These might seem pictures from the life of Alaric, who led the Goths to Rome, or of Attila, general of the Huns, called the Scourge of God, and who boasted that the grass did not grow where his horse had set his foot; but no! they belong to our own times. They are portions of the wonderful, but wicked, career of him who stands forth the foremost representative of worldly grandeur. The heart aches, as we follow him and his marshals from field to field of Satanic glory,[22] finding everywhere, from Spain to Russia, the same carnival of woe. The picture is various, yet the same. Suffering, wounds, and death, in every form, fill the terrible canvas. What scene more dismal than that of Albuera, with its horrid piles of corpses, while all night the rain pours down, and river, hill, and forest, on each side, resound with the cries and groans of the dying?[23] What scene more awfully monumental than Salamanca, where, long after the great battle, the ground, strewn with fragments of casques and cuirasses, was still white with the skeletons of those who fell?[24] What catalogue of horrors more complete than the Russian campaign? At every step is war, and this is enough: soldiers black with powder; bayonets bent with the violence of the encounter; the earth ploughed with cannon-shot; trees torn and mutilated; the dead and dying; wounds and agony; fields covered with broken carriages, outstretched horses, and mangled bodies; while disease, sad attendant on military suffering, sweeps thousands from the great hospitals, and the multitude of amputated limbs, which there is no time to destroy, accumulate in bloody heaps, filling the air with corruption. What tongue, what pen, can describe the bloody havoc at Borodino, where, between rise and set of a single sun, one hundred thousand of our fellow-men, equalling in number the whole population of this city, sank to earth, dead or wounded?[25] Fifty days after the battle, no less than thirty thousand are found stretched where their last convulsions ended, and the whole plain is strewn with half-buried carcasses of men and horses, intermingled with garments dyed in blood, and bones gnawed by dogs and vultures.[26] Who can follow the French army in dismal retreat, avoiding the spear of the pursuing Cossack only to sink beneath the sharper frost and ice, in a temperature below zero, on foot, without shelter for the body, famishing on horse-flesh and a miserable compound of rye and snow-water? With a fresh array, the war is upheld against new forces under the walls of Dresden; and as the Emperor rides over the field of battle--after indulging the night before in royal supper with the Saxon king--he sees ghastly new-made graves, with hands and arms projecting, stark and stiff, above the ground; and shortly afterwards, when shelter is needed for the troops, the order to occupy the Hospitals for the Insane is given, with the words, "Turn out the mad."[27]