these miserable bands vanished.  Ney was indeed able to keep together some battalions of the rear guard, and present a bold aspect to the pursuers—­the marshal himself not disdaining to bear a firelock, and share the meanest fatigues of his followers; but elsewhere there remained hardly the shadow of military order.  Small and detached bodies of men moved, like soldiers, on the highway—­the immense majority dispersed themselves over the ice and snow which equalised the surface of the fields on either side, and there sustained from time to time the rapid and merciless charge of the Cossacks.

Beauharnois, meantime, discovered before he had advanced far on his separate route, that Witgenstein, having defeated successively St. Cyr and Victor on the Dwina, was already in possession of Vitepsk.  The viceroy therefore was compelled to turn back towards the Smolensko road.  Platoff turned with him, and brought him once more to action, “killing many,” said the Hetman’s despatch, “but making few prisoners.”  The army of Italy, if it could still be called an army, mingled with the few troops who still preserved some show of order under Ney, before they came in sight of Smolensko, and communicated to them their own terror and confusion.

Meanwhile the Russian “army of Volhynia,” after it was strengthened by the arrival of Tchichagoff from the Danube, had been able (as we have already hinted) to bear down all the opposition of Schwartzenberg and Regnier; had driven their forces before them, and taken possession of Napoleon’s great depot, Minsk, from which they might hope ere long to communicate with Witgenstein.  The armies of Witgenstein and Tchichagoff, then, were about to be in communication with each other, and in possession of those points at which Napoleon was most likely to attempt his escape from Smolensko, into Poland; while the main army itself, having advanced side by side with the French, was now stationed to the south-west of Smolensko, in readiness to break the enemy’s march whenever Kutusoff should choose; Milarodowitch, finally, and Platoff, were hanging close behind, and thinning every hour the miserable bands who had no longer heart, nor, for the most part, arms of any kind wherewith to resist them.  But the whole extent of these misfortunes was not known to any one of the French generals, nor even to Napoleon himself, at the time when Beauharnois and Ney at length entered Smolensko.

The name of that town had hitherto been the only spell that preserved any hope within the soldiers of the retreat.  There, they had been told, they should find food, clothing, and supplies of all sorts:  and there, being once more assembled under the eye of the Emperor, speedily reassume an aspect, such as none of the northern barbarians would dare to brave.

But these expectations were cruelly belied.  Smolensko had been, as we have seen, almost entirely destroyed by the Russians in the early part of the campaign.  Its ruined walls afforded only a scanty shelter to the famished and shivering fugitives; and the provisions assembled there were so inadequate to the demands of the case, that after the lapse of a few days, Buonaparte found himself under the necessity of once more renewing his disastrous march.  He had, as yet, received no intelligence of the capture of Minsk by Tchichagoff.  It was in that direction, accordingly, that he resolved to force his passage into Poland.