to the right a sombre column moving endlessly; the great rout of the
Grand Army creeping on and on all the time while the fight on our left
went on with a great din and fury. The cruel whirlwind of snow swept
over that scene of death and desolation. And then the wind fell as
suddenly as it had arisen in the morning.

"Presently we got orders to charge the retreating column; I don't know
why unless they wanted to prevent us from getting frozen in our saddles
by giving us something to do. We changed front half right and got into
motion at a walk to take that distant dark line in flank. It might have
been half-past two in the afternoon.

"You must know that so far in this campaign my regiment had never been
on the main line of Napoleon's advance. All these months since the
invasion the army we belonged to had been wrestling with Oudinot in
the north. We had only come down lately, driving him before us to the
Beresina.

"This was the first occasion, then, that I and my comrades had a close
view of Napoleon's Grand Army. It was an amazing and terrible sight. I
had heard of it from others; I had seen the stragglers from it: small
bands of marauders, parties of prisoners in the distance. But this was
the very column itself! A crawling, stumbling, starved, half-demented
mob. It issued from the forest a mile away and its head was lost in the
murk of the fields. We rode into it at a trot, which was the most we
could get out of our horses, and we stuck in that human mass as if in a
moving bog. There was no resistance. I heard a few shots, half a dozen
perhaps. Their very senses seemed frozen within them. I had time for a
good look while riding at the head of my squadron. Well, I assure you,
there were men walking on the outer edge so lost to everything but