UNDER THE RUSSIAN SNOWS.

The first empire of France was buried between the Niemen and Moscow.  The funeral was attended by vultures and Cossacks.

It was on the twenty-fourth of June, 1812, that Napoleon began the invasion of Russia.  The dividing line was the River Niemen.  The inhabitants fell back before him.  He had not advanced far when he encountered a new commander, with whom he was unfamiliar.  It was Field-Marshal Nature.  Marshal Nature had an army that the Old Guard had never confronted.  His herald was Frost, and his aid-de-camp was Zero.  One of his army corps was Snow.  His bellowing artillery was charged with Lithuanian tempests.  Hail was his grape and shrapnel.  The Emperor of the French had never studied Marshal Nature’s tactics—­not even in the Alps.

The Russian summer was as midwinter to the soldiers of France and Spain and Italy.  Some of the invading divisions could hardly advance at all.  The howling storms made impassable the ungraded roads; the 1200 guns of the Grand Army sank into the mire.  Horse-life and man-life fell and perished in the sleet of the mock-summer that raged along the watershed between the Dwina and the Dnieper.

The Russians under Kutusoff fell back to Smolensko.  There on the sixteenth of August they fought and were defeated with a loss of nearly twelve thousand men.  The way was thus opened as far as the Moskwa.  At that place on the seventh of September Kutusoff a second time gave battle, at the village of Borodino.  This was one of the most murderous conflicts of modern times.  A thousand cannon vomited death all day.  Under the smoke a quarter of a million of men struggled like tigers.  At nightfall the French had the field.  The defeated Russians hung sullenly around the arena where they had left more than 40,000 of their dead and wounded.  The Frence losses were almost equally appalling.  “Sire,” said Marshal Ney, “we would better withdraw and reform.” “Thou advise a retreat, Michel?” said the marble head, as it turned to the Bulldog of Battles.

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.