the grand army. But he found them already retreating in such haste that he thought proper to turn round to intercept the foe in his flight by Lepel, and to act on Vesselova, through which the enemy might attempt to retire. By these movements, however, Wittgenstein defeated the hopes of Victor, and cut him off from all communication with his master.-The French, who were hastening to Stoudentzi, made their appearance; a dreadful cannonade, succeeded by a furious onset of the Russians, overwhelmed them, and covered the ground with their slain. The Russian general supposed that Buonaparte himself was in the midst of the fugitives, and unwilling to continue the carnage, equally dreadful as it was useless, he sent a flag of truce to the enemy, who hesi tated for a moment, but was soon relieved from his suspense by the appear, ance of the Cossacks. The French surrendered at discretion; 4 generals, nearly 300 other officers of different ranks, and about 8000 soldiers, were made prisoners. To the great disappointment of the Russians, however, Buonaparte was not of the number; and Wittgenstein lost not a moment to search for him in another quarter. -The French had constructed two bridges, the one at Stoudentzi, and the other at Vasselova; and at the latter point, where Buonaparte succeeded in passing the river, a scene ensued which baffles all description. Wittgenstein reached the spot just as the bridges were completed, and when Buonaparte, surrounded by his guards, was making his escape. A lively cannonade was commenced, and the unhappy fugitives, who saw no safety but in flight, scarcely attempted resistance. They rushed in crowds towards the bridge; they plunged into the river; nothing could save them from the fury of the Russians. Those who found the bridges preoccupied on

their arrival, rushed into the stream in a state of desperation; but large fragments of ice covering the waters, de fied their utmost efforts to reach the opposite shore, and bore them down with resistless impetuosity. The air was filled with a confused noise-with the roaring of the Russian cannon, and the shrieks of the despairing ene my-with the mingled horrors of vengeance and agony. And that this scene of misery might be complete in all its parts that nought might be want, ing to fill up the measure of Buona. parte's guilt, at the very moment when the bridge was crowded with his hap. less followers, it was blown up by his order. This cruel expedient saved him from the immediate pursuit of his enemies, and perhaps it fortunately put an end to the unexampled sufferings of the French soldiers; but it will be a lasting stain on the memory of its contriver. On such a point it were useless to reason; the universal feelings of our nature must decide the controversy. It signifies not that by this act Buonaparte secured himself and that part of his army which had already passed the river from the pur suit of the Russians; and it were monstrous to refer to the misery of the French armies as an apology for the mandate which at once consigned thousands of them to destruction. Had Buonaparte, like a brave and generous commander, sustained his sinking troops by his presence to the last mo ment-had he himself been in the rear of the fugitives, and the last man to pass the bridge, his order for blowing it up after the escape of his army, would have required no justification; but since he was among the first to escape-since his disregard of consequences became apparent only after he had saved himself since on this, as on many other occasions, he sacrificed his soldiers to the most selfish considerations, impartial history must consign

him to reprobation. The events of this dreadful day must have gone far to efface the remembrance of all that was good or great in the character of the French ruler, even had his talents and achieve ments possessed an unquestionable title to the very highest renown.-In this memorable affair 5000 of the enemy were killed on the spot, as many were drowned, and 13,000 were taken prisoners, including a large proportion of officers. The artillery, bagage, and ammunition, which fell into the hands of the Russians, it would be difficult to estimate. The greater part of the plunder which the French had seized in the different Russian cities was recovered on this occasion, and nothing seemed wanting to complete the vengeance of Russia, but that the author of all her miseries should be secured. To accomplish an object, which all Russia now expected with such anxiety, Wittgenstein dispatched the general aid-de-camp Kutusoff towards Lepel, with instructions to cross the river at that point, and move with all haste on the enemy's flank, while Colonel Tettenborn was ordered to attack the Bavarians, and separate them from the French army. In this enterprise Tettenborn completely succeeded, after an affair in which he took 1000 prisoners; and every thing had thus been done by Wittgenstein which became a good general, who was impatient only because the fatal device of the enemy had prevented him from bringing the contest to a more rapid and decisive issue.

The army under Tchichagoff, which, with the Cossacks, occupied the left bank of the river, proceeded to accomplish what was no longer in the power of Wittgenstein. The fugitives were pursued with the most unrelenting activity, till the darkness of night overtook them, and favoured their retreat. Buonaparte, who was still accompanied by a few of his ge

