A few days after the evacuation of Moscow, Napoleon narrowly escaped being made prisoner by the Cossacks. He had started early in the morning on the Kaluga road with only a few officers, leaving the four squadrons of the Guard, his regular escort, to overtake him. Before they arrived, as he was passing along without dreaming of immediate danger, he suddenly saw the crowds of men and women who filled the road in advance with vehicles, hurrying back in terror, overturning the wagons and creating a scene of indescribable confusion. Supposing it a groundless panic, he continued to move forward. At length the long black lines which had remained motionless in the distance, began to advance, and a moment after, six thousand Cossacks came dashing down in a wild gallop. Rapp cried out to the emperor, " It is the Cossacks, turn back." The latter disbelieving it, or too proud to fly, stood still. The furious hordes were already surrounding him, when Rapp seized the bridle of his horse, and turning him round, exclaimed, "Indeed you must turn back." Napoleon perceiving at length the full extent of his danger, immediately drew his sword and placing himself with Berthier and Caulincourt on the side of the road, calmly waited the attack of the barbarians. They approached to within fifty paces when Rapp flung himself on the foremost. A lance pierced his horse, and he fell. The aides-de-camp and a few horsemen of the Guard, extricated him. A moment after, however, Bessieres came thundering up with the cavalry of the Guard, and swept the field.

Soon after, winter began to set in, and the snow covering up concealed ditches and morasses, made such uncertain footing for the soldiers and unsafe ground for horses and artillery, that the loss of the army became immense. Over the field of Borodino laden with thirty thousand skeletons and wrecks of every description, through desolated provinces, living often on half raw horse flesh and rye water, the Old Guard, firm and uncomplaining, bore its emperor on till at last they approached Smolensko, the place where all their sorrows were to end, and plenty to be exchanged for famine, and warm bivouacks take the place of beds of snow and ice. The soldiers could not resist the alluring prospect, and broke their ranks and hurried forward, pell- mell towards the city. The commands of the officers were disregarded, even threats of punishment produced no effect. Food, and fire, and clothing, and rest, were before them. The gnawings of hunger, pinching frost, and starvation impelled them on, and they swept in one vast crowd to the gates. The Old Guard alone showed no symptoms of disorganization. Half naked, and cold, and hungry, they also were, but with steady step and unalterable mien, they continued their march in as perfect order as when they first crossed the Niemen.

The French troops in possession of Smolensko, saw this multitude of more than fifty thousand men approaching with haggard looks and wild cries, and fearing that such an irruption would end in a general pillage, and also to show that the desertion of their colors should never be rewarded, sternly shut the gates upon them. Then arose the most doleful cries, prayers and entreaties were mingled with threats and curses, and mass after mass precipitated itself against the gates to burst them open. Entreaties and violence were alike in vain, and many fell down dead from exhaustion.

Several hours after, the Guard came up, its ranks unbroken, its eagles above them; and moving steadily into the clamorous and excited throng, cleared a path for themselves to the gates. Their entrance guaranteed the safety of the city. The poor wretches pressed after, cursing the Guard, demanding if they were always to be a "privileged class, fellows kept for mere parade, who were never foremost but at reviews, festivities, and distributions, if the army was always to put up with their leavings." Despair and suffering had made them unjust.

Alas, this city which Napoleon supposed to be well supplied with provisions, proved barren as a desert. To their horror, instead of finding abundance to eat, the skeletons of horses, along the streets, from which the flesh had been peeled, showed that famine had been there before them. Around the scantily filled magazines the soldiers crowded with agonizing cries, and could scarcely be kept from murdering each other to get a morsel of food. But this dreadful example had no effect on the Guard. They knew that more than a month of toil and suffering, of combats with the cold and the enemy, must be endured, before they could reach a place of safety-- yet the same severity and order marked all their conduct.

