russian officers, "join and command us and conduct us to our country? If so we are bound to obey you, but with this annexed condition, that you do not interfere with our intention of putting to death the French who are in your company. "No, we cannot," was the answer, and arguments were urged to justify the propriety of their decision The marauders then assembled as a court-martial; and after some deliberation the captain readvanced and delivered its sanguinary decree. "The French for their atrocious conduct to Russian prisoners on every occasion have merited death; execute the sentence!" Obedience was immediate, and the victims were successively shot. This lawless assassination completed, silence was again ordered, and the leader resumed his harangue. "Now, degenerate Russians, receive your reward, you forgetting that you were born so, that your country has a prescriptive right to your allegiance, and that you have volun tarily renewed it to your sovereign, have entered into new engagements with their. most hated enemies, and you have dared to advance in your defence that your word must be binding in their service when you violate the oath you have sworn against them. You are therefore our worst enemies; more wicked, more unnatural, than those whom we have just slain, and you have less claim upon our mercy. We have unanimously doomed you to death, and instant death awaits you." The signal was immediate, and fourteen officers were thus massacred for a persevering virtue, of which history does not record a more affecting and honourable trait. The fifteenth

colonel Arsinoeff, of the imperial guards) was supposed dead, the ball of the mus quet, having entered just above the throat. He was stripped and the body abandoned on the frozen and freezing snow. Towards night after several hours' torpor, sense returned, and whilst he was contemplating the horror of the past and present scene, identified, not only by his own condition, but still more painfully by the surrounding corpses of his mangled friends, and momentarily becoming more terrific, from the apprehension of a horrible and solitary death, he perceived a light towards which he staggered with joyous expectation, but when he approached the hut a clamor of voices alarmed his attention. He listened and recognized his carousing murderers! He withdrew from imminent destruction to a fate, as he then supposed, not less certain, but less rude and revolting. He had still sufficient strength to gain the borders of a no very distant wood, where he passed the night without any covering on his body,, or any application to his open wounds. The glow of latent hope, preserved his animation, his fortune did not abandon him, and, as the day broke, he perceived passing, a peasant who gave him some milk, provided him shelter, and obtained him surgical relief. He recovered and went to Petersburgh. The emperor ordered him to pass the regiments in review that he might designate the offenders. He declined to do so, observing, that he thought it "unadvisable to seek an occasion of correcting such a notion of indefeasible allegiance; that it was better to bury in oblivion a catastrophe that could not be alleviated, than by an exemplary punishment hazard the introduction of a refined polity and manners, which by denationalising the Russian, prepared him for foreign conquest; that Russia was menaced by an enemy who could only triumph by the introduction of new theories, generating new habits; and although he had suffered from an effort of more liberal philanthrophy and respect for the laws of war, he would not, at such a moment, be accessary to innovations which removed some of the most

impregnable barriers to the designs of France."

The regular food of the Russian soldier is of the plainest and coarest quality, and their commissariat was so ill arranged, that even this issue was precarious, and their subsistence depended on their own diligence, or rather rapine, through a country where terror had induced every inhabitant to fly, and the anticipation of famine had buried many feet deep under snow and ground, the pittance destined for the future maintenance of the peasantry; but even with this miserable and uncertain provision they existed without murmur, and occasions were frequent in which they shared their insufficient meal with some starving wretch, whose humid eye implored what his power of utterance was almost too feeble to solicit.

The wear and tear however of a Russian army is enormous, in consequence of these bad arrangements; and the emperor might have increased his army one third solely by the establishment of an improved system. In this campaign such an addition would. have been decisive of victory.

The recruiting of the Russian infantry is not by volunteer enrolment. The magistrates select the most efficient young men according to the required number. The day of nomination is passed in general grief, and each family is in unaffected affliction at the approaching separation of a son or a brother. But no sooner is the head of the reluctant conscript, shaved, according to military habit, no sooner is he recognized as a defender of his country, than the plaints and lamentations cease, and all his relatives and friends present articles of dress or comfort to the no longer reluctant recruit: then revel, with the music. and the dance takes place until the moment arrives when he is to abandon his native home, and the adored tomb of his fathers; the eternal farewell is mutually expressed in repeated cheers, and the exulting soldier devotes his future life to the glory and pros-perity of his sovereign and his country.

The soldier however does not enter into a new state with which bis domestic habits had been at variance. From the earliest 4. U 2.

infancy, he has been accustomed to sports of manly and warlike character; and his body has been hardened by exposition to the elements and the use of his national bath, whilst no intemperance has vitiated his constitution, no unhealthy employment has impregnated the germ of decay.

Religious, perhaps superstitious, but not a bigoted intolerant, the Russian believes that heaven is a palace with many gates; and, while he respects his own faith, he gives himself no concern whether he shares his ration with a Mahomedan, a Protestant, or a Pagan. He professes no concern about any soul but his own; he invades not the right of option to any form of worship, and presumes not to select in the name of the Almighty, those who shall alone find favor in his sight.

The cossacks are a description of troop peculiar to the Russian army. Amalgamated in the Russian empire, the natives of the Don and the Volga still preserve a constitutional independence, which is possessed by none of the other provinces of Russia. Regulated by their own laws, exempt from taxes, and governed under the immediate authority of their own attaman, or chief, chosen from amongst themselves, they are relieved from all impositions; but the obligation of every male to serve gratuitously for five years with the Russian armies, and in some interior services connected with their own police. Blessed with a country of rich plains and noble rivers, which nature covers with the glorious canopy of a fine climate, and fills with redundant food, the cossack still retains his warlike character, and unites with the most enthusiastic admiration of his country, and a disposition to profit of its enjoyments, the ambition of martial service and an errant spirit of adventurous and foreign enterprise. On his native plains, he is the peaceful and civilized inhabitant, natural in his affections, and do mestic in his habits; but in other countries he is the lawless Scythian, respecting neither property nor rights.

