ranks at Austerlitz—­I now find you in the Russian!  Nevertheless, you are a native of the Confederation of the Rhine—­therefore my subject—­and a rebel.—­Seize him, gens-d’armes!  Let the traitor be brought to trial.”  The Emperor’s attendants were wise enough to foresee the effects of such violence, if persisted in:  they interposed, and Witzingerode was sent on as a prisoner of war towards Smolensko.[62]

On the 28th of October, Napoleon himself, with 6000 chosen horse, began his journey towards Smolensko; the care of bringing up the main body being given to Beauharnois, while Ney commanded the rear.  From the commencement of this march, hardly a day elapsed in which some new calamity did not befall those hitherto invincible legions.  The Cossacks of Platoff came on one division at Kolotsk, near Borodino, on the 1st of November, and gave them a total defeat.  A second division was attacked on the day after, and with nearly equal success, by the irregular troops of Count Orloff Denizoff.  On the 3rd, Milarodowitch reached the main road near Viasma, and after routing Ney, Davoust, and Beauharnois, drove them through the town, which he entered with drums beating and colours flying, and making a passage for the rest of the army over the dead bodies of the enemy.  Beauharnois, after this, separated his division from the rest, and endeavoured to push for Vitepsk, by the way of Douchowtchina, and Platoff followed him, while Milarodowitch continued the pursuit on the main road.  The separation of troops so pressed is a sufficient proof that they were already suffering severely for want of food; but their miseries were about to be heightened by the arrival of a new enemy.  On the 6th of November, the Russian winter fairly set in; and thenceforth, between the heavy columns of regular troops which on every side watched and threatened them, the continued assaults of the Cossacks who hung around them in clouds by day and by night, rushing on every detached party, disturbing every bivouack, breaking up bridges before, and destroying every straggler behind them, and the terrible severity of the climate, the frost, the snow, the wind—­the sufferings of this once magnificent army were such as to baffle all description.

The accounts of the Russian authorities, of the French eye-witnesses who have since told this story, and, it must be added, of the Emperor’s own celebrated “twenty-ninth bulletin,” are in harmony with each other.  The enormous train of artillery which Napoleon had insisted on bringing away from Moscow was soon diminished; and the roads were blocked up with the spoils of the city, abandoned of necessity as the means of transport failed.  The horses, having been ill-fed for months, were altogether unable to resist the united effects of cold and fatigue.  They sank and stiffened by hundreds and by thousands.  The starving soldiery slew others of these animals, that they might drink their warm blood, and wrap themselves in their yet reeking skins.  The discipline of