“Our horror,” says Labaume, “was indescribable when we first learned on the outskirts of Smolensk that the 9th Army Corps had already marched on, that the troops were not to stay at Smolensk, and that such provisions as there were had already been exhausted. Had a thunder-bolt fallen at our feet, we could not have been more astounded than at this news; it was so overwhelming that we refused to believe it. We soon found out, however, that downright famine prevailed in the town—the town which we had pictured a veritable Land of Promise.” Those soldiers who could find no quarters lay in the streets; and within a few hours they would be found dead by their fires. The hospitals, the churches, and all the public buildings were crowded with the sick who flocked thither in thousands. Those who could find no room were left to die in the vans and on the caissons and gun-carriages on which they had been brought. “One Cuirassier,” says an eye-witness, “moaning with hunger, flung himself upon the flayed body of a dead horse, thrust his head in between the naked ribs, and began tearing out the entrails with his teeth. So fierce were the pangs they suffered that the Russians found dead bodies of Frenchmen half devoured by their comrades.” They left 5000 sick and wounded in Smolensk without provisions of any kind. The doctors and officials charged with the duty of attending upon them took to flight, in fear of being massacred or taken prisoners. Chambray is our authority for saying that, contrary to custom, the sick were not even commended to the generosity of the enemy—they were simply abandoned as so much useless rubbish. “The war now became so barbarous,” says the author of _The War of 1812_, “that it is impossible to imagine within what limits an enemy whose wrath has been aroused by wholesale ruin and destruction will confine his vengeance. Before planning the cruel and wanton destruction of Moscow and Smolensk, the French should have remembered that they were leaving 10,000 of their men in the hospitals and on the road as hostages in the hands of the enemy.” “When they found themselves left to perish of starvation,” writes René Bourgeois, “compelled to shift for themselves, these poor wretches crawled about the fields digging up roots and picking up the refuse of cabbages and other vegetables. They lay about on rotten grass and straw, on rags and scraps; they were covered with vermin and filth and surrounded by the decomposing bodies of their comrades. For a distance of eighty leagues the road was impassable; one had, so to speak, to cut a way through corpses and _débris_ of every kind. At every halting-place were huge cemeteries, miscalled hospitals, which made their presence known for miles around by their nauseating odour due to the heaps of unburied dead, and the filth of every sort that lay weltering in foul pools.”