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 Koenigsberg.  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.