The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-06
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circle about feeble campfire in the even- ing. often to find them shortly afterward stiff and dead where they had rolled them. Members of a company, friends in many campaign, fought with one another like beasts over morsel of horrible food at supper only to renew the savage bat tie for place by the bivouac fire through the long, 16-hour night of the north.
 Women and Children
 The rearguard of the army marched over the falen in the road, but never failed to> stop long enough to strip the bodies of any warm garments they chanced to wear. A survivor tells of his surprise when one whom he supposed to be dead pleaded to be left in possession of a fur coat and reports his own grim reply, All right, l can wait"
 But humanity survived in some breasts. When a vivandiere was delivered of a child in the snow the colonel of her reg iment and the surgeon did everything pos sible for her comfort With her infant wrapped in sheepskins in her arms. she was placed on the colonePs horse when the march was resumed the next morning. But few days later. as the regiment halted and the mother prepared to nurse her baby, she cried out in anguish on dis covering that the child was frozen. Her husband. the barber of the regiment, sad ly took the poor lifeless little thing from the breast of the weeping vivandiere, kissed 1t and laid it in a tomb Of snow
 Another vivandiere, who had given two chillren to the snow, is portrayed sitting by the road as the troops stumble by, holding in her lap the head of her dying husband while her one remaining child is bending over them her tears freezing as they fall on the fathers face.
 The dog of a regiment. who had fol- lowed it from Spain to Vienna and to Moscow, unable longer to keep step with the soldiers because of frozen feet, was carried on the shoulders of one of them until he. died of the cold. Even the hum ble loyalty of some Germans to their boy prince was not lost. To shield the 20-year, old princeling from a bitter night while he slept in his cloak, they stood around him in solid wall where three- fourths of them died that he might live.
 The Lion at Bay
 When the wretched remnant of the army came again in sight of the towers Of the ruined city of Smolensk, the Emperor himself was afoot, plodding through the snow with an iron-pointed staff In the three weeks since he left Moscow 200 guns had been abandoned along the lane of death. Worse still, thousands of the weakened men had found their muskets too heavy to be carried and had thrown them away The force was now reduced to less than 5000 soldiers in widely sepa- rated columns, and many of these were without weapons. In the F weeks that had passed since Napoleon first stood be- fore the walls of Smolensk, in that period of less than three months. he had lost 135,- GOO men.
 As he paused there on the banks of the Dneiper, the Russians were closing in upon him from all directions and threat ening every avenue of escape. He dared not wait long enough to reunite and re- organize his slender, scattered forces, but fled for safety with only 15.e00 men, leav- ing his sick behind him.
 When he came to Krasnoi. almost the last town in white Russia, he halted be- fore plunging into the Lithuanian wilds for the belated divisions of Davout, Eu- gene and Ney. There, with his 16,0O0 half starved veterans, he turned in desperation upon his SOp00 pursuers and cowed them with the dr{ad of his name. Harshal Da- vout haste1ed to join him, and Prinse Eugene st around the enemy and effect