“We, the cavalry (we were only a handful), had not much to do except turn our backs to the wind and receive some stray French round shot.  This, I may tell you, was the last of the French guns and it was the last time they had their artillery in position.  Those guns never went away from there either.  We found them abandoned next morning.  But that afternoon they were keeping up an infernal fire on our attacking column; the furious wind carried away the smoke and even the noise but we could see the constant flicker of the tongues of fire along the French front.  Then a driving flurry of snow would hide everything except the dark red flashes in the white swirl.

“At intervals when the line cleared we could see away across the plain to the right a sombre column moving endlessly; the great rout of the Grand Army creeping on and on all the time while the fight on our left went on with a great din and fury.  The cruel whirlwind of snow swept over that scene of death and desolation.  And then the wind fell as suddenly as it had arisen in the morning.

“Presently we got orders to charge the retreating column; I don’t know why unless they wanted to prevent us from getting frozen in our saddles by giving us something to do.  We changed front half right and got into motion at a walk to take that distant dark line in flank.  It might have been half-past two in the afternoon.

“You must know that so far in this campaign my regiment had never been on the main line of Napoleon’s advance.  All these months since the invasion the army we belonged to had been wrestling with Oudinot in the north.  We had only come down lately, driving him before us to the Beresina.

“This was the first occasion, then, that I and my comrades had a close view of Napoleon’s Grand Army.  It was an amazing and terrible sight.  I had heard of it from others; I had seen the stragglers from it:  small bands of marauders, parties of prisoners in the distance.  But this was the very column itself!  A crawling, stumbling, starved, half-demented mob.  It issued from the forest a mile away and its head was lost in the murk of the fields.  We rode into it at a trot, which was the most we could get out of our horses, and we stuck in that human mass as if in a moving bog.  There was no resistance.  I heard a few shots, half a dozen perhaps.  Their very senses seemed frozen within them.  I had time for a good look while riding at the head of my squadron.  Well, I assure you, there were men walking on the outer edge so lost to everything but their misery that they never turned their heads to look at our charge.  Soldiers!