132 YEARS OLD.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4480, 16 October 1922, Page 4

132 YEARS OLD.

MAN WHO SAW THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW. ‘‘,l saw the great Napoleon with my own eyes during the retreat from Moscow (in 1812). He was wearing a green cavalry cloak,” was the statement made to a special correspondent of the “Intransigeant” by M. Mecislas Krasinsky, a landed proprietor of Volhynia, in Polapd, who states that he is now 132 years of age. Reporting tp the police pf Warsaw that he had been robbed of 50,000 marks in a tramway car, Krasinsky entered the d,a.te of his birth in the police books as 1790. He states he first enlisted in 1809 in the Third Squadron of the Imperial French Guard. “I fought in Russia," he said. “I well remember the disaster of the crossing of the Beresina (November 27 and 28, 1812). I myself on that fatal day burned a pile of new tricolour flags with their eagles. In 1830 1 I joined the insurrectionary Polish army, and fought, again on the side of the Poles ip their effort tp free the country from Russia. For this I was sent tp Siberia for 16 years.”

Set free, Krasinsky states he offered his services to his late gaolers, and took part in the Chinese campaign of 1900, and again in the RussoJapanese War in 1904 and 1905. He proudly shpws eight military medals that he has won during his long career, and explains that he had many others, but they were stolen from him by the Bolsheviks. He declares he was wounded at Mos.cow in 1812, at Leipzig in 1813, and again in 1830, during the Polish revolution.

“I have never been ill,” he told his interviewer, “and that is because I have always been temperate in all things. I only began to smoke 30 years ago. I attribute my long life to this. My father died when he was 117, and my mother when she was 97.”