Proud of his comparative freedom, he bears himself as one conscious of superiority

and privilege; and yet he tempers the haughty sense of these advantages with an Asiatic grace of manuer that renders its expression inoffensive to his associates and grateful to the stranger. Of late years the attaman has lost some of his power and consequence at St. Petersburgh, but as yet no serious encroachment has been made on the independence and character of the nation. He was almost an independent prince; but is now more subject to the laws and will of the autocrat. He has been deprived of some of the apapnages of royalty, and is perhaps more pliable to the views of Russia, in the character of one of her generals; but still the 'cossacks remain a people with the worth to deserve, and the resolution to maintain, their freedom or sacrifice themselves in the effort.

In the qualities of private character, the cossack is to no man inferior-affectionate to his family, faithful to his friend, hospitable to the stranger, and generous to the distressed; with graceful simplicity of manners, and a candour that commands confidence. His military virtues are splendid in common with the Russian nation; but hereditary habits of war, and perhaps a natural talent for that species of it in which they are engaged, adds an acute intelligence and capacity that is not generally shared. By the stars, the wind, and an union of the most ingenious observations, the cossack travels over countries unknown to him; through forests almos impervious, and reaches his destination, or tracks some precurser that he is directed to pursue, with the ardor of the instinctive bloodhound. Nothing can elude his activity, escape his penetration, or surprise his vigilance. Irreparable disgrace would dishonor the cossack, whose negligence offered an advantage to the enemy. The crimes of the passions, cowardice itself, would not attach so fatal à stigma; for, in the words of their attaman, "this offence would not only sacrifice the army to the swords of the enemy, but entail a reproach on all, that no valor or service could retrieve." And such is the general impression of its base character, that pa

instance of a surprise is on record. Mounted on a very little, ill-conditioned, but well-bred horse, which can walk at the rate of five miles an hour with ease, or in his speed dispute the race with the swiftest; with a short whip on his wrist, (as he on his wrist, (as he wears no spur,) armed with the lance, a pistol in his girdle, and a sword, he never fears a competitor in single combat.

Although the cossacks on some occasious, have discomfited regular cavalry by indirect attacks, it must not be sup posed that they are calculated to act generally in line. Their service is of a different character, which requires a greater latitude and liberty of operation. They act in dispersion, and, when they do reunite to charge, it is not with a systematic formation, but en masse, or what in Germany is called the swarm attack; a movement which is frequently the effect of a voluntary impulse that animates the whole body, and which is expressed by a yell of excitement more frightful and terrific than the war-whoop of the Canadian savage.

Dexterous in the management of a horse that is guided only by the snaffle, they can twist and bend their course through the most intricate country at full speed; and Platoff, in front of Hulsberg, when Buonaparte was retiring on Parsarge at the head of his regiment, charged into a pinewood filled with French infantry, en tirailleur, (who had, during the whole day, disputed possession with 4000 Russian infantry,) carried it in an instant, and decided the affair.

Notwithstanding, however, their military services, the security which their vigilance assures their army, and the distress their enterprises and stratagems occasion the enemy, they are injurious in countries where the good will of the inhabitants is of immediate importance, or where reguJarity and moderation can alone provide the army with its subsistence. Then the cossacks are too frequently scourges of terror and desolation, more fatal to friends than foes; sweeping and devastating in the lawless thoughtlessness of barbarian invaders, without any consideration of future necessities.

Such is the general character of the Russian armies; and the conviction of their superiority in all the qualities requisite to success, might have stimulated the emperor Alexander to a still more early resistance to the power of France, had not the long and repeated successes of the French army thrown around them an air of invincibility. Were these victories, and the melancholly events which have followed them, matter of remote, history, this romantic delusion would be of as little consequence as if its luminous, yet delusive halo, invested the brows of Cæsar or of Alexander ; but our safety as a nation, is unfortunately. deeply implicated in the judgment which we may form of the French armies, the genius of their leader, and the causes of their success. Our part of the spell flung around them has been fortunately dissipated by repeated practical experiment. No one for a moment is now tempted to doubt, that man to man, and regiment to regiment, the French soldiers are, both in a moral and physical point of view, so decidedly inferior to the British, that the antient romantic proportion of two to one, has in some instances scarcely put them upon an equality. Still, however, another part of the charm hovers around us. The general is invested with a double portion of that merit which he formerly divided with his armies, and we now hear of nothing but the commanding genius of Buonaparte, which, supplying all deficiencies, making up for all disasters, conquering all obstacles, gathers victorious laurels, on the very fields from which every other general, antient and modern, must have retired with defeat and dishonor. With this is combined a fearful and inaccurate appre hension, or rather a superstitious terror, of some new discovered and irresistible system of tactics, devised and acted upon by this irresistible leader. Such opinions, were they generally entertained, would form a bad omen for a nation forced unto collision a second time, (March, 1815,) for all that they hold dear, with the very person of whose irresistible skill in arms such an ineffable idea is held forth. I am not, however, very apprehensive that this