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Page 16
Kutusoff abandoned Moscow. The inhabitants receded with him to the
great plains eastward. On the fifteenth of September, Napoleon entered
the ancient capital. The streets were as a necropolis. All was
silence. The conqueror took up his residence in the old palace of the
Czars. Here he would spend the winter in luxurious quarters. Here he
would extemporize theatres, and here he would issue edicts as from
Berlin and Milan. Lo, out of the Bazaar, near the Kremlin, bursts a
volume of flame! The surrounding region is lighted with the glare.
Moscow is on fire in a thousand places. The equinoctial gales fan the
flame. For five days there is the roar of universal combustion. Then
it subsides. But Moscow is a blackened ruin. Napoleon tries in vain to
open negotiations with the Czar; but Alexander and Kutusoff will not
hear. The French are left to enjoy the ashes of a burnt-up Russian
city.
Already winter was at hand. The snow was falling. The soldier of
fortune had at last found his destiny. On the nineteenth of October,
he left Moscow, and the retreat of the Grand Army began toward the
Niemen. Had the retreat been unimpeded, that army might have made its
way back to France with comparatively trifling losses. Indeed the fame
of having burnt the old capital of the Czars might have satisfied the
conqueror with his expedition. But no sooner did he recede than the
Cossacks arose on every hand, and assailed the fugitives. The soldiers
of the West and South dropped and perished by thousands along the
frozen roads. The ice-darts in their sides were sharper than Russian
bayonets. A hundred and twenty thousand men rolled back horridly
across the hostile world. The bridges of the Beresina break down under
the retreating army, and in the following spring, when the ice-gorges
go down the river, 12,000 dead Frenchmen shall be washed up from the
floods!
There is constant battle on flank and rear. All stragglers perish. The
army dwindles away. It is almost destroyed. Ney brings up the rear
guard, wasted to a handful. At the passage of the Niemen, soiled with
dirt, blackened with smoke, without insignia, with only drawn sword,
and facing backward toward the hated region, the "Bravest of the
Brave" crosses the bridge. He is the last man to save himself from the
indescribable horrors of the Campaign of Russia.
The remnants of the Grand Army dragged themselves along until they
found refuge in K�nigsberg. Napoleon had gone ahead toward France.
After Moscow he took a sledge, and sped away across the snow-covered
wastes of Poland, on his solitary journey to Paris. There is a
painting of this scene by the Slavic artist Kowalski, which
represents the three black horses abreast, galloping with all speed
with the Emperor's sledge across the cheerless world which he
traversed. He came to his own capital unannounced. None knew of his
arrival until the next day. At four o'clock in the morning of that
day, some one entered his office at the Tuileries, and found him with
his war-map of Europe spread out on the floor before him. He was
planning another campaign! In doing so, he could hardly forget that
the Grand Army of his glory was under the Russian snows!
WATERLOO.
One battle in this century rises in fame above all other conflicts of
the ages. It is Waterloo.
It was on the night of the seventeenth of June, 1815, that the British
and French armies, drawing near each other on the borders of Belgium,
encamped, the one near the little village of Waterloo and the other at
La Belle Alliance. They were close together. A modern fieldpiece could
easily throw a shell from Napoleon's headquarters over La Haie Sainte
to Mont St. Jean, and far beyond into the forest. During the afternoon
of the seventeenth, and the greater part of the night, there was a
heavy fall of rain. On the following morning the ground was muddy.
The Emperor, viewing the situation, was unwilling to precipitate the
battle until his artillery might deploy over a dry field.
As to the temper of the Emperor, that was good. Hugo says of him:
"From the morning his impenetrability had been smiling, and on June
18, 1815, this profound soul, coated with granite, was radiant. The
man who had been sombre at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The
greatest predestined men offer these contradictions; for our joys are
a shadow and the supreme smile belongs to God.
"'C�sar laughs, Pompey will weep,' the legionaries of the Fulminatrix
legion used to say. On this occasion Pompey was not destined to weep,
but it is certain that C�sar laughed.
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