THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.

BY ONE OF THE OLD GUARD.

As a drama, the career of Napoleon is marked by a simplicity worthy of the Greek stage. There is no mystery, no elaborate plot of wheels within wheels. The ambition of one man in whom supreme ability is seconded by equally supreme contempt, down to the smallest details, for all those restraints to which under the names of honour and morality civilised mankind has agreed to submit, runs a triumphant course for some twenty years; the catastrophe is immediate and complete almost in a moment of time; and the downfall is accomplished in little more than a tenth of the period occupied by the rise. The succession of hubris, atè, nemesis is as regular as Æschylus himself could have imagined. When will the dramatist arise who shall be capable of dealing with it ?

Meantime material is pouring in for a hundred lesser works. The writer of play or novel has to do little but transcribe; all the rest is done for him by the facts, set forth as they have been by half a hundred hands, all endowed with the French gist for telling narration. We had occasion about a year ago to draw the attention of our readers to the modest memoirs of an obscure general of brigade. That simple narrative, as we showed, was as full of hairbreadth escapes and plucky actions as the most jaded reader of adventurous fiction could demand, and had the merit, not always possessed by more elaborate works, of entire self-unconsciousness. One had just the every-day life of one of Napoleon's officers. Even an officer's experiences, however, hardly tell us what war means to the dim, unconsidered population upon whom the real brunt of it falls; the units who compose the battalions, which in their turn are the pieces in the game, and, like the pieces, have little or no share in the stakes.

So far as we are aware, no record has as yet been brought to light to tell the personal experiences of any of the ultimate atoms (which we take to be the privates in the line regiments) com

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posing the great army that entered Russia on June 25, 1812, and never, as an army, left that country again, unless the ‘Prussian Dragoon,' quoted by Mitchell, comes under that head. Recent research has, however, gone a long way in this direction. In 1867 there died at Valenciennes a veteran of eighty-two, named Bourgogne, who, as a private and sergeant in the Imperial Guard, had taken part in fifteen battles, beginning with Jena and ending with Bautzen. Being a man of some education-his father was a tradesman of Condé on the extreme north-east frontier of France-he had kept journals and put together reminiscences, it would seem, to a considerable extent. Portions of these, dealing with the retreat from Moscow, were published in a more or less edited' form during his lifetime-some forty years ago--in an obscure local paper, but attracted no particular attention. The paper died a natural death, and only one file of it seems to exist. Of the tirage à part only two copies are known. The MS., however, is preserved in the library of Valenciennes, where it was discovered by M. Paul Cottin, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Rétrospective; who has now made the authentic text of Sergeant Bourgogne's memoirs accessible to all the Frenchreading world. We understand that an English translation of the book is in preparation; and it may safely be said that in all the vast mass of Napoleonic literature which the last decade has produced, there has been no work which ought better to repay the translator's labour.

When in March 1812 the order to start for Russia reached Bourgogne's regiment, it was on its way towards Almeida in Portugal, a fortress from which the French had been expelled in the previous year. Forty-eight hours were all the rest that was allowed them in Paris, and on June 25, as has been said, they crossed the Niemen. The march to Moscow is related very briefly. The Imperial Guard took very little part in the severe fighting at Smolensk, Valoutina, Borodino, which cost the French army some 50,000 men before the goal was attained. At Borodino especially, for some reason which has never been clearly explained, and in spite of repeated requests from Murat, who was at one time very hard pressed, Napoleon refused to send the Guard forward, or let a man of that fine corps come into action. In the rest of the army the carnage was tremendous. During the march up, Bourgogne had received one evening an invitation from a number of young men, drummers in the 61st Regiment,

all belonging to his native town of Condé, to join them in a carouse, the materials of which were obtained from a Russian general's stores, which they had been lucky enough to capture. A few days after Borodino, he came across one of the party, with his arm in a sling.

I went up to him, asking how our friends were. • Very well,' he replied, tapping the ground with the butt of his musket. They are all dead, on the field of honour, as the saying is, and buried in the great redoubt. They were all killed by grape, while beating the “charge.” Ah, sergeant, I shall not forget that battle! What a slaughter it was! But let us sit dowņ and talk about our poor comrades, and that Spanish girl, our cantinière.'

The Spanish cantinière had been under the protection of the drum-major, en tout bien, tout honneur,' as that worthy had remarked, with his hand on his rapier. When introducing Bourgogne on the occasion of the festivity, the narrator continued that, having got a bullet in his arm, he was going to the field-hospital to have it extracted, but had not gone a hundred steps when he met the Spanish girl in tears. Some wounded men had told her of the fate of the drummers, and the brave girl was going to see if she could be of any help.

• When we had got near the great redoubt, and she saw the field of slaughter, she began to shriek dismally. But it was another thing when she saw the smashed drums. She was like a woman beside herself. “Here, here, friend ; here they are,” she screamed. And there they were lying, sure enough ; limbs smashed, bodies torn by the grapeshot. Like a madwoman she went from one to another, speaking tenderly to them. But none heard, though a few still showed signs of life; among them being the drum-major-her father as she called him.

