Around him during these mortal days, every bivouac was marked by a heap of dead bodies.  There were collected men of all classes, of all ranks, of all ages; ministers, generals, administrators.  Among them was remarked an elderly nobleman of the times long passed, when light and brilliant graces held sovereign sway.  This general officer of sixty was seen sitting on the snow-covered trunk of a tree, occupying himself with unruffled gaiety every morning with the details of his toilette; in the midst of the hurricane, he had his hair elegantly dressed, and powdered with the greatest care, amusing himself in this manner with all the calamities, and with the fury of the combined elements which assailed him.

Near him were officers of the scientific corps still finding subjects of discussion.  Imbued with the spirit of an age, which a few discoveries have encouraged to find explanations for every thing, the latter, amidst the acute sufferings which were inflicted upon them by the north wind, were endeavouring to ascertain the cause of its constant direction.  According to them, since his departure for the antarctic pole, the sun, by warming the southern hemisphere, converted all its emanations into vapour, elevated them, and left on the surface of that zone a vacuum, into which the vapours of our hemisphere, which were lower, on account of being less rarefied, rushed with violence.  From one to another, and from a similar cause, the Russian pole, completely surcharged with vapours which it had emanated, received, and cooled since the last spring, greedily followed that direction.  It discharged itself from it by an impetuous and icy current, which swept the Russian territory quite bare, and stiffened or destroyed every thing which it encountered in its passage.

Several others of these officers remarked with curious attention the regular hexagonal crystallization of each of the flakes of snow which covered their garments.

The phenomenon of parhelias, or simultaneous appearances of several images of the sun, reflected to their eyes by means of icicles suspended in the atmosphere, was also the subject of their observations, and occurred several times to divert them from their sufferings.

CHAP.  XI.

On the 29th the Emperor quitted the banks of the Berezina, pushing on before him the crowd of disbanded soldiers, and marching with the ninth corps, which was already disorganized.  The day before, the second and the ninth corps, and Dombrowski’s division presented a total of fourteen thousand men; and now, with the exception of about six thousand, the rest had no longer any form of division, brigade, or regiment.

Night, hunger, cold, the fall of a number of officers, the loss of the baggage on the other side of the river, the example of so many runaways, and the much more forbidding one of the wounded, who had been abandoned on both sides of the river, and were left rolling in despair on the snow, which was covered with their blood—­every thing; in short, had contributed to discourage them; they were confounded in the mass of disbanded men who had come from Moscow.