Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1893 — Lingering Veterans. [ARTICLE]

Lingering Veterans.

Less than a year has elapsed since the death of the last French survivor of the battle of Trafalgar, a triumph of British naval skill and valor which stultified the projects of Napoleon the Great for the subjugation of this country, and temporarily obliterated the French Navy from the list of important factors in the problem of European politics. Of the many tremendous reverses suffered on land and sea by the forces of France under the regime of the First Empire, four in particular may be said to have permanently affected the destinies of civilized mankind. These were Nelson’s supreme victory off Cape Trafalgar, the ‘ ‘Battle of the Nations” hard by Leipzig, the tragical “Retreat from Moscow," and that fateful encounter which Byron indignantly stigmatized as “the crowning carnage," Waterloo. Our own times have been so nfe with military achievements of the first moment that those mighty war-feats, although performed during the current century, seem as far removed from men of the present day as Blenheim and Ramilies* or even Poitiers and Agincourt. Yet there are veterans still living in half-a-dozen European realms whotook partin the campaigns of 1818-14-15, and only a few days ago, in a quiet Norfolk township, an old soldier of the Grand Army passed peacefully away, who had witnessed the horrors of that terrible march from Borodino to the western frontier of Poland, which ensued upon the burning of Moscow and the disastrous evacuation of Central Russia by the Napoleonic hosts.—[London Telegraph.