•She stopped by him, and dropping on her knees raised his head, to pour a few drops of brandy into his mouth. Just then the Russians made a movement to recapture the redoubt, and the firing recommenced. Suddenly the Spanish girl gave a cry of pain. She had been struck by a bullet, which had smashed her left thumb and entered the shoulder of the dying man whom she was supporting. She sank down in a faint; I tried to raise her, to carry her back to safety, but having only one available arm, I had not the strength to do it. Luckily a dismounted cuirassier came by, Without waiting to be asked, and only saying, “Come along quick, for it is not good here ”_and in truth, the cannon-balls were whistling round our ears—he picked up the girl, and carried her off like a child, still unconscious. M. Larrey, the Emperor's surgeon, amputated her thumb, and extracted my bullet very neatly.' That (adds Bourgogne) was what I beard from Dumont, the Condé lad, corporal in the light company of the 61st. I never heard any more of him. And this was the end of twelve young men from Condé.

Is not the conclusion quite Herodotean in its simplicity? And indeed, the whole tale, the girl going into the fire to help her friends, the wounded corporal turning back to look after her, the cuirassier stopping among the cannon-balls to see them both safe

out of the place, is as pretty a little tale of unpretentious heroism as one often meets with.

The five weeks which some infatuation led Napoleon to waste in Moscow, passed agreeably enough for the Imperial Guard. The fire which broke out an hour after their entrance does not seem to have incommoded them very seriously; nor does Bourgogne attach so much importance as most historians have done to its effect on the ultimate issue of the enterprise.

Many people (he says) who were not in this campaiga, say that the burning of Moscow meant the loss of the army. I and many others thought the contrary; for the Russians might very well have abstained from setting the town on fire, but have carried off all the provisions, or thrown them into the Moskwa, and ravaged the country for ten leagues all round-not a difficult thing to do, for part of it is desert—and by the end of a fortnight we must have gone. After the fire there were still dwellings enough to quarter the whole of the army; and even if they had been burnt, there were the cellars.

Perbaps it would, after all, have been better for them if they had been forced to decamp at the end of a fortnight.

The amount of provisions left in the city was indeed prodigious; and the grenadiers of the Guard obtained their full share. Bourgogne, with five of his comrades, took up his quarters in a deserted house. They had, he says, as their store of drinkables for the winter seven large cases of champagne, plenty of Spanish wine and port, and 500 bottles of rum. Of solid edibles, they had quantities of hams and salt fish, and several sacks of flour. At this time they seem to have thought it possible that they might spend the winter in Moscow. Furs of all kinds and skins of all animals were at their disposal, to say nothing of Indian shawls and silks. It is well to mention,' he adds, that

. ' we non-commissioned officers levied a tax of at least 20 per cent. on all articles which had escaped the fire.' However, this was not to last.

On the evening of October 18, a party of us non-commissioned officers were together as usual, stretched like pashas on skins of ermine, sable, lion, bear, and other not less precious furs, smoking Indian scented tobacco out of elegant pipes, while a huge jorum of rum punch blazed in our midst, in a great silver bowl belonging to some Russian boyard. We were just talking about France, and how pleasant it would be to go back as conquerors after several years' absence, when we heard a loud uproar in the large saloon where the men of the company slept. At the same moment, in came the quartermaster-sergeant of the week with the news that, in obedience to orders, we were to get ready to start.

Before they had marched very far, it struck Bourgogne that his knapsack was a trifle heavy, and he proceeded to take stock

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of the contents. Besides provisions and articles of clothing-a miscellaneous collection, including a Chinese lady's costume of silk embroidered with gold—he had two silver plaques, embossed with mythological subjects, a Russian prince's order set with brilliants, a fragment from the silver casing of the great cross of St. Ivan, and other unconsidered trifles, snapped up in the town where, according to one story, Napoleon had told Mortier that he would hold him responsible with his head for pillage.

The rank and file seem to have had an impression, derived perhaps from the southerly direction in which the army commenced its retreat, that their next stage was to be a march 'to Mongolia and China, to get hold of the English possessions in India. If they so fancied, they were quickly undeceived, for before a week was out Kutusoff had headed them off from Kalouga, and compelled them to follow the devastated track of their former march. It was at the very moment when Napoleon, convinced that the southern road was closed to him, was starting to rejoin the route of his advance, that he had the narrowest escape from capture that befell him in the whole campaign. Bourgogne was an eye-witness of this incident, which has often been related; he had indeed been all night on guard near the house in which Napoleon lodged. The morning of October 25 was foggy. The Emperor mounted early and rode off into the mist, attended only by his staff. Suddenly the Cossack hourra was heard; some squadrons of the cavalry of the Guard dashed off into the plain, followed by the infantry. They came up just in time to deliver the Emperor, whom they found nearly surrounded by Cossacks, generals and staff-officers fighting hand to hand with the adventurous enemy. It was here that the unlucky Major Lecoulteux, an aide-de-camp of Berthier's, having disarmed a Cossack, was returning triumphantly with the captured lance in his hand, when a mounted grenadier, seeing as he thought a Cossack officer in too close proximity to Napoleon's person, rode at him and ran him through. Perceiving the mistake too late, he dashed into the midst of the enemy, hoping to atone for his blunder by getting killed, but the Cossacks fled before him, and he had to come back in despair. However, all the authorities, including Bourgogne, agree that Lecoulteux recovered from his wound.

Two days later, on October 27, Mojaisk, on the former line of march, was reached; and, notes Bourgogne, it began to freeze. By the 30th the roads had become bad; baggage-waggons stuck