Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
The poor negroes in South Carolina have not been deposed simply because they are ignorant; the Russian peasants who fought at Borodino were grossly ignorant. How many of the English hinds who stood rooted in the soil at Waterloo could read and write?
We find the Messina disaster dearly foreseen, twice over, by a little girl who perished under the ruins of the ill-fated city; and we read of a dream which, three months before the French invasion of Russia, foretold to Countess Toutschkoff that her husband would fall at Borodino, a village so little known at the time that those interested in the dream looked in vain for its name on the maps.
But Russia was thoroughly dissatisfied with the way in which the war had so far been carried on, and Barclay de Tolly was at this juncture superseded by Kutusof, who, having intrenched himself strongly near the little village of Borodino, prepared to dispute the farther progress of the invaders.
The Russians withdrew before the French advance, until, on September third, their van halted on the right bank of the Kalatscha, opposite Borodino, to strike the decisive blow in defense of Moscow. On the fourth Napoleon's van attacked and drove before it the Russian rear, which was just closing in. He had a hundred and twenty-eight thousand men at hand, and six thousand more within reach.
At Wagram, in the thick of the firing, on the field of Borodino, among the dead, always as cool as a cucumber he is!" said the grenadier, in answer to the questions with which the young girl plied him. For a moment Julie was absorbed in the contemplation of that face, so quiet in the security of conscious power.
Borodino went home furious; nor was his rage diminished, when, on coming to dinner that day, a recherche banquet served in the Frangipane best style, and requesting a supply of a puree a la bisque aux ecrevisses, the clumsy attendant who served him let fall the assiette of vermeille cisele, with its scalding contents, over the prince's chin, his Mechlin jabot, and the grand cordon of the Legion of honor which he wore.
"Well, well; it was so. Your brother was a Count, and died a General in my service." Gahagan. "He was found lying upon the bodies of nine-and-twenty Cossacks at Borodino. They were all dead, and bore the Gahagan mark." "C'est vrai, Montholon: je vous donne ma parole d'honneur la plus sacree, que c'est vrai. Ils ne sont pas d'autres, ces terribles Ga'gans.
The villages which had but lately given us shelter were level with the ground: under their ashes were the bodies of hundreds of soldiers and peasants.... But most horrible was the field of Borodino, where we saw the forty thousand men, who had perished there, yet lying unburied."
A rout only sets in when the moral force of the defeated is very severely shaken then there often ensues a complete incapability of further resistance, and the whole action consists of giving way, that is of flight. Jena and Belle Alliance were routs, but not so Borodino.
And the campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? Lodi, Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark, unthinking force resident in masses of men.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking