WAR IN THE DIR'ST DEGREE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2368, 20 July 1899, Page 56

WAR IN THE DIR'ST DEGREE.

THE RETREAr FROM MOSCOW.

'Mr Heinemann has just published a translation of the "Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne." This is a book which one lays down with fatigue — the fatigue that is honourable to the writer.

This Bourgogno was a Velite sergeant t>f the Imperial Guard. In 1812 he was in •Portugal, engaged against the English. One day they received orders to march for Russia, and six months later Bourgogne heard the historic shout, " Moscow ! Moscow ! " ; We are with him in all his duties in the deserted, burning city. We know how his tompany fared ; what preposterous comforts treasures they amassed, running through naming and falling streets. The miserable convicts who fired the city are shot against walls. A Jew, tearing his beard to see his 'synagogue in flames, is seized by Bourgogne for a guide. All his valuables, he says, were in the synagogue : " Have they anything to sell or exchange? They loot an ■Italian confectioner's shop, and arc cut off by flames ; then, sheltering from rain and fire, they pass the time in making jamfritters. In their quarters the non-commis-sioned officers lie " like pashas on ermine, sable lion, ancl bear skins, smoking costly tobacco in magnificent pipes " ; they have champagnes, preserved fruits, and silver ingots. Then the flight, and its crescendo of horror. Even two days after leaving Moscow the scene was grotesque : —

" The next day (the 30th) the joad had become very heavy, and many carts, laden with booty had the greatest difficulty in getting along. Several were damaged, and others were lightened by throwing away useless parts of the load. I was that day in the rear guard, and could see from the extreme rear of the column the beginning of the frightful disorder that followed. The road was heaped with valuable things — pictures, candlesticks, and quantities of books. For more than an hour I was picking up volumes, which I glanced through, and then threw down again, tc be taken up by others, who in their turn left them on the road — books such as Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Buffon's 'Natural History,' bound in red morocco and gold."

War's ironies have seldom produced a stranger picture than this — Napoleon's horde flinging down th<* literature of their country which the studious Muscovites, had bound in Morocco and gold. One might ponder on the way in which the soldier and tha natural man played on each other in this unparalleled walk through the snow. On a certain night some hundreds of men were burned to death in a barn, and their comrades robbed their bodies, and, warming themselves, said.. "What a beautiful fire!" Yet the next nighc 150 dragoons stood all night round the Prince Emile of Hesse-Cassel,- pressing tightly dgiiiiml- each other to protect him (he was not 20 years old) from the fiendish north wind. In the morning three-quarters of these men were fiozen dead, along .with ten thousand others who had sunk in the snow during the night. Hunger and honour contended all through the hellish drama.

At Smolensk we have a lurid scene in it church where Bourgogne, nigh dead with cold and hunger, finds his own company singing, mad drunk: some clown playing cii an organ amid volume? of smoke; the churchyard heaped with dead bodies for which no graves could be scooped in the fiozen soil; and tbx door blocked with

corpses over which new-comers walked as over logs, without a glance at their feet. Once Bourgogne fell by the way, and begged an old grenadier to help him. "1 have not got any," he said, raising two stumps to show that his hands were cut off. Fortunately, he found a friend, one Picart, a good fellow with an unquenchable humour, and for three days these two dodged hunger and the Cossacks through leagues ol forest. Picart adored the Emperor, yet he would break out : "Heis a regular fool of a conscript to have waited so long in Moscow. A fortnight was long enough to eat and drink everything we found there ; but to stay there 34 days, just waiting for winter to come on ! I call that folly. If he were here I could tell him to his face that isn't the way to lead men. Good God ! the dances he has led me the last 16 years ! We suffered enough in Egypt — in the Syrian deserts ; but that's nothing compared with these deserts ot snow.' 1 When the two struck the mournful columns, thej r were able to watch the Emperor go by. He was followed by seven or eight hundred officers and non-commi&sioned officers, "walking in order and perfect silence, and carrying the eagles of their different regiments, which so often had led them to victory. This was all that remained ot 60,000 men." After them came the Imperial Guard, to which the two wanderers belonged. - : Picart wept, and struck the ground .with his musket, saying : " I don't know, mon pays, if I am awake or dreaming. It breaks my heart 'to see ' our Emperor on foot, his baton in his hand. He, so great, who made \is all proud of him ! " It is a picture that we know.

Sergeant Bourgogne lived through it all, had the cross of the Legion of Honour, and settled down to be — a draper. Ifc was an inspiration to give Alphonse Chigot's sketch of Bourgogne aftei he had left the army — Bourgogne in a tall hat and curly hair, the boulevard figure of an old soldier, kindly, courteous ("wouldn't hurt a fly"), ready for a newspaper .and a glass of wine. And all that behind him : the fires of Moscow, the snow, the wolves, the obscene hunger, the league-long litter of dead men glad to be dead.

Bourgogne died in his bed, well tended, in 1867, and his book lives as a soldier's record of war at its worst. — Academy.