After remaining here five days, Napoleon issued orders to re-commence the retreat. The debris of the cavalry had been collected together, the half-destroyed battalions united into separate corps, while eight or nine thousand infantry, and some two thousand cavalry of the Guard, all that remained, were put in the best conditions their straitened circumstances would permit--and on the 14th of November, at five o'clock in the morning, the whole marched out of Smolensko. Napoleon, with the Guard in a solid column, was in advance. Its march was firm as ever, but gloomy as the grave. Daylight had not yet appeared, and that dark column passed out upon the snow fields, silent as death. Not a drum or a bugle cheered their march, and more sombre and sterner than all, rode Napoleon in their midst, his great soul wrung with silent agony. The cracking of whips as the drivers lashed their horses, or a smothered imprecation as horses, and men, and cannon rolled down a declivity in the darkness together, were the only sounds that broke the stillness of the morning, as the doomed host lost itself in the deepening gloom of a northern winter. It made but thirteen miles the first day, a distance it took the artillery of the Guard twenty-two hours to accomplish. Such was the first day's march, making scarce a mile an hour through the snow and frost, yet it was the easiest they were to have for a month to come.

While the imperial column was thus toiling forward, the enemy had got in advance and occupied the road between it and Krasnoi with a battery and thirty squadrons of horse. The leading corps of the French army was thrown into disorder by this sudden appearance of the enemy, and would have broken and fled, but for a wounded officer, the brave Excelmans, who, although having no command, immediately assumed it in the face of the proper leader, and by his energy and daring, restored order. He thus succeeded in putting on a bold front which intimidated the squadrons, and they dared not charge. The battery, however, kept up an incessant fire, the balls at every discharge crossing the road along which the column was marching. When it came the turn of the Old Guard to pass, they closed their ranks in a solid wall of flesh around the emperor, and moved steadily into the fire, while their band of music struck up the air, "0ù peut-on être mieux qu' au sein de sa famille?" "Where can one be happier than in the bosom of his family ?" Napoleon stopped them, exclaiming, "Play rather Veillons au salut de l'Empire." "Let us watch for the safety of the Empire.

As soon as the Old Guard had passed, the Russian commander, who had not dared even with his vastly superior force to arrest this terrible corps, threw twenty thousand men across the road on all the heights around, thus dividing Napoleon from Eugene, Davoust, and Ney, who were bringing up the rear. Mortier had escaped, but Eugene was compelled to fight his way through, with the loss of nearly his whole division. Davoust was next in rear. Ney came last, though no news had been received from him for a long time.

Although at Krasnoi Napoleon saw the enemy in immense force surrounding him to take him prisoner, he would not leave the place till assured of the safety of his lieutenants. He had heard all day long the cannonading which annihilated Eugene's corps, but could not succor him.

After the prince had escaped, his anxiety for Davoust and Ney was redoubled. He had determined, before the arrival of Eugene, to face about, and with his feeble force attack the enemy, and thus make a great effort, but a still greater sacrifice for those noble officers. Still holding to this determination, he sent forward Eugene with the miserable wreck of his corps, while he, with his Old Guard, prepared to march back on the Russian army, and attempt to save Davoust and Ney. The night before, however, the Young Guard, under Roquet, crushed to atoms a vanguard of Russian infantry, which had taken position in front of Napoleon, to cut off his retreat. The latter ordered him to attack the enemy in the dark, and with the bayonet alone, saying that this was "the first time he had exhibited so much audacity, and he would make him repent it in such a way that he should never again dare approach so near his headquarters." The complete success of the expedition detained the Russian army twenty-four hours--a delay of vast importance to the French.

In the morning, before daylight, Napoleon placed himself on foot in the midst of the Old Guard and issued from Krasnoi. As he grasped his sword, he said, "I have sufficiently acted the Emperor--it is time I became the General." Perhaps there is not a more sublime exhibition of heroism in the whole of his career than this effort to save Davoust and Ney. With only six thousand of his Guard, and some five thousand under Mortier, composed chiefly of the Young Guard, he turned to meet eighty thousand victorious troops, entrenched on commanding heights and protected by a powerful artillery. The enemy was sweeping round him in a vast semi-circle and a few hours of delay might cut off his retreat entirely, yet he resolved to march back instead of forward, and to lessen his force in a hopeless combat, instead of preserving it for his own use. He well knew the peril of the undertaking, but he had determined to succor his brave marshals or perish in the attempt.

