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Updated: June 9, 2025
This was a disastrous mistake, for these pontoons would have assured us a quick crossing of the Beresina which, in the event, we had to effect at the cost of so much blood.
The celebrated passage of the Beresina by the French is one of the most remarkable examples of such an operation. Never was an army in a more desperate condition, and never was one extricated more gloriously and skillfully.
Poor man, how bad he felt when he saw his Eagles flying with their backs turned on victory! That was really too rough! Well, the next thing is the Beresina.
This prospect made them all desperate; they saw the abyss, and still the worst was yet in store for them: Beresina and Wilna! Napoleon left Smolensk on November 14th. The cold had become more intense 21 deg. The cold killed a great many, and the road became covered with dead soldiers resting under the snow.
So it happened that, as the colonel had foreseen and arranged, Stephanie traveled across the mimic Beresina about nine o'clock in the morning, and was awakened by an explosion of rockets about a hundred paces from the scene of action. It was a signal.
Little by little the mass of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid, or perhaps it should be said so happy that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this forest of men, so as to cross the Beresina with the five thousand heroes whom he was leading to the Emperor.
The conqueror appeared to have the very forces of nature in his favour, and his hosts moved on without a check and without a failure of organization. So perfectly had he planned the minutest details that, although his stations were scattered from the Beresina to the Seine, not so much as a letter was lost during the onward movement. How could the doomed country resist? So thought all Europe.
Roos, of whom I have already spoken, having been taken prisoner near the Beresina, became physician to the hospitals of Borisow and Schitzkow and soon had the greatest private practice of any physician in the vicinity; he afterward was called to the large hospitals in St. Petersburg, and was awarded highest honors by the Russian government.
I have not forgotten the passage over the bridges in the Beresina, and it is fresh in the memories of some brave fellows of my acquaintance; they will back me up, and the nation shall give you the recognition you deserve." "You will be called a Bonapartist! Please do not meddle in the matter, sir. I have gone to the rear now, and I have dropped into my hole here like a spent bullet.
At a short distance before them lay the fatal river the Beresina, the scene of untold horrors, which, now half-frozen, forced its way through the ice that impeded its progress. The two bridges were so completely choked up by the crowds of people, horsemen, foot-soldiers, and fugitives, that they broke down.
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