and trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which
eddied from the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the
grenadier. They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human
faces and living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left
the bank of the Beresina clear for a few moments. The multitude had
hurled themselves back on the plain. Some few men sprang down from the
banks of the river, not so much with any hope of reaching the opposite
shore, which for them meant France, as from dread of the wastes of
Siberia. For some bold spirits despair became a panoply. An officer
leaped from hummock to hummock of ice, and reached the other shore;
one of the soldiers scrambled over miraculously on the piles of dead
bodies and drift ice. But the immense multitude left behind saw at
last that the Russians would not slaughter twenty thousand unarmed
men, too numb with the cold to attempt to resist them, and each
awaited his fate with dreadful apathy. By this time the major and his
grenadier, the old general and his wife, were left to themselves not
very far from the place where the bridge had been. All four stood
dry-eyed and silent among the heaps of dead. A few able-bodied men and
one or two officers, who had recovered all their energy at this crisis,
gathered about them. The group was sufficiently large; there were
about fifty men all told. A couple of hundred paces from them stood
the wreck of the artillery bridge, which had broken down the day
before; the major saw this, and "Let us make a raft!" he cried.

The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the whole group
hurried to the ruins of the bridge. A crowd of men began to pick up
iron clamps and to hunt for planks and ropes--for all the materials
for a raft, in short. A score of armed men and officers, under command
of the major, stood on guard to protect the workers from any desperate
attempt on the part of the multitude if they should guess their