When Napoleon, who was two leagues farther on, heard that Ney had just re-appeared, he leaped and shouted for joy, and exclaimed, “I have then saved my eagles!  I would have given three hundred millions from my treasury, sooner than have lost such a man.”

BOOK XI.

CHAP.  I.

The army had thus for the third and last time repassed the Dnieper, a river half Russian and half Polish, but of Russian origin.  It runs from east to west as far as Orcha, where it appears as if it would penetrate into Poland; but there the heights of Lithuania oppose its farther progress, and compel it to turn towards the south, and to become the frontier of the two countries.

Kutusoff and his eighty thousand Russians halted before this feeble obstacle.  Hitherto they had been rather the spectators than the authors of our calamities; we saw them no more; our army was released from the punishment of their joy.

In this war, and as always happens, the character of Kutusoff availed him more than his talents.  So long as it was necessary to deceive and temporize, his crafty spirit, his indolence, and his great age, acted of themselves; he was the creature of circumstances, which he ceased to be as soon as it became necessary to march rapidly, to pursue, to anticipate, and to attack.

But after passing Smolensk, Platof passed over to the right flank of the road, in order to join Wittgenstein.  The war was then entirely transferred to that side.

On the 22d of November, the army had a disagreeable march from Orcha to Borizof, on a wide road, (skirted by a double row of large birch trees,) in which the snow had melted, and through a deep and liquid mud.  The weakest were drowned in it; it detained and delivered to the Cossacks such of our wounded, as, under the idea of a continuance of the frost, had exchanged their waggons for sledges.

In the midst of this gradual decay, an action was witnessed exhibiting something of antique energy.  Two marines of the guard were cut off from their column by a band of Cossacks, who seemed determined to take them.  One became discouraged, and wished to surrender; the other continued to fight, and called out to him, that if he was coward enough to do so, he would certainly shoot him.  In fact, seeing his companion throw away his musket, and stretching out his arms to the enemy, he brought him to the ground just as he fell into the hands of the Cossacks; then profiting by their surprise, he quickly reloaded his musket, with which he threatened the most forward.  He kept them thus at bay, retreated from tree to tree, gained ground upon them, and succeeded in rejoining his troop.

It was during the first days of the march to Borizof, that the news of the fall of Minsk became generally known in the army.  The leaders themselves began then to look around them with consternation; their imagination, tormented with such a long continuance of frightful spectacles, gave them glimpses of a still more fatal futurity.  In their private conversations, several exclaimed, that, “like Charles XII. in the Ukraine, Napoleon had carried his army to Moscow only to destroy it.”