“Was he perhaps misled by his experience of campaigning in Poland, where the winter is no more severe than in France? Was he deceived by those sunny October days, which surprised even the Russians themselves? What midsummer madness was it that scattered the wits of Napoleon and his army? What mist was it that obscured their vision? What was the resource on which they counted? Even if all heads were turned by the notion of concluding a treaty of peace within the walls of Moscow, they had still in any case to march back again. Yet not the slightest preparation was made even for the most peaceful return.” “At last,” continues Ségur, “the army cast its eyes once more upon Smolensk. Before them lay the promised land, where the hungry should be filled and the weary be at rest, where they were to lie in warm and comfortable rooms and forget their nightly bivouacs in forty degrees of frost. ‘Now,’ they thought, ‘we can sleep as long as we wish, mend our clothes, and provide ourselves with boots!’ But the skeletons of horses lying in the streets show that even here there is a scarcity of provender. Broken doors and window-frames serve as fuel for camp-fires, and the warm houses and promised winter quarters—where are they? The sick and wounded lie neglected in the street, in the vans in which they arrived. This is but another camp, still colder than the forests through which the march has hitherto lain. “The greatest care was needed to prevent detachments of the different corps from coming to blows at the doors of the store-houses. When the rations were at last served out the soldiers refused to carry them to their various regiments. They sprang eagerly upon the sacks, seized a few pounds of flour and bore it off to gorge themselves. The same thing happened with the brandy. Next day the houses were filled with the bodies of these poor wretches, dead of their surfeit of food and drink. It was evident that Smolensk, which the army had regarded as the end of its sufferings, was but the beginning. An endless vista of misery opened out before it. There remained forty more days of marching—forty more such days as they had already experienced.” The Emperor arrived on November 9, when their despair was at its height. He locked himself in a house in the market-place, and left it on the 14th, to continue his retreat. He had been counting on a fortnight’s full rations for a force of 100,000 men, and he found only half that quantity in flour, rice, and brandy—meat there was none. “Ever since Napoleon arrived,” writes the author of _The War of 1812_, “I have been engaged in serving out rations to the troops of the various corps. I am afraid that the seven sentries who keep guard over me day and night will hardly manage to save me from being torn to pieces by the famishing soldiers.... Some of the very highest officers broke one of my windows the other night and climbed in.” Every eye-witness speaks of the bitter disappointment of the soldiers at Smolensk.