Silently and sternly this brave band retraced its steps over the snow-covered field, uttering no complaint, and ready as ever to be sacrificed at the will of their beloved leader. When daylight dawned, lo, on three sides of them the Russian batteries crowned the heights. Into the "centre of that terrible circle" the old Guard moved with an intrepid step and took up its position. A few yards in advance, Mortier deployed his five thousand in front of the whole army, and the battle opened, if that can be called a battle in which a small devoted band stands and is shot down, solely to attract the enemy's force from another quarter. The Russians needed only to advance, and by the mere weight of its masses, crush that Old Guard to atoms. But awed by its firm presence, and more than all by the terrible renown it had won, and by the still greater renown of its leader whom they regarded almost as a supernatural being, they dared not close with it. They, however, trained their cannon on the ranks, through which the shot went tearing with frightful effect--but without a movement of impatience, the living closed over the dead to be trodden under foot in turn. Thus girdled with fire, they stood hour after hour, while Napoleon strained his eager gaze to catch a glimpse of Davoust and Ney. At length he saw Davoust alone, dragging his weary columns through clouds of Cossacks and marching straight on the Russian batteries. But as the soldiers came in sight of Krasnoi, they disbanded, and making a detour to escape the enemy's guns, rushed pell-mell into the place.

Napoleon having seen half his Guard shot down, commenced his retreat, leaving Mortier with the Young Guard to keep the enemy in check as long as he could, telling him that he would send back Davoust with his rallied troops to his assistance. They must, if possible, hold out till night and then rejoin him. The enemy he said was overwhelming him on every side, and soon his retreat would be entirely cut off and he must push on and occupy the passage of the Borysthenes, or all would be lost. He pressed this brave marshal's hand sorrowfully as he parted from him, and traversing Krasnoi, cleared the road beyond it as he advanced. But Mortier could not obey the orders he had received, for a part of the Young Guard had lost an important post they had been defending, and the Russians emboldened by Napoleon's departure, began to close slowly around him. Roquet endeavored to take the position that had been lost, and from which a Russian battery was now vomiting death on its ranks, but of the regiment which he sent against it, only eleven officers and fifty soldiers returned to tell how they fought and fell. It was then that Mortier performed that admirable movement which shed such glory on him and the Young Guard. With the three thousand, all that was left of his five thousand, he wheeled and marched in ordinary time out of that concentrated fire.

Ney was left behind abandoned of all, and apparently a doomed man, yet to exhibit still greater heroism, and furnish a still more miraculous page in the history of this unparalleled retreat.

Napoleon continuing his retreat, came to Dombrowna, a town built of wood, where he encamped for the night, and obtained some provisions. In the night he was heard groaning--the name of Ney ever and anon escaping his lips--and mourning over the sufferings of his poor soldiers, and yet declaring that it was impossible to help them without stopping, and this he could not do with no ammunition, provisions, or artillery. He had not force enough to make a halt. "He must reach Minsk as quickly as possible." Here were his magazines, his great hope, towards which he was toiling with the energy of despair.

But scarcely had these words escaped him, when a Polish officer arrived, stating that Minsk had been taken by the enemy. Napoleon was struck dumb by this new and overwhelming disaster; then raising his head, he said, "Well, there is nothing left now, but to clear our passage with our bayonets."

Despatches were immediately sent to the different portions of the army in advance, where they had remained during the march of the grand army to Moscow; and then, dejected and worn out, he sunk into a lethargy. It was not yet daylight when a sudden tumult aroused him from his stupor. He sent Rapp out to ascertain the cause. But the uproar increasing, he imagined that a nocturnal attack had been made upon his head-quarters, and immediately inquired if the artillery had been placed behind a ravine made by a stream that ran through the town. Being told that it had not, he hastened thither himself and saw it brought over. He then came back to his Old Guard who were standing to arms, and addressing each battalion in turn, said, "Grenadiers, we are retreating without being conquered by the enemy; let us not be vanquished by ourselves! Set an example to the army. Several of you have already deserted your eagles, and even thrown away your arms. I have no wish to have recourse to military laws to put a stop to this disorder, but appeal entirely to your sense of duty. Do justice to yourselves. To your own honor I commit the maintenance of your discipline."

This was all that was needed to make the grenadiers firm as iron. In fact it was rather whipping the other troops over the Old Guard's shoulders, for amid the general panic that prevailed in the darkness, when all believed the enemy was upon them, Napoleon on his return, found them standing in perfect order, and ready to charge on ten or ten thousand alike.

