Such was the crossing of the Beresina.  The ghastly tale was told once more with renewed horrors when the floods of winter abated and laid bare some 12,000 corpses along the course of that fatal stream.  It would seem that if Napoleon, or his staff, had hurried on the camp-followers to cross on the night of the 27th to the 28th, those awful scenes would not have happened, for on that night the bridges were not used at all.  Grosser carelessness than this cannot be conceived; and yet, even after this shocking blunder, the devotion of the soldiers to their chief found touching expression.  When he was suffering from cold in the wretched bivouac west of the river, officers went round calling for dry wood for his fire; and shivering men were seen to offer precious sticks, with the words, “Take it for the Emperor."[278]

On that day Napoleon wrote to Maret that possibly he would leave the army and hurry on to Paris.  His presence there was certainly needed, if his crown was to be saved.  On November 6th, the day of the first snowstorm, he heard of the Quixotic attempt of a French republican, General Malet, to overthrow the Government at Paris.  With a handful of followers, but armed with a false report of Napoleon’s capture in Russia, this man had apprehended several officials, until the scheme collapsed of sheer inanity.[279] “How now, if we were at Moscow,” exclaimed the Emperor, on hearing this curious news; and he saw with chagrin that some of his generals merely shrugged their shoulders.  After crossing the Beresina, he might hope that the worst was over and that the stores at Vilna and Kovno would suffice for the remnant of his army.  The cold for a time had been less rigorous.  The behaviour of Prussia and Austria was, in truth, more important than the conduct of the retreat.  Unless those Powers were kept to their troth, not a Frenchman would cross the Elbe.

At Smorgoni, then, on December the 5th, he informed his Marshals that he left them in order to raise 300,000 men; and, intrusting the command to Murat, he hurried away.  His great care was to prevent the extent of the disaster being speedily known.  “Remove all strangers from Vilna,” he wrote to Maret:  “the army is not fine to look upon just now.”  The precaution was much needed.  Frost set in once more, and now with unending grip.  Vilna offered a poor haven of refuge.  The stores were soon plundered, and, as the Cossacks drew near, Murat and the remnant of the Grand Army decamped in pitiable panic.  Amidst ever deepening misery they struggled on, until, of the 600,000 men who had proudly crossed the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of Kovno in the middle of December.  The auxiliary corps furnished by Austria and Prussia fell back almost unscathed.  But the remainder of that mighty host rotted away in Russian prisons or lay at rest under Nature’s winding-sheet of snow.[280]