den
buildings, communicated itself from one to another with frightful
rapidity. Shooting forth in long tongues of flame, it was seen
invading other quarters situated to the west.

Rockets were noticed in the air, and soon wretches were seized
carrying combustibles at the end of long poles. They were taken up;
they were questioned with threats of death, and they revealed the
frightful secret, the order given by the Count of Rostopchin to set
fire to the city of Moscow, as if it had been the smallest village on
the road from Smolensk. This news spread consternation through the
army in an instant. To doubt was no longer possible, after the arrests
made, and the depositions collected from different parts of the town.
Napoleon ordered that in each quarter the corps fixt there should form
military commissions to try, shoot, and hang on gibbets the
incendiaries taken in the act. He ordered likewise that they should
employ all the troops there were in the town to extinguish the fire.
They ran to the pumps, but there were none to be found. This last
circumstance would have left no doubt, if there had remained any, of
the frightful design that delivered Moscow to the flames....

Napoleon, followed by some of his lieutenants, went out of that
Kremlin which the Russian army had not been able to prevent him from
entering, but from which the fire expelled him after four-and-twenty
hours of possession, descended to the quay of Moskowa, found his
horses ready there, and had much difficulty in crossing the town,
which toward the northwest, whither he directed his course, was
already in flames. The wind, which constantly increased in violence,
sometimes caused columns of fire to bend to the ground, and drove
before it torrents of sparks, smoke, and stifling cinders. The
horrible appearance of the sky answered to the no less horrible
spectacle of the earth. The terrified army went out of Moscow. The
divisions of Prince Eugene and Marshal Ney, which had entered the
evening before, turned back again on the roads of Zwenigorod and Saint
Petersburg; those of Marshal Davoust returned by the road of Smolensk,
and, except the guard left around the Kremlin to dispute its
possession with the flames, our troops retired in haste, struck with
horror, before this fire, which, after darting up toward the sky,
seemed to bend down again over them as if it wished to devour them. A
small number of the inhabitants who had remained in Moscow, and had
hidd