It proved a false alarm; order was restored, but only to be lost again a few hours after, among all but the Guard and a few hundred men belonging to Prince Eugene. The confused mass streamed along the road towards Orcha, the Guard alone showing the array of disciplined troops.

Six thousand were all that entered the place, out of that magnificent and veteran corps. Here the dangers thickened; for two armies were cutting off their retreat, while the winter was deepening, and the cold becoming more and more intense. There was nothing before the fragments of the grand army, but deserts of snow and ice over whose desolate bosom Cossacks were streaming, and the artillery of the enemy thundering. Napoleon resorted to threats to maintain discipline among his troops, but they had lost all fear of death--it was the slow torture that made them wild with despair. Nothing but the firm presence of the Old Guard and Eugene's few men prevented them from pillaging Orcha, although situated on a friendly frontier. The wonder is not that soldiers under such sufferings should become disorganized, but that the few thousand of the Old Guard could resist the infectious example, especially as by their orderly march they lost all the provisions by day and fuel by night, which the stragglers were able to pick up; and suffered dreadfully the want of both. Minsk, beyond the Beresina, had kept alive their hopes, but now nothing but frozen deserts lay beyond that inhospitable river.

Still they stood firm. Napoleon had said to them, "Grenadiers of my Guard, you are witnesses of the disorganization of the army. The greater part of your brethren have, by a deplorable fatality, thrown away their arms. If you imitate this sad example, all hope will be lost. The safety of the army is confided to you. You will justify the good opinion I have had of you. It is necessary not only that the officers among you maintain a severe discipline, but also that the soldiers should exercise a rigorous surveillance, and themselves punish those who attempt to leave their ranks."

This appeal to their honor was received in dead silence--not in words but in deeds they were to prove his confidence well placed; and shivering with cold and reeling from exhaustion, they closed sternly around him.

On the 20th of November, Napoleon quitted Orcha with his Guard, leaving behind him Eugene, Mortier, and Davoust to wait for Ney. The officers declared it was impossible that he should escape, but the emperor would not abandon the last hope. He knew the indomitable character of the man, and that he would perform everything short of miracles before he would surrender.

Four days after he heard that the heroic marshal was safe. When the courier brought the news he leaped into the air and shouted for joy, it was a sudden flash of light and hope on the night of his darkness and dejection.

But the horrors of this march increased as he advanced towards the Beresina, and when he arrived near that fatal river, he ordered all his eagles to be burned, together with half the wagons and carriages of the army, and the horses to be given to the artillery of the Guard. He commanded them also to lay hands on all the draught cattle within their reach, not sparing even his own horses, rather than leave a single cannon or ammunition wagon behind. Eighteen hundred dismounted cavalry of the Guard were rallied into two battalions, although but eleven hundred of them could be supplied with muskets or carbines. All the officers of the cavalry of the army that still had horses, formed themselves into a "sacred squadron" for the protection of the person of the emperor; and with this and the Old Guard as a fixed and central orb to retain the vast and straggling multitude--Napoleon, with a sack of poison on his breast to take in the last extremity rather than fall into the hands of the Cossacks, plunged into the gloomy forest of Minsk, and pressed forward to the desperate conflict that awaited him on the banks of the Beresina. Amid the double darkness of the night and the forest, thousands perished, and Napoleon with knit brow and compressed lip saw men in raging delirium constantly falling at his feet wildly entreating for help.

The frightful disorder that arose among the multitude during the awful passage of the Beresina, when the Old Guard at last began to cross, shows with what feelings the army regarded it. It was compelled to clear a passage for the emperor with the bayonet, though one corps of grenadiers, out of mere compassion, refused to exercise force on the despairing, pleading wretches, even to save themselves.

Having reached the opposite banks, they defended them during the succeeding days of storm, and battle, and death that marked the passage. It encamped near the ruins of Brelowa, in the open fields with Napoleon, also unsheltered, in their midst. During the day they were drawn up in order of battle, while the driving snow covered them as with a shroud; at night they bivouacked in a square around their suffering, yet intrepid leader. These veterans of a hundred battles would sit on their knapsacks feeding their feeble fires, their elbows planted on their knees, and their heads resting on their hands, doubling themselves up for the twofold purpose of retaining the little warmth they possessed, and of feeling less acutely the gnawings of empty stomachs. The nights were nearly sixteen hours long, and either filled with clouds of snow, or so piercing cold that the thermometer sunk to twenty, and sometimes to over thirty degrees below zero. Painful marches, fierce battles, tattered clothing, cold, and famine combined, were too much for human endurance, and in a few days one third of the Guard perished.