nerals, too faithful to his fortunes, took shelter during the night in the woods which surround the village of Tchatchovo. His soldiers also sought security in the same retreats; and be fore the morning, he had contrived to give them for the last time some appearance of order, and to exhibit to the Russians a feeble resistance. He found this expedient necessary for the singular step which he determi ned immediately to take the entire abandonment of his army. He wished to place them once more betwixt himself and the pursuing enemy, that he might not be interrupted in his flight. It was with the utmost difficulty the soldiers could be prevailed on to make any further exertion; and the marshals were seen riding along their ranks stri ving to revive their drooping courage. Oudinot alone could prevail on his fol lowers to engage; but this last effort of their courage was not of long dura tion. Oudinot himself was severely wounded; and his followers abandoned themselves to despair.-Buonaparte, meanwhile, executed the plan which he had long formed, and in the midst of this afflicting scene, hastily set off towards the frontiers. To this measure he was urged partly by the diffi culties of his situation in Russia, and partly by some recent occurrences in Paris. A conspiracy had been disco vered, which, if it had been conducted with any thing like talent or address, might have somewhat abridged the duration of his power. But the leaders seem to have been destitute of all capacity for their enterprise and although they at first succeeded in exciting a slight commotion in the capital, they were speedily arrested and put to death. But the existence of such sentiments among the French people was enough to appal Buona parte; and his return to France was probably hastened by the late discoveries. To the honour of his mar

shals, however, it should be mentioned, that they did every thing which could be required of skill and constancy to animate and sustain the drooping spirits of the soldiers; and by their good conduct, secured the retreat of their leader. But all their efforts soon proved unavailing; the progress of the Russians was marked on all sides by the confusion of their enemies, who were so completely overpowered, that they no longer retreated as an army, but dispersed in crowds to escape the immediate notice of their pursuers-Never surely did more signal disasters overtake the army of a civilized nation.

Prince Kutusoff was no sooner apprised of the destruction of the bridge by which Buonaparte had crossed the Berezina, and the impediment thus thrown in the way of Count Wittgenstein, than he ordered new bridges to be erected for the passage of this geteral and his troops. His orders were promptly obeyed, and the count was soon in active co-operation with the right of the army of the Danube. Some parties were ordered to pass rapidly forward, even beyond Wilna; to destroy the bridges as they advanced, and to intercept the French ruler before he should pass the Niemen. The army of Tchichagoff, supported by the Cossacks, advanced in full pursuit; and the whole force of the Russian empire was thus again in motion. -Those who do not reflect that, from the time the French left Moscow, and for weeks before, they had been with out any regular supply of food; that they had been exposed to fatigues almost incredible; compelled to meet what they were even less able to sus tain, the severity of a Russian winter, and assailed at all points by an enraged and merciless enemy, will scarcely give credit to the account of their sufferings, on any authority inferior to that of an eye-witness. No other

words than those of a spectator, indeed, could do any thing like justice to this dreadful scene; and as it has been described by a person who had this advantage, it may be proper to give the details in his own hardly exaggerated language." Though besieged with miseries," says one of the Russian pursuers in a letter to his friend at St Petersburgh," and assailed with all the fury of our cannon and our bayonets, it is certain that nearly 40,000 of our merciless invaders escaped to the nearest bank of the Beresina. But numbers of the fugitives, even in the moment in which they believed themselves safe, met their destruction; they plunged in to gain the opposite shore, and met the death from which they fled in the cold bed of the river, in the direful flames which rolled along its surface. They who escaped the flood and the conflagration, were not more secure, for all nature seemed to fight against them; Heaven itself appeared to hurl its last bolt against these sacrilegious hordes, by increasing the cold to a degree, that was almost intolerable to the best defended; but to those who had no covering, it was suffering worse than the tortures of the rack. It was at this crisis, when nearly deprived of the power of moving, they abandoned their guns, baggage, and ammunition, and throwing themselves upon the drifting snow, called on the blast to end their miseries. Then rising in frantic despair, they ran howling among each other, exclaiming aloud against their betrayer, and demarding death at the hands of their equally distracted companions. Thousands of these poor wretches were nearly naked; few had either a shoe, or boot, or pantaloon, to protect their freezing limbs. Many had endeavoured to shield them from the severity of the weather, by wrap. ping about them the raw hides they had stripped from the perished horses. Others covered their bodies with old

matting, canvas, women's clothes, priests' vestments, or any other thing that might assist in sheltering their emaciated persons from the piercing wind, and a frost that seemed to cut into their souls. Happy was he who had been so lucky as to have purloined from the countryman his winter sheepskin, or saved a pelisse from the general pillage. Officers and men were in the same condition. The wretched fragments which decency would still wrap round them, were tattered into a hundred shreds, but from the inclemency of the season there was no shelter. Thousands hecame benumbed and stupified; many dropped in silence into the grasp of death; others moved on their gradually freezing bodies, bewailing their fate, and cursing the name of him who had brought them into such depths of unimaginable suffering. Every corps and every rack of officers partook of the general distress. The guards even, the proud favourites of their proud chief, were alike the sport of the angry elements; were alike exposed to nakedness and privation. Their gay caparisons were changed into loathsome rags; and, a prey to every evil of squalid wretchedness, to hunger, and to cold, they dropped down dead in heaps, groaning out the reproaches their tongues were too feeble to utter. Defence was now totally out of the question. Flight, not escape, was their object; for none possessed within himself sufficient strength to preserve him in existence for many hours. It was not life they sought, but relief from the agonics of fear. An undefinable terror struck the soul of the famished wretch, who, stretched on the chilling snow, called fervently on death to release him from his misery. Even in this state let but the cry of the Cossacks be sounded in his ear, and it would be sufficient to rouse him to temporary energy; a thousand would

