Then the elements began to fight for Russia--the snow-flakes came, then the bitter polar winds, cutting like a razor; and a winding sheet of snow enveloped the land.

On the 13th of October, after lighting a mine under the Kremlin, with sullen rage the French troops marched out of Moscow.

The Great Tower of Ivan erected by Boris was cracked and some portions of palaces and gateways destroyed by this vicious and useless act of revenge.
Then, instead of marching upon St.Petersburg as he had expected, Napoleon escaped alone to the frontier, leaving his perishing wreck of an army to get back as it could.

The peasantry, the mushiks, whom the Russians had feared to trust--infuriated by the destruction of their homes, committed awful atrocities upon the starving, freezing soldiers, who, maddened by cold and hunger and by the singing in their ears of the rarefied air, many of them leaped into the bivouac fires.

It was a colossal tragedy.