Of the 50 thousand, armed or unarmed,
who had crossed there was not a single one who did not owe his life and
liberty to him and his pontooneers. But the 400 pontooneers who had worked
in the water, paid with their lives for this noblest deed in the history
of wars; they all died within a short time. General Eble survived his act
of bravery only three weeks; he died in Koenigsberg on the 21st. day of
December, 1812.
This is an incomplete sketch of the immortal event of the Beresina, full of
psychological interest and therefore fit to be inserted in the medical
history of Napoleon's campaign in Russia.
To a miraculous accident, the arrival of Corbineau, the noble devotedness
of Eble, the desperate resistance of Victor and his soldiers, to the energy
of Oudinot, Ney, Legrand, Maison, Zayonchek, Doumerc, and, finally, to his
own sure and profound decision, his recognition of the true steps to be
taken, Napoleon owed the possibility that he could escape after a bloody
scene, the most humiliating, the most crushing disaster.
TWO EPISODES
Surgeon Huber of the Wuerttembergians, writes to his friend, Surgeon Henri
de Roos, who settled in Russia after the campaign of 1812, how he crossed
the Beresina, and in this connection he describes the following dreadful
episode:
"A young woman of twenty-five, the wife of a French colonel killed a few
days before in one of the engagements, was near me, within a short distance
of the bridge we were to cross.
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