partake his agony, and suddenly spreading in flight, they would every where darken the snow with their flying shadows, and fill the air with their despairing shrieks. In this state some thousands would be made prisoners, by a horde of perhaps no more than a hundred Cossacks. The road along which this ruined army moved was rough with their dead, who, heaped on each other, shewed through the uneven surface of the snow their grisly and disfigured visages, their perishing and dismembered bodies, and all the horrid variety of deaths inflicted by want and pain and the sword. Every bivouac, at the dawn of morning, resembled rather the place of a sanguinary conflict than that of rest Cold and fatigue benumbed many into their last repose; but scarcely did the hand of death close their eyes before they were despoiled; nay, even while breathing, their companions seized on their expiring bodies, and stripped them of their ragged coverings to defend themselves. -Vast are the circles of the dead they leave behind them in their dismal night watches, and when they proceed in the morning, there is nothing before them but a similar fate; and, desperate with cold, they set every house and town on fire in their way, in order to alle viate with the heat the pangs which rack their joints. But the expedient is fraught with new sufferings. Hundreds hasten to the blazing scene to enjoy a few minutes warmth, but not having strength to retire with suf ficient speed from the influence of the flames when they become outrageous, they fall a prey to their fury, and the ruins of the burning houses are sur rounded with the expiring remains of their helpless consumers. Many of those who escape immediate destruction from the fire, seared by its flames, blackened in part by the smoke, otherwise pale as the snow itself, range themselves like a horde of ghastly

spectres upon the lifeless bodies of their countrymen, and there remain in motionless apathy, till the benumbing hand of death stretches by degrees over their vitals, and they fall amid the icy and scorched corpses of their comrades. Numbers having their feet frozen and half-mortified, were reduced to a situation of complete helpless ness, and being left upon the road, were forced to abandon themselves to the death they might otherwise have averted for some time. In these days, now so cruelly cut off from their existence, some succours might arrive! The idea alone seemed to speak a hope of which they were for ever to be deprived; and their despair broke out in cries of the bitterest anguish; it was a lamentation that paralized the hear er, and made him feel the unparalleled depth of misery into which the French ruler had plunged his too confident followers. Multitudes of these desolate fugitives lost their spirits; others were seized with frenzy, and maddened by the extremes of pain and hunger. But I will not attempt a further enumeration of the varieties of human misery I have seen; those only who have witnessed such extreme of distress can form any idea of the horrors I have left yet untold-of the hideous spectacles exhibited between the Berezina and the Niemen, whose parallel for misery is not to be found in the annals of the world."-Such descriptions as these might seem fanciful, were they not confirmed by the authentic history of this campaign; by the fact, as striking as it is unquestionable, that, in the course of a very few months, betwixt three and four hundred thousand men fell a sacrifice to that complication of miseries of which the above passages profess to give an imperfect account.

There remained but little to be done by the Russians; the grand army was now annihilated. When Buonaparte reached Smeymo, he made his flight

known to the world; he had before abandoned his soldiers, and he now formally appointed Murat to the command of the armies-On the 7th he reached Wilna, accompanied by Caulaincourt, who was worthy of the honour now conferred on him.-The Russians did not relax the pursuit. Platoff, at the village of Orchniani, fell in with a small reinforcement advancing under Loison, and cut it to pieces. Tchaplitz, after destroying what was still called the rear-guard of the French armies, in the neighbourhood of Wilna, on the 10th attacked and carried the suburbs of that city; and on the following day entered it, at the very moment when the French were retiring. The enemy had no leisure to destroy any thing, and his whole stores and ammunition fell into the hands of the Russians.-Strong detach. ments of Cossacks and light troops were spread along the shores of the Niemen, to prevent the escape of Macdonald, and to ensure the destruction of his army.-On the 11th December, Tchichagoff addressed a report to the Emperor Alexander from the neighbourhood of Wilna, in which he estitimated the loss of the enemy from the date of his passing the Beresina downwards, at no less than 30,000 men.On the 12th, the head-quarters of Prince Kutusoff were established in the capital of Russian Poland.

Such was the issue of this eventful campaign, in which a greater number of sanguinary battles were fought than had ever been before crowded together within so short a space. Never surely was enterprise more disastrous than that of the French tyrant against Russia; never were per severing virtue and patriotism crowned with so signal a triumph, as upon this memorable occasion. Of an army consisting of more than 400,000 men, finely appointed, and commanded by the most distinguished captains of the