BOOKS.

SERGEANT BURGOGNE.*

SERGEANT BURGOGNE, a veteran of the Old Guard, who served in nine campaigns and was thrice wounded, being taken prisoner towards the close of 1813, beguiled the tedium of his captivity by writing his " Memoires," and these, or a part of them, edited by M. Paul Cottin, now for the first time published in volume form, are both deeply interesting and historically valuable. Though containing as much matter as an old-fashioned three-volume novel, the work deals ex- clusively with the Russian Campaign of 1812, and is probably the best soldier's book on that subject which has yet appeared. As a piece of personal narrative, showing in lurid colours the seamy side of the most terrible war of modern times, we have not met with its equal. Sergeant Burgogne's tale is all the more effective for being utterly destitute of " distinction of style." He merely tells, with Defoe-like directness and mili- tary bluntness, all that befell him in that fateful year. He had little or no grammar, and his French is often faulty, but he possessed the gift of narration, missed nothing worth setting down, and forgot nothing worth remembering. M. Cottin says he took notes, which is very likely. The first sentence of his strange eventful history may be cited as a fair sample of his style : " It was in the month of March, 1812, when we were at Almeida, in Portugal, fighting the English army under Wellington, that we got the route for Russia. We traversed Spain, where each day's march was marked by a combat, sometimes by two. It was in this way we arrived at Bayonne, the first city in France."

The real interest of the book, we might almost say the book itself, begins with the burning of Moscow, the march thither from Portugal and the battles in which Bourgogne was engaged during the advance being described in the first chapter, which is little more than an introduction. The fire, as he rightly observes, was not the cause of the ruin which later on overtook the army. There were buildings enough left standing to shelter the whole of it, and the cellars might have been used as stables and store-houses. Napoleon made two immense mistakes. He thought that the taking of Moscow would be equivalent to the conquest of Russia, and that his troops would be able to live on the country as they had done in Germany and elsewhere. But when the Russians refused to sue for peace, and Moscow and all the villages round about were deserted by their inhabitants, no supplies were obtainable, and he had to choose between being starved into surrender in the heart of Russia and retreat. He chose the latter alternative, and the disasters that ensued were due less to the severity of the winter than to lack of food. Strong men, well fed and warmly clad, can resist low temperatures with comparative impunity, but a combination of hunger and extreme cold is more fatal than plague and pestilence.

The retreat began on October 19th; before the 30th the supplies, which the commissariat had brought from Moscow, were exhausted, and the troops had to provide for them- selves as they best could. A party of Russian prisoners, under escort, says Burgogne, to whom no rations could be given, ate each other, "that is to say, when one of them died his body was cut up and divided among the survivors." And this was only the beginning, worse was to come. Horses were continually falling in their tracks, never to rise again ; the soldiers roasted and devoured them. There was nothing else for them. If by good fortune a man found a loaf or a potato, his comrades would tear it from him, and then fight among themselves for the morsels. On the night of Novem- ber 5th the sergeant's regiment halted near a wood, and here, during a violent snowstorm, a baby was born to Madame Dubois, the barber's wife, "an unfortunate position for a • Memeires du Serpent Burgopne (1812-15) publiis d'apr‘e le Manuserti Par Paul Cottin. Paris : Hachette et Cie.

woman," adds Burgogne. " But in this circumstance the colonel who commanded the regiment, did all he could for her, lending his cloak to cover the shelter (of branches) in which was Mother Dubois, who bore her trouble with courage. The same night our men killed a white bear, which was in- stantly devoured."

The next morning the "new-born" was folded in a sheep- skin, and the Colonel lent Madame Dubois his horse ; but before nightfall the poor babe was dead " frozen as hard as a board," which, for the mother at least, was doubtless the best thing that could have happened. At the end of a day's march there was always great eagerness to obtain shelter, or, failing shelter, fuel, since, without either one or the other, it was impossible for the famished fugitives to live through nights in which the thermometer descended to 30° to 40° below zero. It was always first come first served; those who got posses- sion of a building often refusing to admit others even when there was room. One of the most thrilling incidents of the retreat, arising from this cause, is thus described by Bur- gogne

" As we approached Gars, a poor hamlet with a few houses, I perceived one of those buildings (a large barn and a small dwelling-house attached) of which I have spoken, I pointed it out to a serjeant of the company, an Alsatian of the name of Muther, and proposed that we should pass the night there if we could reach it first and find places. So we started running, but when we arrived the barn was so crowded with superior officers, soldiers, and horses, that we could not get in, despite all our efforts to do so, as they pretended that there were eight hundred

persons within already On this we resolved to pass the night under the horses, which were fastened to the doors. Several times those who were bivouacking around tried to demolish the barn, so that they might use the wood of which it was built for making fires and shelters, and get the straw which was stored in an adjoining granary. There was also a quantity of pine wood, dry and resinous. Those inside were lying on the straw, and though they were so crowded they made little fires to warm themselves and roast their horseflesh. So far from letting their habitation be demolished they threatened to shoot those

who made the attempt It was about eleven o'clock. Part of these unfortunates were asleep; others warming their limbs at the fires. A confused noise was heard ; a fire had broken out in two places,—in the middle of the barn and at the end, close to the door near which we were lying. When they tried to open it the horses, frightened by the flames and smothered with the smoke, plunged in such sort that the men,notwithstanding their efforts, were unable to get through, and when they would have made for the other door were driven back by the flames Nothing was to be heard but hoarse howlings. The unfortunates whom the fire was devouring screamed dreadfully. They mounted on each others' shoulders and made a hole through the roof, but that let in air, the fire blazed higher. and the few men who got up to the hole, their heads without hair, their clothes

burning, fell back into the abyss It was a veritable tableau of hell."

