This bad policy is not to be imputed to Napoleon, who had refused to authorise the armistice, but to the vanity of Murat, under whose authority it was still observed. It gave him an opportunity of amusing himself, by caracoling on the neutral ground betwixt the camps, displaying his handsome form, gallant horsemanship, and splendid dresses, to the soldiers on both sides; receiving the respectful salutes of the Russian patrols, and the applause of the Cossacks. These last used to crowd around him, partly in real admiration of his chivalrous appearance and character, which was of a kind to captivate these primitive warriors, and partly, doubtless, from their natural shrewdness which saw the utility of maintaining his delusion. They called him their Hettman; and he was so intoxicated with their applause, as to have been said to nourish the wild idea of becoming in earnest King of the Cossacks.[174] Such delusions could not for ever lull Murat's vigilance to sleep. The war was all around him, and his forces were sinking under a succession of petty hostilities; while the continual rolling of drums, and the frequent platoon firing, heard from behind the Russian encampment, intimated how busily they were engaged in drilling numerous bodies of fresh recruits. The Russian officers at the outposts began to hold ominous language, and ask the French if they had made a composition with the Northern Winter, Russia's most fearful ally. "Stay another fortnight," they said, "and your nails will drop off, and your fingers fall from your hands, like boughs from a blighted tree." The numbers of the Cossacks increased so much, as to resemble one of the ancient Scythian emigrations; and wild and fantastic figures, on unbroken horses, whose manes swept the ground, seemed to announce that the inmost recesses of the desert had sent forth their inhabitants. Their grey-bearded chiefs sometimes held expostulations with the French officers, in a tone very different from that which soothed the ears of Murat. "Had you not," they said, "in France, food enough, water enough, air enough, to subsist you while you lived--earth enough to cover you when you died; and why come you to enrich our soil with your remains, which by right belong to the land where you were born?" Such evil bodements affected the van of the army, from whence Murat transmitted them to the Emperor.[175]