ht leagues: they met only with Cossacks and an armed
population, which gathered around them, wounded and stripped them naked,
and then left them, with bursts of savage laughter, to perish in the
snow. These people, who had risen at the call of Alexander and Kutusoff,
and who had not then learned, as they since have, to avenge nobly a
country which they had been unable to defend, hovered on both flanks of
the army under favor of the woods. Those whom they did not despatch with
their pikes and hatchets, they drove back to the fatal and all-devouring
high road.

Night then came on: a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow, which
covered everything, where were they to halt, where sit, where lie down,
where find even a root to satisfy their hunger, or dry wood to kindle a
fire? Fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders nevertheless stopped those
whom their moral and physical strength and the efforts of their officers
had still kept together. They strove to establish themselves; but the
tempest, not yet subsided, dispersed the first preparations for
bivouacs. The pines, laden with frost, obstinately resisted ignition;
while the snow, which still continued to fall from the sky, and that on
the ground, which melted with the effect of the first heat, extinguished
their kindling fires, and, with them, the strength and spirits of the
men.

When at length the flames gained the ascendancy, the officers and
soldiers around them commenced preparing their wretched repast: it
consisted of lean and ragged pieces of flesh torn from the horses that
had given out, and at most a few spoonfuls of rye flour mixed with
snow-water. The next morning circular ranges of soldiers extended
lifeless marked the sites of the bivouacs, and the ground about them was
strewed with the bodies of several thousand horses.

From that day we began to place less reliance on one another. In that
vivacious army, susceptible of all impressions, and taught to reason by
an advanced civilization, despondency and neglect of discipline rapidly
spread, the imagination knowing no bounds in evil any more than in good.
Henceforward, at every bivouac, at every difficult passage, nay, every
moment, some portion separated from the yet organized lines and fell
into disorder. There were some, however, who were proof against this
widespread contagion of insubordination and despair. These were
officers, non-commissioned officers, and the firmest among the soldiers.
They were extr