t movements, there was
no consistency: every thing was unexpected; the occasion hurried them
away; impetuous, they varied in language, plans, and dispositions, at
every step, just as the ground is incessantly varying in appearance.

CHAP. VI.

About the same time, Rapp and Lauriston presented themselves: the latter
came from Petersburgh. Napoleon did not ask a single question of this
officer on his arrival from the capital of his enemy. Aware, no doubt,
of the frankness of his former aid-de-camp, and of his opinion
respecting this war, he was apprehensive of receiving from him
unsatisfactory intelligence.

But Rapp, who had followed our track, could not keep silence. "The army
had advanced but a hundred leagues from the Niemen, and already it was
completely altered. The officers who travelled post from the interior of
France to join it, arrived dismayed. They could not conceive how it
happened that a victorious army, without fighting, should leave behind
it more wrecks than a defeated one.

"They had met with all who were marching to join the masses, and all who
had separated from them; lastly, all who were not excited either by the
presence of the chiefs, or by example, or by the war. The appearance of
each troop, according to its distance from home, excited hope, anxiety,
or pity.

"In Germany, as far as the Oder, where a thousand objects were
incessantly reminding them of France, these recruits imagined themselves
not wholly cut off from it; they were ardent and jovial; but beyond the
Oder, in Poland, where the soil, productions, inhabitants, costumes,
manners, in short every thing, to the very habitations, wore a foreign
aspect; where nothing, in short, resembled a country which they
regretted; they began to be dismayed at the distance they had traversed,
and their faces already bore the stamp of fatigue and lassitude.

"By what an extraordinary distance must they then be separated from
France, since they had already reached unknown regions, where every
thing presented to them an aspect of such gloomy novelty! how many steps
they had taken, and how many more they had yet to take! The very idea of
return was disheartening; and yet they were obliged to march on, to keep
constantly marching! and they complained that ever since they left
France, their fatigues had been gradually increasing, and the means of
supporting them continually diminishing."

The truth is, that wine first failed them, then beer, e