Part 3 (1/2)

UNDER THE RUSSIAN SNOWS.

The first empire of France was buried between the Niemen and Moscow.

The funeral was attended by vultures and Cossacks.

It was on the twenty-fourth of June, 1812, that Napoleon began the invasion of Russia. The dividing line was the River Niemen. The inhabitants fell back before him. He had not advanced far when he encountered a new commander, with whom he was unfamiliar. It was Field-Marshal Nature. Marshal Nature had an army that the Old Guard had never confronted. His herald was Frost, and his aid-de-camp was Zero. One of his army corps was Snow. His bellowing artillery was charged with Lithuanian tempests. Hail was his grape and shrapnel. The Emperor of the French had never studied Marshal Nature's tactics--not even in the Alps.

The Russian summer was as midwinter to the soldiers of France and Spain and Italy. Some of the invading divisions could hardly advance at all. The howling storms made impa.s.sable the ungraded roads; the 1200 guns of the Grand Army sank into the mire. Horse-life and man-life fell and perished in the sleet of the mock-summer that raged along the watershed between the Dwina and the Dnieper.

The Russians under Kutusoff fell back to Smolensko. There on the sixteenth of August they fought and were defeated with a loss of nearly twelve thousand men. The way was thus opened as far as the Moskwa. At that place on the seventh of September Kutusoff a second time gave battle, at the village of Borodino. This was one of the most murderous conflicts of modern times. A thousand cannon vomited death all day. Under the smoke a quarter of a million of men struggled like tigers. At nightfall the French had the field. The defeated Russians hung sullenly around the arena where they had left more than 40,000 of their dead and wounded. The Frence losses were almost equally appalling. ”Sire,” said Marshal Ney, ”we would better withdraw and reform.” ”_Thou_ advise a retreat, Michel?” said the marble head, as it turned to the Bulldog of Battles.

Kutusoff abandoned Moscow. The inhabitants receded with him to the great plains eastward. On the fifteenth of September, Napoleon entered the ancient capital. The streets were as a necropolis. All was silence. The conqueror took up his residence in the old palace of the Czars. Here he would spend the winter in luxurious quarters. Here he would extemporize theatres, and here he would issue edicts as from Berlin and Milan. Lo, out of the Bazaar, near the Kremlin, bursts a volume of flame! The surrounding region is lighted with the glare.

Moscow is on fire in a thousand places. The equinoctial gales fan the flame. For five days there is the roar of universal combustion. Then it subsides. But Moscow is a blackened ruin. Napoleon tries in vain to open negotiations with the Czar; but Alexander and Kutusoff will not hear. The French are left to enjoy the ashes of a burnt-up Russian city.

Already winter was at hand. The snow was falling. The soldier of fortune had at last found his destiny. On the nineteenth of October, he left Moscow, and the retreat of the Grand Army began toward the Niemen. Had the retreat been unimpeded, that army might have made its way back to France with comparatively trifling losses. Indeed the fame of having burnt the old capital of the Czars might have satisfied the conqueror with his expedition. But no sooner did he recede than the Cossacks arose on every hand, and a.s.sailed the fugitives. The soldiers of the West and South dropped and perished by thousands along the frozen roads. The ice-darts in their sides were sharper than Russian bayonets. A hundred and twenty thousand men rolled back horridly across the hostile world. The bridges of the Beresina break down under the retreating army, and in the following spring, when the ice-gorges go down the river, 12,000 dead Frenchmen shall be washed up from the floods!

There is constant battle on flank and rear. All stragglers perish. The army dwindles away. It is almost destroyed. Ney brings up the rear guard, wasted to a handful. At the pa.s.sage of the Niemen, soiled with dirt, blackened with smoke, without insignia, with only drawn sword, and facing backward toward the hated region, the ”Bravest of the Brave” crosses the bridge. He is the last man to save himself from the indescribable horrors of the Campaign of Russia.

The remnants of the Grand Army dragged themselves along until they found refuge in Konigsberg. Napoleon had gone ahead toward France.

After Moscow he took a sledge, and sped away across the snow-covered wastes of Poland, on his solitary journey to Paris. There is a painting of this scene by the Slavic artist Kowalski, which represents the three black horses abreast, galloping with all speed with the Emperor's sledge across the cheerless world which he traversed. He came to his own capital unannounced. None knew of his arrival until the next day. At four o'clock in the morning of that day, some one entered his office at the Tuileries, and found him with his war-map of Europe spread out on the floor before him. He was planning another campaign! In doing so, he could hardly forget that the Grand Army of his glory was under the Russian snows!

WATERLOO.

One battle in this century rises in fame above all other conflicts of the ages. It is Waterloo.

It was on the night of the seventeenth of June, 1815, that the British and French armies, drawing near each other on the borders of Belgium, encamped, the one near the little village of Waterloo and the other at La Belle Alliance. They were close together. A modern fieldpiece could easily throw a sh.e.l.l from Napoleon's headquarters over La Haie Sainte to Mont St. Jean, and far beyond into the forest. During the afternoon of the seventeenth, and the greater part of the night, there was a heavy fall of rain. On the following morning the ground was muddy.