One who had seen that corps, on a review day in Paris, would not have recognized its uniform in the tattered vestments that half protected their persons. But they never murmured, never broke their solid formation, but clenching firmly with frozen fingers their muskets, struggled and died at their posts.

The following solitary incident illustrates the character and suffering of all. One day a mounted grenadier, or one who belonged to the corps of mounted grenadiers, though no longer possessing a horse, approached a fire occupied by various soldiers of the army. He was a tall, elegantly formed man, with a face full of serenity and firmness. He was covered with tatters of every color, having saved nothing of his handsome uniform but his sabre and a few pieces of the fur of his bear-skin cap, which he had wrapped around his head to protect it from the frost. His breath had congealed into icicles which hung from his lips and beard. He had but one boot, the other foot being enveloped in shreds of coarse cloth. As he approached the fire, he unrolled a small piece of linen cloth and held it out to dry, saying, "I will finish my washing." When it was dry he rolled a little tobacco in it, and said gaily "We are used up, but it is all the same, Vive l' Empereur. We have always thoroughly flogged these Russians, who are nothing but schoolboys compared to us."

Such was the destitution and such the spirit of this glorious old corps. It seems fabulous that any body of men could be subjected to the extremes of cold and hunger they underwent, and one be left alive to tell the tale of their sufferings and courage. Ever since they left Smolensko they had lived on horse flesh half roasted and rye water which in the absence of salt they seasoned with gunpowder.

From the Beresina to Smorgoni, the grand army exhibited nothing but a disordered mob, with the exception of the Guard. At the latter place Napoleon gave a farewell and agonized look upon it, and set out for Paris. Murat was left in command, but the giant mind had gone, and the Old Guard, scorning to take in its keeping an inferior person, voluntarily broke its ranks, and dispersed with the other stragglers. Its solid squares were no longer seen at night, nor its firm array by day, the trust and hope of all. The disorder then became frightful, and the last remaining days of the grand army presented the accumulation of all horrors. The Guard still numbering three thousand men partook of these horrors and sufferings. The weather suddenly became intensely cold, the thermometer standing day after day from twenty to thirty degrees below zero. Floundering through snow drifts, piercing dark forests, the frozen multitude dragged itself along, the silence broken only by the crackling of ice under their feet, or the low moan or shriek of despair, or last faint cry of soldiers as they fell stiff and stark on the icy earth. The living trod over the dead without turning aside to avoid the corpses. They stopped only to take the last morsel of food f'rom the dying, and to pounce like wolves upon a fallen horse, and quarrel over his emaciated carcass. The exhausted wretches strained their bloody eyes on the pitiless heavens, and then with heart-rending sighs, fell to rise no more. At night the strongest cut down fir trees for fire, into which the frozen stragglers as they arrived would often throw themselves, and be burned to a cinder. The frost seemed to attack the brains of many, causing the most frightful delirium. But the details are too horrible--let them rest with the dead who fattened with their corpses the deserts of Russia.

When the army arrived at Wilna, only a few platoons of the Old Guard remained, and they no longer obeyed the beat of the generale. Murat's shameful desertion of the army here completed the wreck.

The remains of that splendid army which in June had crossed the Niemen 500,000 strong, was now chased back by a detachment of cavalry. The solid squares of the Old Guard remained in Russia. Many of their bivouacs could be traced in the spring by the circle of skeletons that encompassed a heap of ashes. That "column of granite" had melted away, and nothing but its base was left on which another was to be speedily reared.

But its fame lasts. The courage that nothing could daunt the patient endurance under unheard of horrors, the sublime moral elevation of its character, its steadfast devotion to duty amid universal disorder, and which no bad example nor the last pangs of mortal agony could demoralize its lofty sense of honor triumphing over famine and death, will claim the admiration of the world till the end of time.