“Philippe, where are we?” she cried in a gentle voice, looking about her.

“Only five hundred feet from the bridge.  We are now going to cross the Beresina, Stephanie, and once across I will not torment you any more; you shall sleep; we shall be in safety, and can reach Wilna easily.  —­ God grant that she may never know what her life has cost!” he thought.

“Philippe! you are wounded!”

“That is nothing.”

Too late! the fatal hour had come.  The Russian cannon sounded the reveille.  Masters of Studzianka, they could sweep the plain, and by daylight the major could see two of their columns moving and forming on the heights.  A cry of alarm arose from the multitude, who started to their feet in an instant.  Every man now understood his danger instinctively, and the whole mass rushed to gain the bridge with the motion of a wave.

The Russians came down with the rapidity of a conflagration.  Men, women, children, horses,—­all rushed tumultuously to the bridge.  Fortunately the major, who was carrying the countess, was still some distance from it.  General Eble had just set fire to the supports on the other bank.  In spite of the warnings shouted to those who were rushing upon the bridge, not a soul went back.  Not only did the bridge go down crowded with human beings, but the impetuosity of that flood of men toward the fatal bank was so furious that a mass of humanity poured itself violently into the river like an avalanche.  Not a cry was heard; the only sound was like the dropping of monstrous stones into the water.  Then the Beresina was a mass of floating corpses.

The retrograde movement of those who now fell back into the plain to escape the death before them was so violent, and their concussion against those who were advancing from the rear so terrible, that numbers were smothered or trampled to death.  The Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to their carriage, behind which Philippe forced them, using it as a breastwork.  As for the major and the grenadier, they found their safety in their strength.  They killed to escape being killed.

This hurricane of human beings, the flux and reflux of living bodies, had the effect of leaving for a few short moments the whole bank of the Beresina deserted.  The multitude were surging to the plain.  If a few men rushed to the river, it was less in the hope of reaching the other bank, which to them was France, than to rush from the horrors of Siberia.  Despair proved an aegis to some bold hearts.  One officer sprang from ice-cake to ice-cake, and reached the opposite shore.  A soldier clambered miraculously over mounds of dead bodies and heaps of ice.  The multitude finally comprehended that the Russians would not put to death a body of twenty thousand men, without arms, torpid, stupid, unable to defend themselves; and each man awaited his fate with horrible resignation.  Then the major and the grenadier, the general and