Among them were wives and mothers, calling in vain, and in tones of distraction, for their husbands and their children, from whom they had been separated but a moment before, never more to be united:  they stretched out their arms and entreated to be allowed to pass in order to rejoin them; but being carried backwards and forwards by the crowd, and overcome by the pressure, they sunk under without being even remarked.  Amidst the tremendous noise of a furious hurricane, the firing of cannon, the whistling of the storm and of the bullets, the explosion of shells, vociferations, groans, and the most frightful oaths, this infuriated and disorderly crowd heard not the complaints of the victims whom it was swallowing up.

The more fortunate gained the bridge by scrambling over heaps of wounded, of women and children thrown down and half suffocated, and whom they again trod down in their attempts to reach it.  When at last they got to the narrow defile, they fancied they were safe, but the fall of a horse, or the breaking or displacing of a plank again stopped all.

There was also, at the outlet of the bridge, on the other side, a morass, into which many horses and carriages had sunk, a circumstance which again embarrassed and retarded the clearance.  Then it was, that in that column of desperadoes, crowded together on that single plank of safety, there arose an internal struggle, in which the weakest and worst situated were thrown into the river by the strongest.  The latter, without turning their heads, and carried away by the instinct of self-preservation, pushed on toward the goal with fury, regardless of the imprecations of rage and despair, uttered by their companions or their officers, whom they had thus sacrificed.

But on the other hand, how many noble instances of devotion! and why are time and space denied me to relate them?  There were seen soldiers, and even officers, harnessing themselves to sledges, to snatch from that fatal bank their sick or wounded comrades.  Farther off, and out of reach of the crowd, were seen soldiers motionless, watching over their dying officers, who had entrusted themselves to their care; the latter in vain conjured them to think of nothing but their own preservation, they refused, and, sooner than abandon their leaders, were contented to wait the approach of slavery or death.

Above the first passage, while the young Lauriston threw himself into the river, in order to execute the orders of his sovereign more promptly, a little boat, carrying a mother and her two children, was overset and sunk under the ice; an artilleryman, who was struggling like the others on the bridge to open a passage for himself, saw the accident; all at once, forgetting himself, he threw himself into the river, and by great exertion, succeeded in saving one of the three victims.  It was the youngest of the two children; the poor little thing kept calling for its mother with cries of despair, and the brave artilleryman was heard telling it, “not to cry; that he had not preserved it from the water merely to desert it on the bank; that it should want for nothing; that he would be its father, and its family.”