Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
A gas attack, launched by the Germans during the night of August 22, 1916, in the region south of Krevo, a little town north of the Beresina River and about fifty miles southeast of Vilna, brought no results of importance. The same was true of an attack against Russian trenches south of Tsirin, northwest of Baranovitchy, made after considerable artillery preparation on August 24, 1916.
He ordered ragged uniforms and clothing for several hundred peasants. Huts and bivouacs and batteries were raised and burned down. In short, he omitted no device that could reproduce that most hideous of all scenes. He succeeded. When, in the earliest days of December, snow covered the earth with a thick white mantle, it seemed to him that he saw the Beresina itself.
The moment that they saw their handiwork floating on the Beresina, they sprang down onto it from the bank with callous selfishness. The major, dreading the frenzy of the first rush, held back Stephanie and the general; but a shudder ran through him when he saw the landing place black with people, and men crowding down like playgoers into the pit of a theatre.
A few days after my return to Paris their Majesties were present at the opera where 'Jerusalem Delivered' was presented. Never have I seen more enthusiasm displayed, and I must avow that the transition seemed to me most sudden from the recent passage of the Beresina to those truly magical scenes.
The overladen bridge gave way, and not only so, the impetus of the frantic living wave towards that fatal bank was such that a dense crowd of human beings was thrust into the water as if by an avalanche. The sound of a single human cry could not be distinguished; there was a dull crash as if an enormous stone had fallen into the water and the Beresina was covered with corpses.
There still remained behind a great number of the irregular attendants, besides those soldiers who had been wounded during the battle, and guns and baggage-carts enough to cover a large meadow. The French now fired the bridge, and all these were abandoned to their fate. The Russian account states, that when the Beresina thawed after that winter's frost, 36,000 bodies were found in its bed.
Grave situation of the army. Loss and recapture of Borisoff. The bridge over the Beresina burnt. We collect much booty from Borisoff. Chap. 18. Corbineau rejoins 2nd Corps. The enemy are deceived. Chap. 19. Loss of Partouneaux's division. The catastrophe at the Beresina. 2nd Corps forms the rearguard. I am wounded again. Chap. 20.Intense cold. Thieving in the army. Arrival at Wilna. Using sledges.
"You must know that so far in this campaign my regiment had never been on the main line of Napoleon's advance. All these months since the invasion the army we belonged to had been wrestling with Oudinot in the north. We had only come down lately, driving him before us to the Beresina. "This was the first occasion, then, that I and my comrades had a close view of Napoleon's Grand Army.
Then the invading hosts, stricken with dismay, fly from this fated and ill-starred city to darken the snows of Lithuania with their bodies; and of five hundred thousand men the flower of French chivalry but forty thousand cross the Beresina to tell the tale! Surely Moscow, like Jerusalem, hath "wept sore in the night."
The cannonade and fusillade soon became extremely violent, and Napoleon, on horseback, incessantly riding from one point to another, assumed that Oudinot resisted Tchitchakoff while Eble continued to care for the bridges, and that Victor, who was fighting Wittgenstein, was not thrown into the icy floods of the Beresina together with the masses which had not yet crossed.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking