bivouacs, broke up the
material which they found there to build themselves cabins, made fuel of
everything that came to hand, cut up the frozen carcasses of the
horses for food, tore the cloth and the curtains from the carriages
for coverlets, and went to sleep, instead of continuing their way
and crossing quietly during the night that cruel Beresina, which an
incredible fatality had already made so destructive to the army.

The apathy of these poor soldiers can only be conceived by those who
remember to have crossed vast deserts of snow without other perspective
than a snow horizon, without other drink than snow, without other bed
than snow, without other food than snow or a few frozen beet-roots, a
few handfuls of flour, or a little horseflesh. Dying of hunger, thirst,
fatigue, and want of sleep, these unfortunates reached a shore where
they saw before them wood, provisions, innumerable camp equipages,
and carriages,--in short a whole town at their service. The village of
Studzianka had been wholly taken to pieces and conveyed from the heights
on which it stood to the plain. However forlorn and dangerous that
refuge might be, its miseries and its perils only courted men who had
lately seen nothing before them but the awful deserts of Russia. It was,
in fact, a vast asylum which had an existence of twenty-four hours only.

Utter lassitude, and the sense of unexpected comfort, made that mass of
men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the
artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this
mass,--visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the
trackless snow,--this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only
one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all
because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and
there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! Stragglers arrived in
groups continually; but once here those perambulating corpses separated;
each begged for himself a place near a fire; repulsed repeatedly, they
met again, to obtain by force the hospitality already refused to them.
Deaf to the voice of some of their officers, who warned them of probable
destruction on the morrow, they spent the amount of courage necessary to
cross the river in building that asylum of a night, in making one meal
that they themselves doomed to be their last. The death that awaited
them they considered no evil, provided they could h