tle. Napoleon's army marched on.
The Cossacks, with their well fed horses, constantly circled round the
French army and cut to pieces the small detachments in the van and in
the rear-guard. The French cavalry, with their horses dead, dying or out
of condition, could not pursue. Meanwhile the army, under the burning
heat of the short summer which had known no spring, marched on.

"Into that huge wilderness, over the marshes and plains, the army
marched. Always before it lay a land bare and dumb. The vast Russian
army could never be found. In endless succession the French crossed
plains on which the grass grew, thin and bare, splendid for the grazing
of cattle, but utterly insufficient for a hundred thousand horses, now
reduced to seventy thousand. Ahead of the soldiers, every day, the sun
rose red upon an empty land, every night it set, red, behind them, upon
a land equally bare and empty. Day after day they marched through this
land without food, unmolested by the Russians, who knew well that lack
of forage and interminable marching was defeating the great Napoleon
better than they could upon the battlefield, and without the sacrifice
of a single Russian soldier. Weather, boys, always weather, is the
greatest ally or the greatest enemy in the entire history of war.

"At last the army saw in the distance a long black line. Every effort of
Napoleon to persuade the Russians to attack him had failed, the Russian
army steadily withdrew. But when the long black line of Smolensk
appeared, hope was restored to the French army. At last they would meet
the Russians on equal terms and decide the campaign against guns and
bayonets instead of against leagues and starvation! On Napoleon marched
and at last found himself before the town of Smolensk. The French army,
now only four hundred thousand strong, was yet an unwieldy force to
handle. It took two days for the various groups to form into positions
and then they charged the town.

"The soldiers fighting them had fled. Everybody had fled. The city was
utterly deserted, sad and silent as a grave-yard. There was nothing
there to eat. The Russians had destroyed everything. There was not a
handful of oats, not a loaf of bread. The French victory had gained for
them only an empty city and an empty land. It was now the end of August,
and Moscow was a long way away.

"The march continued. Before them, the sun rose red through the volcanic
dust every morning and set red every night. Had