a considerable time. Frenchmen would
certainly not have acted thus.

Among the thousands of facts which might be adduced to prove that it was
absolutely impossible for any thing whatever to be left in the town,
that its resources were completely exhausted, and that extreme want
could not but prevail, let one instance suffice. There were in the city
two granaries, one of which, in the palace of Pleissenburg, had been
filled at the king's cost, and the other, called the corn-magazine, at
the expense of the magistrates. The former had long been put in
requisition by French commissaries, and had been chiefly applied to the
provisioning of the French garrisons of Wittenberg and Torgau. As this
was the king's property, it was perhaps but right to demand it for the
fortresses which were to defend the country. The stores possessed by the
magistrates were purchased in those years when a scarcity of corn
prevailed in Saxony. To afford some relief the government had imported
great quantities from Russia, by way of the Baltic and the Elbe. The
magistrates of Leipzig had bought a considerable part of it, that they
might be able to relieve the wants of the citizens in case a similar
calamity should again occur. It was ground and put into casks, each
containing 450 pounds. They had in their magazine 4000 such casks, which
had been left untouched even in the year 1806, and were carefully
preserved, to be used only in cases of extreme necessity. This was
certainly a wise and truly paternal precaution. So valuable a store
would have been sufficient to protect the city from hunger for a
considerable time. As the French army behaved all over Saxony as though
it had been in an enemy's country, and consumed every thing far and
near, the most urgent want was the inevitable consequence. They forgot
the common maxim, that the bread of which you deprive the citizen and
the husbandman is in fact taken from yourself, and that the soldier can
have nothing where those who feed him have lost their all. The country
round Dresden was already exhausted. Soldiers and travellers coming from
that quarter could scarcely find terms to describe the distress. They
unanimously declared that the country from Oschatz to Leipzig was a real
paradise, in comparison with Lusatia and the circle of Misnia, as far as
the Elbe. Of this we soon had convincing proofs. It was necessary to
pick out a great number of horses from all the regiments, and to send
back numerous tr