Xenophon affirms that there were 'many' women in the
Greek army--pollai aesun etairai en tosratenaeazi; and in a late stage
of that trying expedition it is evident that women were amongst the
survivors.] and children. There were both, it is true, with the French
army, but so few as to bear no visible proportion to the total numbers
concerned. The French, in short, were merely an army--a host of
professional destroyers, whose regular trade was bloodshed, and whose
regular element was danger and suffering. But the Tartars were a
nation carrying along with them more than two hundred and fifty
thousand women and children, utterly unequal, for the most part, to any
contest with the calamities before them. The Children of Israel were
in the same circumstances as to the accompaniment of their families;
but they were released from the pursuit of their enemies in a very
early stage of their flight; and their subsequent residence in the
Desert was not a march, but a continued halt, and under a continued
interposition of Heaven for their comfortable support. Earthquakes,
again, however comprehensive in their ravages, are shocks of a moment's
duration. A much nearer approach made to the wide range and the long
duration of the Kalmuck tragedy may have been in a pestilence such as
that which visited Athens in the Peloponnesian war, or London in the
reign of Charles II.
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