“At every step he (the Emperor) saw his soldiers, stricken by cold, extenuated by hunger and fatigue, falling half dead into the hands of the Russian cavalry. “Around these (their bivouacs) hunger and cold rivetted those wretched sufferers. It was impossible to tear them away. “Above sixty thousand men well clothed, well fed, and completely armed, attacked eighteen thousand half naked, ill armed, famished men, encumbered by more than fifty thousand stragglers, sick and wounded. For two days the cold and misery were so intense that the old guard lost a third, and the young guard one-half of their effective men. “It was indeed but the shade of an army, but it was the shade of a grand army. It felt itself conquered by nature alone. “Under these circumstances, the elements appeared more hostile to us than the Russians themselves. Their climate did its part—if they had done theirs.” In that disastrous retreat there was a most extraordinary accumulation of influences powerfully destructive of health. There was extreme cold, that of an intensely cold climate, there was an insufficiency of food and of clothing, and there was a want of proper habitations,—the wretched sufferers lying almost naked around their fires in the open air, perhaps enjoying the partial protection of a shed, a ruin, or a stable, and sometimes seeking shelter in the carcasses of horses. But there was also present another influence, highly prejudicial to health, and equal of itself to a considerable proportion of the fearful amount of disease which prevailed, and that was depression of mind. Depression of mind conveyed a withering influence to the hearts of the bold victors of a thousand actions, and paralyzed the whole energies of the system. Here it acted on a gigantic scale, and its work of death, yes, of death itself, was not less prodigious. The humiliation, the mortifications, and the heart-rending misfortunes of which these once victorious but now unhappy men were the prey, could not but induce a state of mind, which, of all other circumstances, must have been the most favourable to the invasion of disease. Daily experience demonstrates that disease is much favoured by the presence of circumstances, such as are referred to in the following passages.