Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/649

 contrary, the shoes both of saddle and draught horses were worn smooth by the last five or six days' incessant march on muddy ground, and the progress of the army met with terrible hindrance at the outset. . . . . It was not long before our march began to exhibit, on a small scale, some of the horrors of the famous retreat of the French from Moscow. The night was dark—the cold terrible; the thermometer, I dare say, did not mark more than four or five degrees below the freezing-point—but the chill in our veins told a very different tale, and the slipperiness of the road was perfectly awful. The snow, which was falling thick and fast at frequent intervals, lay in the fields three or four inches deep, and fringed the trees in the forests with the most picturesque fretwork; but it was trodden to the thinnest layer by all the feet, hoofs, and wheels of a whole host, till it glistened like ice in the occasional gleam of some pale star, as one or two peeped out in the sky through the gaps opened in the mass of clouds by the fitful blast. Dragoons, artillery-men—all who travel on saddle—were dismounted; even led horses were put to the direst exertions to keep their footing; draught-horses had to be held up—and cannon, caissons, and ammunition or luggage waggons to be dragged by the sheer strength of men, whose tread was no steadier. The falling of men and of beasts, the cracking of wheels and axletrees, was prodigious. It took us full nine hours to go over the first Danish mile and a half (less than seven English miles) of ground. Morning broke upon us long before we were half way between Schleswig and Fensburg, and we reached the latter place about four o'clock,, on Saturday, having