er.

As long as Russia was ruled by Paul I, the half-witted son of Catherine
the Great, Napoleon had known how to deal with the situation. But Paul
grew more and more irresponsible until his exasperated subjects were
obliged to murder him (lest they all be sent to the Siberian lead-mines)
and the son of Paul, the Emperor Alexander, did not share his father's
affection for the usurper whom he regarded as the enemy of mankind, the
eternal disturber of the peace. He was a pious man who believed that he
had been chosen by God to deliver the world from the Corsican curse.
He joined Prussia and England and Austria and he was defeated. He tried
five times and five times he failed. In the year 1812 he once more
taunted Napoleon until the French Emperor, in a blind rage, vowed that
he would dictate peace in Moscow. Then, from far and wide, from Spain
and Germany and Holland and Italy and Portugal, unwilling regiments were
driven northward, that the wounded pride of the great Emperor might be
duly avenged. The rest of the story is common knowledge. After a march
of two months, Napoleon reached the Russian capital and established his
headquarters in the holy Kremlin. On the night of September 15 of the
year 1812, Moscow caught fire. The town burned four days. When the
evening of the fifth day came, Napoleon gave the order for the retreat.
Two weeks later it began to snow. The army trudged through mud and sleet
until November the 26th when the river Berezina was reached. Then the
Russian attacks began in all seriousness. The Cossacks swarmed around
the "Grande Armee" which was no longer an army but a mob. In the middle
of December the first of the survivors began to be seen in the German
cities of the East.

Then there were many rumours of an impending revolt. "The time
has come," the people of Europe said, "to free ourselves from this
insufferable yoke." And they began to look for old shotguns which had
escaped the eye of the ever-present French spies. But ere they knew
what had happened, Napoleon was back with a new army. He had left his
defeated soldiers and in his little sleigh had rushed ahead to Paris,
making a final appeal for more troops that he might defend the sacred
soil of France against foreign invasion.

Children of sixteen and seventeen followed him when he moved eastward to
meet the allied powers. On October 16, 18, and 19 of the year 1813, the
terrible battle of Leipzig took place where for three days boys in gre