In the road, the army passed Borodino, the scene of the grand battle which exhibited so many vestiges of the French prowess, and of the loss they had sustained.[195] This, the most sanguinary conflict of modern times, had been entirely without adequate advantages to the victors. The momentary possession of Moscow had annihilated every chance of an essential result by the catastrophe which followed; and the army which had been victorious at Borodino was now escaping from their conquests, surrounded by danger on every hand, and already disorganised on many points, by danger, pain, and privation. At the convent of Kolotskoi, which had been the grand hospital of the French after the battle, many of the wounded were found still alive, though thousands more had perished for want of materials necessary for surgical treatment, food of suitable quality, bandages, and the like. The survivors crawled to the door, and extended their supplicating hands to their countrymen as they passed onwards on their weary march. By Napoleon's orders, such of the patients as were able to bear being moved were placed on the suttlers' carts, while the rest were left in the convent, together with some wounded Russian prisoners, whose presence, it was hoped, might be a protection to the French.[196] Several of those who had been placed in the carriages did not travel very far. The sordid wretches to whom the carts and wains, loaded with the plunder of Moscow, belonged, got rid in many cases of the additional burden imposed on them, by lagging behind the column of march in desolate places, and murdering the men intrusted to their charge. In other parts of the column, the Russian prisoners were seen lying on the road, their brains shot out by the soldiers appointed to guard them, but who took this mode of freeing themselves of the trouble. It is thus that a continued course of calamity renders men's minds selfish, ravenous, and fiendish, indifferent to what evil they inflict, because it can scarcely equal that which they endure; as divines say of the condemned spirits, that they are urged to malevolent actions against men, by a consciousness of their own state of reprobation. [Sidenote: GJATZ--WIAZMA.]