Page:The woman in battle .djvu/190

168 would be uttered that would strike terror to my soul, and make my blood run cold, as the fiercest fighting I had ever seen had not been able to do. I could face the cannon better than I could this bitter weather, and I could suffer myself better than I could bear to hear the cries and groans of these wounded men, lying out on the frozen ground, exposed to the beatings of this pitiless storm. Several times I felt as if I could stand it no longer, and was tempted to give the whole thing up, and lie down upon the ground and die; but, although my clothing was perfectly stiff with ice, and I ached in every limb from the cold, I succeeded in rallying myself whenever I found these fits of despondency coming over me, and stood my ground to the last.

I understood, from this brief but sufficient experience, what must have been the sufferings of the army of Napoleon, on the retreat from Moscow ; and the story of that retreat, which had hitherto seemed to me more like a romance than a narrative of actual occurrences, was now presented to my mind as a terrible reality. I even tried to find some consolation in thinking that, after all, it was only for a few hours that I would be called upon to endure, while the soldiers in that most disastrous retreat were for weeks exposed to all the severities of an almost Arctic winter, in their long march over desert plains, but was forced to the conclusion that reflecting on the woes of others is but an, indifferent alleviation of our own. In such a situation as the one I am describing, the most singular ideas run through one's mind. The minutes are lengthened out into hours, and the hours into days, until the reckoning of time is lost; and as the past seems to fade away into a remoteness that makes the painlessness of yesterday appear like the fragment of a happy dream, so the future, when it will all be over, and the commonplace routine of uneventful every-day life will commence again, is as far off as a child's imagination pictures heaven to be. We actually catch ourselves wondering whether it has always been so, and whether it will always be so until we die, and when we die, whether eternity will have anything better to offer. Little incidents in our past lives, of no possible moment, and which had perhaps never been thought of from the date of their occurrence, present themselves suddenly, with astonishing