eded, day after day, in
obstructing their pursuers. Ney was on foot in the midst of them,
carrying a musket and fighting like the humblest private. But at
Smolensk--where the army expected to find everything, and really found
nothing--they stayed too long, and on resuming their march found the
Russians barring their path. Napoleon and the Imperial Guard cut their
way through. The first and fourth corps succeeded, after a desperate
conflict, in evading their enemies, but Ney, who had received orders
to blow up the fortifications of Smolensk before leaving the town,
found himself with some eight thousand men cut off from the main body
of fugitives by an army of 50,000 Russians. He attacked them as though
the numbers were equal, lost in a short time nearly half his little
force, and was obliged to fall back. Being called upon to surrender,
he answered, proudly, "A Marshal of France never surrenders," and gave
the order, as night approached, to retreat toward Smolensk, which was
indeed the only way open to him. The soldiers were in despair. Ney
alone did not lose heart. In the gathering dusk they came upon a small
rivulet. The marshal broke the ice and watched the flow of the current
beneath. "This must be a feeder of the Dnieper," he said. "We will
follow it, and put the river between us and our enemies." This they
succeeded in doing; but were obliged to leave their wounded, their
artillery, and their baggage upon the other side. Ney had left
Smolensk on November 17th, with about eight thousand men. On the 20th
he joined Napoleon, who had given him up for lost--with somewhere
about one thousand. Napoleon, hearing that he was come, fairly leaped
and shouted for joy, exclaiming, "I have three hundred millions of
francs in the Tuileries--I would have given them all rather than have
lost such a man."

A few days afterward Ney was fighting madly on the shores of the fatal
Beresina to clear the way for the surging and almost frenzied crowd of
soldiers, stragglers, women and children, who, under the merciless
fire of the Russian batteries were streaming across the river on the
rickety bridges improvised by the French engineers. The Grand Army was
by this time only a crowd of wretched and undisciplined fugitives. Ney
managed to preserve the semblance of a rear-guard, and if it had not
been for his unceasing efforts it seems probable that hardly a single
soldier would ever have seen again the shores of France. As it was,
when he c