their uniforms, and even their arms, with which they covered themselves.  Under this disguise, they mingled with their conquerors; and such was the disorganization, the stupid carelessness; and the numbness into which their army had fallen, that these prisoners marched for a whole month in the midst of them without being recognised.  The hundred and twenty thousand men of Kutusoff’s army were then reduced to thirty-five thousand.  Of Wittgenstein’s fifty thousand, scarcely fifteen thousand remained.  Wilson asserts, that of a reinforcement of ten thousand men, sent from the interior of Russia with all the precautions which they know how to take against the winter, not more than seventeen hundred arrived at Wilna.  But a head of a column was quite sufficient against our disarmed soldiers.  They attempted in vain to tally a few of them, and he who had hitherto been almost the only one whose commands had been obeyed in the rout, was now compelled to follow it.

He arrived along with it at Kowno, which was the last town of the Russian empire.  Finally, on the 13th of December, after marching forty-six days under a terrible yoke, they once more came in sight of a friendly country.  Instantly, without halting or looking behind them, the greater part plunged into, and dispersed themselves, in the forests of Prussian Poland.  Some there were, however, who, on their arrival on the allied bank of the Niemen, turned round.  There, when they, cast a last look on that land of suffering from which they were escaping, when they found themselves on the same spot, whence five months previously their countless eagles had taken their victorious flight, it is said that tears flowed from their eyes, and that they uttered exclamations of grief.

“This then was the bank which they had studded with their bayonets! this the allied country which had disappeared only five months before, under the steps of their immense united army, and seemed to them then to be metamorphosed into moving hills and valleys of men and horses!  These were the same valleys, from which, under the rays of a burning sun, poured forth the three long columns of dragoons and cuirassiers, resembling three rivers of glittering iron and brass.  And now men, arms, eagles, horses, the sun itself, and even this frontier river, which they had crossed replete with ardour and hope, all have disappeared.  The Niemen is now only a long mass of flakes of ice, caught and chained to each other by the increasing severity of the winter.  Instead of the three French bridges, brought from a distance of five hundred leagues, and thrown across it with such audacious promptitude, a Russian bridge is alone standing.  Finally, in the room of these innumerable warriors, of their four hundred thousand comrades, who had been so often their partners in victory, and who had dashed forward with such joy and pride into the territory of Russia, they saw issuing from these pale and frozen deserts, only a thousand infantry and horsemen still