We must touch very lightly upon the horrors of the retreat, confining ourselves to a brief statement of the leading facts, and of the results of the whole. Famine, cold, and the sword combined to punish an unjust aggression. When the French left Moscow they numbered one hundred and twenty thousand men under arms, with an immense train of baggage and camp followers: in twenty–six days, from October 19th to November 13th, when the Emperor quitted Smolensk, their organized force was reduced to thirty–six thousand men, and they had lost three hundred cannon. Napoleon’s partisans have tried to shelter him from blame, by alleging the premature rigour of winter as the cause of this wholesale destruction. No doubt cold was the main agent in it, but the nature of a Russian winter was well known, and should have been considered in the scheme of the campaign; and so far was it from being premature, that the frost did not begin till November 7th, only three days before the French van and the Emperor arrived at Smolensk. Other causes aided to produce this result. Napoleon intended to return to the above–named town by the unwasted route of Kalouga and Medyn, but the Russian army barred his way, and, after an obstinate contest,[212] turned him back on the ravaged country through which he had already passed. Here neither food, shelter, nor clothing could be procured, and thousands fell victims rather to the want of all appliances to bear it, than to the intolerable severity of the winter itself. Numbers fell in battle, or were intercepted and slain, or made prisoners by the ever active hostility of the Cossacks who hovered round their march: still the loss sustained in warfare was small in comparison to that which resulted from the combined operation of hunger and cold. The appearance of this new enemy, and its effects, moral and physical, are powerfully, though rather theatrically, described by the Comte de Segur, himself a sharer in the miseries which he describes.