The Emperor, viewing the situation, was unwilling to precipitate the battle until his artillery might deploy over a dry field.

As to the temper of the Emperor, that was good. Hugo says of him: ”From the morning his impenetrability had been smiling, and on June 18, 1815, this profound soul, coated with granite, was radiant. The man who had been sombre at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest predestined men offer these contradictions; for our joys are a shadow and the supreme smile belongs to G.o.d.

”'Caesar laughs, Pompey will weep,' the legionaries of the Fulminatrix legion used to say. On this occasion Pompey was not destined to weep, but it is certain that Caesar laughed.

”At one o'clock in the morning, amid the rain and storm, he had explored with Bertrand the hills near Rossomme, and was pleased to see the long lines of English fires illumining the horizon from Frischemont to Braine l'Alleud. It seemed to him as if destiny had made an appointment with him on a fixed day and was punctual. He stopped his horse and remained for some time motionless, looking at the lightning and listening to the thunder. The fatalist was heard to cast into the night the mysterious words, '_We are agreed_.' Napoleon was mistaken; they no longer agreed.”

The arena of Waterloo is an undulating plain. Strategically it has the shape of an immense harrow. The clevis is on the height called Mont St. Jean, where Wellington was posted with the British army. Behind that is the village of Waterloo. The right leg of the harrow terminates at the hamlet of La Belle Alliance. The left leg is the road from Brussels to Nivelles. The cross-bar intersects the right leg at La Haie Sainte. The right leg is the highway from Brussels to Charleroi. The intersection of the bar with the left leg is near the old stone chateau of Hougomont. The battle was fought on the line of the cross-bar and in the triangle between it and the clevis.

The conflict began just before noon. The armies engaged were of equal strength, numbering about 80,000 men on each side. Napoleon was superior in artillery, but Wellington's soldiers had seen longer service in the field. They were his veterans from the Peninsular War, perhaps the stubbornest fighters in Europe. Napoleon's first plan was to double back the allied left on the centre. This involved the capture of La Haie Sainte, and, as a strategic corollary, the taking of Hougomont. The latter place was first attacked. The field and wood were carried, but the chateau was held in the midst of horrid carnage by the British.

Early in the afternoon a Prussian division under Billow, about 10,000 strong, came on the field, and Napoleon had to withdraw a division from his centre to repel the oncoming Germans. For two or three hours, in the area between La Haie Sainte and Hougomont, the battle raged, the lines swaying with uncertain fortune back and forth. La Haie Sainte was taken and held by Ney. On the whole, the British lines receded. Wellington's attempt to retake La Haie Sainte ended in a repulse. Ney, on the counter charge, called on Napoleon for reinforcements, and the latter at that moment, changing his plan of battle, determined to make the princ.i.p.al charge on the British centre, saying, however, ”It is an hour too soon.” The support which he sent to Ney was not as heavy as it should have been, but the Marshal concluded that the crisis was at hand, and Napoleon sought to support him with Milhaud's cuira.s.siers and a division of the Middle Guard.

Under this counter charge the British lines reeled and staggered, but still clung desperately to their position. They gave a little, and then hung fast and could be moved no farther. In another part of the field Durutte carried the allied position of Papelotte, and Lobau routed Bulow from Planchenois. At half-past four everything seemed to portend disaster to the allies and victory to the French.

If the tragedy of Waterloo had been left at that hour to work out its own results as between France and England it would appear that the latter must have gone to the wall; but destiny had prepared another end for the conflict. Waterloo was a point of concentration. Several tides had set thither, and some of them had already arrived and broken on the rocks. Other tides were rolling in. The British wave had been first, and this had now been rolled back by the tide of France. A German wave was coming, however, and another French billow, either or both of which might break at any moment.

On the morning of June 18, at the little town of Wavre, fifteen miles southeast of Brussels and about eight or ten miles from Waterloo, a battle had been fought between the French contingent under Marshal Grouchy and the Prussian division under Thielmann, who commanded the left wing of Marshal Blucher's army. That commander had a force of fully forty thousand men under him, and was on his way to join his forces with those of Wellington on the plateau of Mont St. Jean.

Grouchy had at this time between thirty and forty thousand men, and was under orders from Napoleon to keep in touch with his right wing, watching the Prussians and joining himself to the main army according to the emergency.

These two divisions--Blucher's and Grouchy's--were _sliding along_ toward Waterloo, and on the afternoon of the eighteenth it became one of the great questions in the history of this century which would first arrive on the field. Napoleon believed that Grouchy was at hand.

Wellington in his desperation breathed out the wish that either night or Blucher would come. The ambiguous result of the princ.i.p.al conflict made it more than ever desirable to both of the commanders to gain their reinforcements, each before the other. The event showed that the arrival of Bulow's contingent was really the signal for the oncoming of the whole Prussian army. The French Emperor, however, remained confident, and at half-after four he felt warranted in sending a preliminary despatch of victory to Paris.