"'If this happens on the first day's march, at the gates of Moscow,' observed Rasinski, 'what is to be expected when an enemy threatens these heavy-laden masses? Yonder marauder has saved nothing but his pair of lean horses. The others may think themselves lucky if they save as much from the first feint-attack of half a hundred Cossacks! The fellow now howling and cursing is the luckiest of them all; for he is the first relieved from his useless drudgery. This very day he will have abundant opportunity to laugh and scoff in his turn, perhaps at his spoilers themselves. And before a week is over, he will bless his stars that he has been saved the profitless toil. The difference is merely that he loses to-day what others will lose to-morrow and the day after: of all these thousands not one will ultimately profit by his booty.' "The prognostications of the experienced soldier were speedily verified. The track of the French army was marked first by abandoned spoils, then by the bodies of the spoilers. Napoleon's soldiers were little accustomed to retreats, and seemed to imagine that, now they had condescended to commence one, the enemy would show his surprise and respect by abstaining from molesting them. Such at least is the only plausible way of explaining the infatuation that loaded with the most cumbersome plunder the multitude of men who, on the 16th September 1812, turned their backs upon the blazing turrets of Moscow. Nothing was too clumsy or heavy to be carried off; but ultimately nothing was found portable enough to be carried through the fatigues and dangers of the winter march. Baggage and superfluous munition-carts were soon left behind, and the horses taken for the artillery; for which purpose, before reaching Smolensko, every second man in the cavalry was deprived of his charger. Although winter had not yet set in, there were frosts every night, and the slippery roads trebled the fatigues of the attenuated and ill-shod horses. After a short time, every means of transport, not monopolised by the guns, was required by the sick, wounded, and weary; and nobody thought of possessing more baggage than he could carry with him. And even the trophies selected in Moscow by Napoleon's order, to throw dust in the eyes of the Parisians,--splendid bronze ornaments from the palaces, outlandish cannon, (the spoils of Russia in her eastern wars,) and the cross of St Ivan, wrenched from the tower of the Kremlin,--were sunk in a lake by the roadside. Soon snow was the sole pillow, and horse-flesh the best nourishment, of the broken and dispirited army.