turn. Baron von Müffling tells us that Kutusoff "would not hear a word
of crossing the Elbe; and all Scharnhorst's endeavors to make him more
favorably disposed toward Prussia were fruitless. The whole peace party
in the Russian army joined with the Field-Marshal, and the Emperor was
placed in a difficult position. On my arrival at Altenberg, I found
Scharnhorst deeply dejected, for he could not shut his eyes to the
consequences of this resistance. Unexpectedly, the death of the
obstinate old Marshal occurred on the twenty-eighth of April, and the
Emperor was thus left free to pursue his own policy." The first general
who had successfully encountered Napoleon, it would have been the
strangest of history's strange facts, if the Emperor had owed the
continuance of his reign to Kutusoff's influence, and that was the end
to which the Russian's policy was directed; for, though he wished to
confine French power within proper limits, he had no wish to strengthen
either England or any of the German nations, deeming them likely to
become the enemies of Russia, while he might well suppose that the
French had had enough of Russian warfare to satisfy them for the rest of
the century. Had his astute policy been adopted and acted on, there
never would have been a Crimean War, and Sebastopol would not now be a
ruin; and Russia would have been greater than she is likely to be in our
time, or in the time of our children.

Blücher, who completed the work which Kutusoff began, and in a manner
which the Russian would hardly have approved, was an older man than the
hero of Borodino. When called to the command of the Prussian army, in
March, 1813, he was in his seventy-first year; and he was in his
seventy-third year when his energy enabled him, in the face of
difficulties that no other commander could have overcome, to bring up
more than fifty thousand men to the assistance of Wellington at
Waterloo, losing more than an eighth of their number. He had no military