Soldiers get proper funeral 200 years on

About 3,000 French soldiers finally received a proper funeral today in a hilltop cemetery in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, where they froze or starved to death during Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion of Russia two centuries ago.

Lithuanian leaders, French diplomats and other representatives of the former Soviet republic’s diplomatic corps oversaw the consecration of the remains - discovered two years ago in a nearby mass grave seen at the time as a major archaeological find.