CHAP.  XI.

The spirits of the troops were still supported by the example of their leaders, by the hopes of finding all their wants supplied at Smolensk, and still more by the aspect of a yet brilliant sun, of that universal source of hope and life, which seemed to contradict and deny the spectacles of despair and death that already encompassed us.

But on the 6th of November, the heavens declared against us.  Their azure disappeared.  The army marched enveloped in cold fogs.  These fogs became thicker, and presently an immense cloud descended upon it in large flakes of snow.  It seemed as if the very sky was falling, and joining the earth and our enemies to complete our destruction.  All objects changed their appearance, and became confounded, and not to be recognised again; we proceeded, without knowing where we were, without perceiving the point to which we were bound; every thing was transformed into an obstacle.  While the soldier was struggling with the tempest of wind and snow, the flakes, driven by the storm, lodged and accumulated in every hollow; their surfaces concealed unknown abysses, which perfidiously opened beneath our feet.  There the men were engulphed, and the weakest, resigning themselves to their fate, found a grave in these snow-pits.

Those who followed turned aside, but the storm drove into their faces both the snow that was descending from the sky, and that which it raised from the ground:  it seemed bent on opposing their progress.  The Russian winter, under this new form, attacked them on all sides:  it penetrated through their light garments and their torn shoes and boots.  Their wet clothes froze upon their bodies; an icy envelope encased them and stiffened all their limbs.  A keen and violent wind interrupted respiration:  it seized their breath at the moment when they exhaled it, and converted it into icicles, which hung from their beards all round their mouths.

The unfortunate creatures still crawled on, shivering, till the snow, gathering like balls under their feet, or the fragment of some broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their comrades, caused them to stumble and fall.  There they groaned in vain; the snow soon covered them; slight hillocks marked the spot where they lay:  such was their only grave!  The road was studded with these undulations, like a cemetery:  the most intrepid and the most indifferent were affected; they passed on quickly with averted looks.  But before them, around them, there was nothing but snow:  this immense and dreary uniformity extended farther than the eye could reach; the imagination was astounded; it was like a vast winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army.  The only objects not enveloped by it, were some gloomy pines, trees of the tombs, with their funeral verdure, the motionless aspect of their gigantic black trunks and their dismal look, which completed the doleful appearance of a general mourning, and of an army dying amidst a nature already dead.