The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-06
It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous Napoleon at Warsaw.
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longer shone for him as at Austerlitz, thawed the marshes and broke up the ice in the rivers With only 30,000 men he must bridge and cross a river, while 65,000 Russians pressed behind him, 30.000 bore down upon him from the north and 34.000 threatened him from the south Yet he had only to turn and growl at them to throw them back in such panic as to spread decentralization throughout all their armies and render paratively harmless a force more than four times greater than his own.
 But he had burned his pontoon train as a useless incumbrance only to find that the Russians had destroyed the bridge by which he intended to pass over the Beresina. "Is 1t written there,' to the heavens, that we shall do noth- ing but make mistakes?' For the lack of better material, he must tear down houses and build his bridges of such sticks as he could pick up. In the eag- erness of his soldiers to put the river between them and the Russians they fought among themselves in the desirs of all to take a hand in the work of bridging it. They leaped into the icy waters up to their shoulders and la bored there until two bridges spanned the little stream no wider than a nar- row city street. But not more than | in 100 of those devoted bridge builders survived the exposure and returned to their homes.
 Napoleon and the Old Guard at once crossed to the homeward bank, but there they had to make an all-day fight to beat off Russian army which had come to dispute their passage. The weather was growing colder and guardsemn vent about the camp calling for dry firewood to keep the shivering monarch warm in his hovel on the river bank. Though themselves chilled to the marrow, half dead grenadiers took fagots from their own scanty piles and said, Give them to the Emperor
 On the other shore, the army and it's hangers on, deprived of Napoeon's care, became an unmanageable mob. Not hat they stampeded in their haste 10 es- cape over the river. On the contrary, the bridges remained idle all night long, while frostbitten men and women per- sisted in staying near the bridge heads in the warmth of the burning wagons that had been devoted to destruction. Thousands of others, stupefied by hun ger and benumbed by cold. sank into a sluggish indifference to their fate, rom which they could not be awakened in the morning until they saw the spears of the Cossacks bearing down upon them and the shells of the Russian artillery raining from the heights behind tnems Then they rose in wild panic and madly fought with one another at the entrance to the bridges, which were quickly choked with horses. wagons and guns, men, women and children
 Many were struck down in the heed- less rush and many others were pushed into the river. One of the bridges at last sank beneath it's burden and filled the stream with screaming, struggling. drowning mass. Many were still on the remaining bridge when the Russians ad- vanced to seize it and the French fired 1t, giving their own people to the flames or the waters to save themselves from pursuit. And other thousands were still on the shore, ready for the Cossach knife.
 Perhaps only 12.ooo or 1s.o0o had crossed the Beresnia, no more in number than they who were found asleep on the bank when the Russian spring came and lifted their mantle of snow. But flood and flame never told how many thousands of lives they took between them.
 The American Minister
 "Food!" "FoOdw 'Food!' That wal marched his tatterdemalions toward Wilma, where. five months before, th' earth had trembled beneath the treat of his hundreds of thousands of troops I've bring back nothing but men and 6 few sabers," he warned his headquarters in that capital of Lithuania. But n' could not bear to confess that the mer were almost as few as the sabers, ard h' had stopped all letters home from thu officers and soldiers.
 He had summoned some Of tho foreig1