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Updated: June 9, 2025
A great number of Bavarians, however, remained under General Zoller to garrison Thorn, and about fifteen hundred of them returned home. At the passage of the Beresina, the Wuertembergers had still about eighty men under arms, and in Poland about three hundred assembled, the only ones who returned free.
General de Wrède, who had fought on our side in Russia, thought that he would find the French army in the deplorable state to which cold and hunger had reduced those retreating from Moscow by the time they reached the Beresina, but we soon showed him that in spite of our misfortunes, we still had soldiers in good heart, and quite capable of defeating Austro-Bavarians.
Questions like these have been asked also in times preceding ours. Alfred de Musset wrote upon this subject in 1833, in Paris: "There are people who tell you our age is preoccupied, that men no longer read anything or care for anything. Napoleon was occupied, I think, at Beresina: he, however, had his Ossian with him.
His jolly red face was rather discolored, like those of all who had lived to tell of the Beresina. The lower half of his big, pointed stomach marked the straight line which characterizes a cavalry officer. Gouraud had commanded the Second Hussars. His gray moustache hid a huge blustering mouth, if we may use a term which alone describes that gulf. He did not eat his food, he engulfed it.
If I were asked what I think of people's travelling after the commonly accepted natural term of life is completed, I should say that everything depends on constitution and habit. The old soldier says, in speaking of crossing the Beresina, where the men had to work in the freezing stream constructing the bridges, "Faut du temperament pour cela!"
After the bridges had been constructed across the Beresina, General Eble presented such of the pontooners as were not disabled to the Emperor, and Napoleon embraced poor Gondrin perhaps but for that accolade he would have died ere now. This memory and the hope that some day Napoleon will return are all that Gondrin lives by. "Let us go on as fast as possible!" cried Genestas.
This is the first of my savings on my pay, and the price of the leg which I left the past year at the battle of Mohiloff, after the passage of Beresina; for he was first, Peter the Great well-named in paying generously the soldiers of fortune who enrolled themselves in his service and who gave, many of them, the sacrifice of some one of their limbs."
The bridge was burned at eight o'clock in the morning. On the 29th the. Emperor quitted the banks of the Beresina, and we slept at Kamen, where his Majesty occupied a poor wooden building which the icy air penetrated from all sides through the windows; nearly all the glass of which being broken, we closed the openings as well as we could with bundles of hay.
To find a catastrophe in history comparable to that of the Beresina we must go back to the destruction of the legions of Varus. Notwithstanding the general dismay which prevailed in Paris that capital continued tranquil, when by a singular chance, on the very day on which Napoleon evacuated the burning city of Moscow, Mallet attempted his extraordinary enterprise.
A small stream ran through his park, and in winter time flooded a low-lying land, something like the plain on the eastern side of the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the slope of a ridge above it, bounded the horizon of a picture of desolation, something as Studzianka lay on the heights that shut in the swamp of the Beresina.
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