“Early in the morning the marshal had sent off a Polish officer, who reached Orcha and described our condition. The Emperor had left the town the day before: the Viceroy and Marshal Davoust still occupied it. At nine that night we resumed our march in profound silence. The Cossack pickets, distributed along the road, retired at our approach. The march continued with much order. At a league from Orcha, our vanguard fell in with an advanced post, which challenged in French. It was a division of the 4th corps coming to our assistance with the Viceroy. One must have passed three days between life and death to judge of the joy this meeting gave us. The Viceroy received us with lively emotion, and warmly expressed to Marshal Ney his admiration of his conduct. He congratulated the generals and the two remaining colonels. His aides-de-camp surrounded us, and overwhelmed us with questions on the details of this great drama, and the part that each of us had played in it. But time pressed; after a few minutes we again moved on. The Viceroy formed our rearguard: at three in the morning we entered Orcha. Thus terminated this bold march, one of the most curious episodes of the campaign. It covered Marshal Ney with glory, and to him the 3d corps owed its salvation; if, indeed, the term of _corps d’ armée_ may be applied to the 800 or 900 men who reached Orcha, remnant of the 6000 who had fought at Krasnoi.” For eighteen days, over a distance of sixty leagues, the 3d corps had formed the rearguard. Diminished as its numbers now were, it was no longer available for that dangerous duty, and it joined the main body. Scarcely had it taken three hours’ repose in some wretched houses of the faubourg of Orcha, when the Russians, from the other side of the Dnieper, set fire to the town with shells, which were more particularly aimed at some conspicuous buildings, serving as provision-stores. It was impossible to serve out rations; at the risk of their lives, a few soldiers brought off some brandy and flour; but Davoust, now in command of the rearguard, hurried the troops’ departure, and by eight o’clock the unfortunate 3d corps was on the march to Borisow. A broad, good road facilitated their progress, and Colonel de Fezensac, no longer occupied in repelling the enemy, was able to investigate the state of his regiment. Eighty men remained, out of the 2800 that began the campaign; eighty tattered, famine-stricken, desponding wretches. They lived from hand to mouth, almost by a miracle; sometimes on flour steeped in water; at others, with a morsel of honeycomb or fragment of horseflesh; their sole drink the melted snow. “At some distance from Orcha, I fell in with M. Lanusse, a captain of my regiment, who had lost his sight by a shot, at the taking of Smolensko; a sutler belonging to his company was leading and taking the greatest care of him. He told me that after having been taken and plundered by the Cossacks at Krasnoi, he had