of
horror, by which the Tartar march was distinguished from 30
the French, lies in the accompaniment of women[5] and
children. There were both, it is true, with the French
army, but so few as to bear no visible proportion to the
total numbers concerned. The French, in short, were
merely an army--a host of professional destroyers, whose
regular trade was bloodshed, and whose regular element 5
was danger and suffering. But the Tartars were a nation
carrying along with them more than two hundred and
fifty thousand women and children, utterly unequal, for
the most part, to any contest with the calamities before
them. The Children of Israel were in the same circumstances 10
as to the accompaniment of their families; but
they were released from the pursuit of their enemies in a
very early stage of their flight; and their subsequent residence
in the Desert was not a march, but a continued halt
and under a continued interposition of Heaven for their 15
comfortable support. Earthquakes, again, however comprehensive
in their ravages, are shocks of a moment's
duration. A much nearer approach made to the wide
range and the long duration of the Kalmuck tragedy may
have been in a pestilence such as that which visited 20
Athens in the Peloponnesian war, or London in the reign
of Charles II. There, also, the martyrs were counted by
myriads, and the period of the desolation was counted
by months. But, after all, the total amount of destruction
was on a smaller scale; and there was this feature of 25
alleviation to the _conscious_ pressure of the calamity--that
the misery was withdrawn from public notice into private
chambers and hospitals. The siege of Jerusalem by
Vespasian and his son, taken in its entire circumstances,
comes nearest of all--for breadth and depth of suffering, 30
for duration, for the exasperation of the suffering from
without by internal feuds, and, finally, for that last most
appalling expression of the furnace heat of the anguish in
its power to extinguish the natural affections even of
maternal love. But, after all, each case had circumstances
of romantic misery peculiar to itself--circumstances 5
without precedent, and (wherever human nature is ennobled
by Christianity), it may be confidently hoped, never
to be repeated.

The first point to be reached, before any hope of repose
could be encouraged, was the River Jaik.