And in fact, notwithstanding the long journies which they had to make, all these recruits joined the army.  There was no occasion to defer calling them together as in other years, till deep snows, obstructing all the roads excepting the high road, rendered their desertion impossible.  Not one failed to obey the national appeal; all Russia rose:  mothers, it was said, wept for joy on learning that their sons had been selected for soldiers:  they hastened to acquaint them with this glorious intelligence, and even accompanied them to see them marked with the sign of the Crusaders, to hear them cry, ’Tis the will of God!

The Russian officers added, “that they were particularly astonished at our security on the approach of their mighty winter, which was their natural and most formidable ally, and which they expected every moment:  they pitied us and urged us to fly.  In a fortnight, your nails will drop off, and your arms will fall from your benumbed and half-dead fingers.”

The language of some of the Cossack chiefs was also remarkable.  They asked our officers, “if they had not, in their own country, corn enough, air enough, graves enough—­in short, room enough to live and die?  Why then did they come so far from home to throw away their lives and to fatten a foreign soil with their blood?” They added, that “this was a robbery of their native land, which, while living, it is our duty to cultivate, to defend and to embellish; and to which after our death we owe our bodies, which we received from it, which it has fed, and which in their turn ought to feed it.”

The Emperor was not ignorant of these warnings, but he would not suffer his resolution to be shaken by them.  The uneasiness which had again seized him betrayed itself in angry orders.  It was then that he caused the churches of the Kremlin to be stripped of every thing that could serve for a trophy to the grand army.  These objects, devoted to destruction by the Russians themselves, belonged, he said, to the conquerors by the two-fold right conferred by victory, and still more by the conflagration.

It required long efforts to remove the gigantic cross from the steeple of Ivan the Great, to the possession of which the Russians attached the salvation of their empire.  The Emperor determined that it should adorn the dome of the invalids, at Paris.  During the work it was remarked that a great number of ravens kept flying round this cross, and that Napoleon, weary of their hoarse croaking, exclaimed, that “it seemed as if these flocks of ill-omened birds meant to defend it.”  We cannot pretend to tell all that he thought in this critical situation, but it is well known that he was accessible to every kind of presentiment.

His daily excursions, always illumined by a brilliant sun, in which he strove himself to perceive and to make others recognize his star, did not amuse him.  To the sullen silence of inanimate Moscow was superadded that of the surrounding deserts, and the still more menacing silence of Alexander.  It was not the faint sound of the footsteps of our soldiers wandering in this vast sepulchre, that could rouse our Emperor from his reverie, and snatch him from his painful recollections and still more painful anticipations.