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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: had the effect of leaving for a few short moments the whole bank of
the Beresina deserted. The multitude were surging to the plain. If a
few men rushed to the river, it was less in the hope of reaching the
other bank, which to them was France, than to rush from the horrors of
Siberia. Despair proved an aegis to some bold hearts. One officer
sprang from ice-cake to ice-cake, and reached the opposite shore. A
soldier clambered miraculously over mounds of dead bodies and heaps of
ice. The multitude finally comprehended that the Russians would not
put to death a body of twenty thousand men, without arms, torpid,
stupid, unable to defend themselves; and each man awaited his fate
with horrible resignation. Then the major and the grenadier, the
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