Let's exert ourselves a little more. Dog
that he is, he can't beat us always. God has set a limit for him
somewhere. To-day is his, to-morrow may be his, but after a while the
luck perhaps will turn."
Then he went to the old hermit-monks in the caves of Kiev and on the
island of Valaam, and bowed himself at the feet of all the
archimandrites and metropolitans, saying: "Pray for us, holy fathers,
and beseech the Lord God to turn away his wrath; because we haven't
strength enough to defend you from this Napoleonder."
Then the old hermit-monks and the archimandrites and the metropolitans
all prayed, with tears in their eyes, to the Lord God, and prostrated
themselves until their knees were all black and blue and there were big
bumps on their foreheads. With tearful eyes, the whole Russian people,
too, from the Tsar to the last beggar, prayed God for mercy and help.
And they took the sacred ikon of the Holy Mother of God of Smolensk,
the pleader for the grief-stricken, and carried it to the famous field
of Borodino, and, bowing down before it, with tearful eyes, they cried:
"O Most Holy Mother of God, thou art our life and our hope! Have mercy
on us, and intercede for us soon.
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