"Comparable to the Retreat of Xenophon! cry many. Every Retreat is compared to that. A valiant feat, after all exaggerations. A thing well done, say military men;--'nothing to object, except that the troops were so ruined;'--and the most unmilitary may see, it is the work of a high and gallant kind of man. One of the coldest expeditions ever known. There have been three expeditions or retreats of this kind which were very cold: that of those Swedes in the Great Elector's time (not to mention that of Karl XII.'s Army out of Norway, after poor Karl XII. got shot); that of Napoleon from Moscow; this of Belleisle, which is the only one brilliantly conducted, and not ending in rout and annihilation. "The troops rest in Eger for a week or two; then homeward through the Ober-Pfalz:--'go all across the Rhine at Speyer' (5th February next); the Bohemian Section of the Oriflamme making exit in this manner. Not quite the eighth man of them left; five-eighths are dead: and there are about 12,000 prisoners, gone to Hungary,--who ran mostly to the Turks, such treatment had they, and were not heard of again." [_Guerre de Boheme,_ ii. 221 (for this last fact). IB. 204, and Espagnac, i. 176 (for particulars of the Retreat); and still better, Belleisle's own Despatch and Private Letter (Eger, 2d January and 5th January, 1743), in _Campagnes,_ vii. 1-21.]--Ah, Belleisle, Belleisle! The Army of the Oriflamme gets home in this sad manner; Germany not cut in Four at all. "Implacable Austrian badgers," as we call them, "gloomily indignant bears," how have they served this fine French hunting-pack; and from hunted are become hunters, very dangerous to contemplate! At Frankfurt, Belleisle, for his own part, pauses; cannot, in this entirely down-broken state of body, serve his Majesty farther in the military business; will do some needful diplomatics with the Kaiser, and retire home to government of Metz, till his worn-out health recover itself a little. A GLANCE AT VIENNA, AND THEN AT BERLIN.