choosing rather death if only the marble face but smile!


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 impassable 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