File:The panorama of nations - comprising the characteristics of courage, perseverance, enterprise, cunning, shrewdness, vivacity, ingenuity, contempt of danger and of death exhibited by people of the (14760902021).jpg

Identifier: panoramaofnation00fros (find matches)
Title: The panorama of nations : comprising the characteristics of courage, perseverance, enterprise, cunning, shrewdness, vivacity, ingenuity, contempt of danger and of death exhibited by people of the principal nations of the world, as illustrated in narratives of peril and adventure
Year: 1852 (1850s)
Authors: Frost, John, 1800-1859
Subjects: Adventure and adventurers
Publisher: Auburn, N.Y. : Beardsley
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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war, tliemost murderous because the most vindictive, and also war combinedwith agencies of nature, that ever can have been exhibited. ThisI say thoughtfully; for in hot climates, through wliich lay thewhole of the great military campaigns or retreats in ancient his-tory—such as those of Cambyses, Crassus, Julian—there nevercould have been that direct and silent agency of nature put forthwhich occurs under higher latitudes. A snow storm, it is true,has sometimes interrupted a march near Jerusalem, but not forany continuance, and not except in winter, when the ancientsrarely undertook warlike expeditions. Here only, from the vastextent of the fighting and the retreat, nature had time allowedher to develope her resources—full seven weeks of time after thesnow commenced in good earnest over full seven hundred milesEnglish of ground; for an army encumbered as the French was,cannot, in the most favourable circumstances, clear more than(254) ■^^tfliti!;»IJfelilllil!:i: .Illllljllll
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mm; ■■■:^ yi m \n n THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW. 257 fourteen and a half English miles a day. I affirm therefore,peremptorily, that such a case, when the sword was aided throughseven long weeks by the fiercest artillery from the heavens, andalso from the rage of famine—never was exhibited before, norprobably will be again for a millcniura, unless it should be inAmerican wars. So true is the summing up in a modernEnglish poet—that God, in the anger of retribution, speakingby his still small voice, said to Famine, Frost and Snow, Finish the strife by deadliest victory.It is false and basely unjust to the Russians, if we submit to therepresentations of some historians, that the sword had no sharein this tremendous catastrophe ! on the contrary, it was thesword that reaped the earliest harvest; and to the mute agencyof heaven was assigned only the final task— Finish the strife hy deadliest victory. From Pleskow we passed to Druja, thence over the frozen riverDuena; and from that p

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