The fugitives, too, were covered with every sort of vermin. The stench that arose from these living corpses was due both to their disorders, and the fact that through dread of the cold they never removed their clothing for any purpose whatever. Their hands were smeared with horses’ blood, and their faces and tattered garments reeked with its effluvium. Many whose faces and arms were frost-bitten resembled the rounded figures of ivory chessmen. “What I dreaded most,” says a German writer, “was the approach of night; not so much because our sufferings were greatly intensified at night, as because when we halted all the soldiers collected together and huddled close to one another so as to keep as warm as circumstances would permit. In the general silence one might hear on different sides, sometimes on all sides at once, the dull thud of men and horses falling on to the frozen ground, dead of cold and privation.” “In one encampment,” says Bourgogne, “I was horrified to find that all the men and horses were dead and already covered with snow. The men’s bodies lay in the most natural manner round the camp-fires, and the horses remained harnessed to the guns. There were five men snarling and fighting like dogs—on one side lay the hindleg of a horse, the subject of their dispute. “They had been buoyed up by the expectation of finding food and lodging in Smolensk, but now they had no further hope; they marched along mechanically wherever they were led, and halted when others halted.” “A veteran Chasseur,” says the same author, “who had wrapped his frost-bitten extremities in strips of sheep-skin, sat down by our fire. He cursed the name of the Emperor Alexander, and he cursed Russia and all the saints; then he asked whether any brandy had been served out. When he heard the answer—‘No, none has been served out, and none will be,’ he exclaimed—‘Well, there is but one thing left, and that is death!’ “On the road we came upon a Hussar in his death agony, now rising to his feet, now falling to the ground again. We tried to help him along, but he fell again, and for the last time. Further on we came upon three men engaged upon a fallen horse. Two were standing up, reeling so fearfully that they looked like drunken men. The third, a German, lay across the horse—the poor devil, half dead with hunger and too feeble to cut a piece off, was trying to bite out a mouthful, but he died in the endeavour.”