The horrors of the return march are well known. Thousands froze to death in the extreme cold of November, horse-meat and melted snow were the sole means of nourishment, and any soldier who lay down was irretrievably lost. Between Moscow and Smolensk, which was reached on November 9, one-half of the soldiers who had started out from Moscow died; the number of sick soldiers was enormous, and typhus fever raged more and more extensively. On December 8 Vilna was reached, but there the army was not given a moment’s rest; two days later the Russians advanced and captured 30,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers who could go no further. In pursuing the French army the Russians also suffered severely from diseases; according to Ebstein,[118] between October 20 and December 14, 1812, they lost 61,964 men, most of whom died of ‘nerve fever’ (typhus fever). In Vilna, which was greatly overcrowded, typhus fever raged furiously. The large number of sick and exhausted soldiers that were left behind, owing to the extreme cold (the thermometer went down as low as –28° Réaumur) sought shelter, partly in private houses, and partly in hospitals. The latter, for the first few days after the arrival of the Russians, were in a terrible condition; sick men and dead men were packed together in the cold, unheated rooms, the former lying on rotten straw, completely deserted, and without care or nourishment. The corridors and courts were filled with dead bodies and with refuse of all kinds, while in the rooms themselves there was no less filth, since nobody removed the excrements. ‘The courts and corridors of the hospitals’, says Gasc, an eye-witness,[119] ‘were so covered with dead bodies that it was necessary to walk over heaps of them in order to enter the rooms.’ Not until after the Emperor of Russia arrived in Vilna was some semblance of order restored. But it was then too late; almost all the patients in the hospitals were infected with typhus fever, and according to Gasc and Lemazurier the great majority of the 30,000 French prisoners died. For owing to the long series of extreme hardships which the soldiers had undergone, the disease broke out in its most severe form, causing wild delirium, very large petechiae, abscesses, and gangrene. Many patients succumbed within twenty-four hours, and recovery was very slow for those who survived the attack.