have fancied you saw a famished pack of hounds; they surrounded him, they tore him to pieces, for which they quarreled among themselves like ravenous dogs.
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“On the 6th December, the very day after Napoleon’s departure, the sky exhibited a still more dreadful appearance. You might see icy particles floating in the air; the birds fell from it quite stiff and frozen. The atmosphere was motionless and silent; it seemed as if every thing which possessed life and movement in nature, the wind itself, had been seized, chained, and as it were frozen by a universal death.
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“The army was in this last state of physical and moral distress, when its first fugitives reached Wilna. Wilna! their magazine, their depôt, the first rich and inhabited city which they had met with since their entrance into Russia. * * * * * *. For the space of ten hours (Dec. 9), with the cold at 27 and even at 28 degrees, thousands of soldiers who fancied themselves in safety, died either from cold or suffocation, just as had happened at the gates of Smolensk, and the bridges across the Berezina[1].”
Such were the last days of Napoleon’s “grand army,” – the greatest that has ever existed in modern warfare.
After passing through Grodno, guarded the whole of his journey by a gen d’arme. Captain Willoughby arrived at Königsberg, where he was confined to his bed with fever, and totally blind, for seven weeks, during which long and severe illness, he had the good fortune to be attended by Dr. Motherby, an English physician, settled in that city, whose professional abilities and constant kindness saved him. At Konigsberg, he likewise found a British merchant, named Smith, who kindly gave him money for his bills, and thus enabled him to repay the benevolent Count Horgendorf, by means of his banker at Dantzic.
Captain Willoughby did not leave the ancient capital of Prussia until the cossacks were seen from its walls, when nearly 20,000 French soldiers, all wounded or ill, likewise took their departure. He subsequently passed through Dantzic, Stettin, and many other strongly fortified places still in the hands of the enemy, and at length entered Berlin, where he had a personal conference with one of the King’s
- ↑ De Segur, Vol. ii. pp. 341–351.
