The following evening the little band of friends reached Wilna, but without Jaromir, who had expired on the road. Wilna, the first inhabited town the French army had seen since their entrance into Russia, had been looked forward to by the fugitives who escaped from the terrible passage of the Beresina, as a refuge and a resting-place. There they fondly expected shelter from the cold, food for the famishing, bandages and medicine for the wounded and the sick. But their arrival took the Lithuanian capital by surprise. The inhabitants were still without any certain accounts of the disasters of the French, when suddenly they beheld their streets invaded by forty thousand ragged wretches, in whom it was impossible to recognise the remains of those magnificent troops which had passed through with Napoleon in the previous month of July. The very impatience of the men to get into the comfortable quarters they had promised themselves (but which few of them found, for the inhabitants shut their doors, and the commissaries, although their stores were crammed with bread and meat, refused to serve out those much needed provisions without a host of formalities rendered impossible by the general disorganisation) was the destruction of thousands. They all rushed in at one entrance,—the narrow suburb became blocked up with men, horses, and vehicles, and numbers perished of cold and of suffocation. When the survivors got through, their despair was terrible on finding themselves every where repulsed, from hospital and barracks, from the provision-store and the private dwelling. The hospitals and barracks, where there were neither beds or straw, were converted into charnel-houses, heaped with human bodies. “At last,” says Ségur, “the exertions of certain chiefs, such as Eugene and Davoust, the pity of the Lithuanians and the avarice of the Jews, opened places of refuge. Then it was strange to behold the astonishment of these unfortunates on finding themselves at last in inhabited houses. What delicious food a loaf of bread appeared, what inexpressible pleasure did they find in eating it seated, and with what admiration were they struck by the sight of a single weak battalion, still armed and uniformly clothed. They seemed to return from the extremity of the world, so completely had the violence and duration of their sufferings detached them from all their former habits.”