SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS:

Baltic Soil Yields Evidence of a Bitter End to Napoleon's Army (MICHAEL WINES, September 14, 2002, NY Times)

When construction workers excavating an old Soviet military base for roads and apartments unearthed the first of their grisly discoveries last fall, the conclusion was obvious: here lay the handiwork of Stalinist death squads that spread terror throughout Lithuania in the 1940's and 1950's.

Then they found the buttons.

Scattered like pebbles among perhaps 2,000 contorted skeletons, the buttons were embossed with numbers, the last traces of military uniforms of the regiments of an earlier tyrant. What the workers had found, it soon became clear, were remains of the Grand Army of Napoleon, reduced to frozen, starving rabble after the retreat from its disastrous siege of Moscow in 1812. [...]

This is not the first mass grave to be uncovered in post-Soviet Vilnius. Five years ago, residents here stumbled across another one: a pit holding some 500 Lithuanians who had indeed been massacred by Stalin's henchmen in the purges that followed the Soviet invasion of Lithuania during World War II.

Another unpleasant reminder, this time that tyranny always leaves bodies stacked in its wake. Thus must it always be confronted. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2002 2:14 PM