As the retreat neared Vilna the cold had increased, killing men as
the first cold of an English winter kills flies. And when the
French quitted Vilna, the Russians were glad enough to seek its
shelter, Kutusoff creeping in with forty thousand men, all that
remained to him of two hundred thousand. He could not carry on the
pursuit, but sent forward a handful of Cossacks to harry the hare-
brained few who called themselves the rearguard. He was an old man,
nearly worn out, with only three months more to live--but he had
done his work.
Ney--the bravest of the brave--left alone in Russia at the last with
seven hundred foreign recruits, men picked from here and there,
called in from the highways and hedges to share the glory of the
only Marshal who came back from Moscow with a name untarnished--Ney
and Girard, musket in hand, were the last to cross the bridge,
shouting defiance at their Cossack foes, who, when they had hounded
the last of the French across the frontier, flung themselves down on
the bloodstained snow to rest.
All along the banks of the Vistula, from Konigsberg and Dantzig up
to Warsaw--that slow river which at the last call shall assuredly
give up more dead than any other--the fugitives straggled homewards.
For the Russians paused at their own frontier, and Prussia was still
nominally the friend of France. She had still to wear the mask for
three long months when she should at last openly side with Russia,
only to be beaten again by Napoleon.
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