Isolated groups of soldiers, shivering round expiring bivouac fires, hurried to the burning barn, not to save the inmates— these were past praying for—but to warm themselves and roast bits of horseflesh at the ends of their swords and bayonets. It was the general opinion that the conflagration was a Divine judgment, those who were destroyed having brought from Moscow a vast quantity of gold, silver, and diamonds, and many of the men, knowing this, risked being roasted in turn in a mad search for the stolen treasure.

It was rumoured that some Croats, who belonged to the Army, cut up and devoured one of the half-burnt bodies. "I believe that this happened several times in the course of that fatal campaign, though I never actually saw anything of the sort," adds Burgogne, who is always careful to distinguish between what he heard and what be saw.

The note of the retreat was supreme selfishness. The instinct of self-preservation dominated every other. When men are maddened with hunger they lose all sense of humanity, right, and wrong. They become for the time being wild beasts. The troops marched on with bent heads, looking neither to the right nor the left. Those who fell and were too weak to rise were left to perish ; and perhaps theirs was the better part. But there were noble exceptions. Some of the soldiers carried wounded officers on their backs. Once Burgogne, baying a frost-bitten foot and a bad shoe, fell behind and presently observed a man with a dog on his back. The man was Serjeant Daubenton, " of the regiment." "Are you going to eat it ? " asked Burgogne, " horse would be better." " Not I, indeed, I would rather eat a Cossack," answered Daubenton.

"Don't you recognise Mouton,' the dog of the regiment? His paws are frost-bitten so that he cannot walk." And then he explains that on seeing that the dog could not keep up he would have left him, but the poor beast howled so pitifully that Danbenton relented and strapped him to his knapsack. Shortly afterwards the two serjeants were beset by Cossacks, one of whom gave Mouton' a cut with his sabre. So it came to pass that in order to save his own life Daubenton had to put the dog down, and they never saw him again.

Another instance of devotion witnessed by Bargogne con- concerns the young Prince Emile, of Hesse Cassel, who had brought a contingent to the " Grand Army," the main body of which halted one night at a place where no shelter was to be had, and, by reason of a terrible snowstorm, no fires could be made. In order to protect their Prince from the icy blast a hundred and fifty dragoons, " whose horses were either dead or eaten," stood round him in close order through the night. In the morning three-fourths of these brave fellows and ten thousand belonging to other corps were no more.

Hunger and cold were not the only evils with which the survivors of the army had to contend. Few of them had a spare shirt, their underclothing rotted on their backs, they had no chance of washing themselves, they were devoured with vermin, and suffered horribly from chilblains ; their boots were in holes, and their frostbitten toes and fingers fell off like rotten twigs from a tree. Burgogne tells that shortly before the few survivors of the Guard reached the frontier they had to cross a frozen river covered with hummocks of ice. The banks being high the passage was difficult, and Burgogne, who had a sore foot and a frostbitten hand, found it impossible to climb the opposite bank. He besought several soldiers to help him, but none gave heed to his entreaties. At length, seeing an old Horse Grenadier of the Guard he appealed to him, saying, "Comrade, since you, like me, are of the Imperial G uard, I beseech you to help me ; by giving me a hand you will save my life."—" I have not a band to

give you," was the startling answer; "but if you will lay hold of my cloak I will try to pull you up." On this Burgogne seized the Grenadier's cloak with one band and his teeth, and so was saved. "I told you I had no hands," observer the Grenadier, as they resumed their march ; "I should have said ' fingers' ; they have all dropped off; " and then the poor fellow asked Burgogne to do him a service, which he gladly rendered.

Yet these heroes still believed in Bonaparte. They were devoted to him body and soul. It was a religion; every- thing he did was right. The night after the passage of the Beresina some Grenadiers of the Guard and an officer went round the bivouacs asking for wood to warm the Emperor. "All freely gave the best they had; even the dying raised their heads and said, ' Take (this) for the Emperor." Everything he did was right, even quitting the Army, and the few who blamed him for doing so were probably "agents of England, who had entered the Army to preach disaffection." When Picart, a comrade of Burgogne's, saw Napoleon "clothed in a great fur-lined capote, having on his head a velvet cap, edged with fox-skin, and a stick in his hand, he wept, saying, Oar Emperor is on foot, walk- ing with a stick, he who is so great, he of whom we are so proud.' " In a note to his Memoirs, written in 1814, when he had become a Lieutenant, the sergeant observes : " The Emperor being no longer in France, I sent in my resignation." Yet of Burgogne's regi- ment only twenty-six returned to France ! All the others, upwards of two thousand, had laid down their lives for the god of their idolatry. The survivors must have been the pick of the regiment. Only men of exceptional vitality, bodily strength, and alertness of mind could have gone through the trials which Bargogne so vividly describes, trials which he had afterwards some difficulty in believing that he had really undergone. " Those who made that unfortunate and glorious campaign," he writes, " agree, as the Emperor said, " that it was necessary to be of iron to withstand so many evils and miseries, and that it was the greatest ordeal to which men could be exposed." No greater can be imagined; the wonder is less that so many perished than that any out- lived the horrors of the Moscow Campaign. Burgogne survived the retreat more than half a century, dying in 1867, in his eighty-first year.