On this desolate spot lay thirty thousand half-devoured corses.  A number of skeletons, left on the summit of one of the hills, overlooked the whole.  It seemed as if death had here fixed his empire; it was that terrible redoubt, the conquest and the grave of Caulaincourt.  Presently the cry, “It is the field of the great battle!” formed a long and doleful murmur.  The Emperor passed quickly.  Nobody stopped.  Cold, hunger, and the enemy urged us on:  we merely turned our faces as we proceeded to take a last melancholy look at the vast grave of so many companions in arms, uselessly sacrificed, and whom we were obliged to leave behind.

It was here that we had inscribed with the sword and blood one of the most memorable pages of our history.  A few relics yet recorded it, and they would soon be swept away.  Some day the traveller will pass with indifference over this plain, undistinguished from any other; but when he shall learn that it was the theatre of the great battle, he will turn back, long survey it with inquisitive looks, impress its minutest features on his greedy memory, and doubtless exclaim, What men! what a commander! what a destiny!  These were the soldiers, who thirteen years before in the south attempted a passage to the East, through Egypt, and were dashed against its gates.  They afterwards conquered Europe, and hither they came by the north to present themselves again before that same Asia, to be again foiled.  What then urged them into this roving and adventurous life?  They were not barbarians, seeking a more genial climate, more commodious habitations, more enchanting spectacles, greater wealth:  on the contrary, they possessed all these advantages, and all possible pleasures; and yet they forsook them, to live without shelter, and without food, to fall daily and in succession, either slain or mutilated.  What necessity drove them to this?—­Why, what but confidence in a leader hitherto infallible! the ambition to complete a great work gloriously begun! the intoxication of victory, and above all, that insatiable thirst of fame, that powerful instinct, which impels man to seek death, in order to obtain immortality.

CHAP.  VIII.

While the army was passing this fatal field in grave and silent meditation, one of the victims of that sanguinary day was perceived, it is said, still living, and piercing the air with his groans.  It was found by those who ran up to him that he was a French soldier.  Both his legs had been broken in the engagement; he had fallen among the dead, where he remained unnoticed.  The body of a horse, gutted by a shell, was at first his asylum; afterwards, for fifty days, the muddy water of a ravine, into which he had rolled, and the putrified flesh of the dead, had served for dressing for his wounds and food for the support of his languishing existence.  Those who say that they discovered this man affirm that they saved him.