The extent of the suffering entailed by the passage of this gigantic host through Germany may be imagined. The mere supplying it with food was enough to exhaust the country, but it was but a part of what had to be endured. The peasants were robbed of horses, vehicles and implements for the service of the troops, and forced themselves to accompany the columns to drive their carts laden with baggage or their own plundered crops. Honourable men in the French army saw such proceedings with shame and regret. De Fezensac tells with ill-suppressed indignation how he met German peasants fifty leagues from their homes acting as baggage drivers, and adds that they were fortunate if they reached their villages in a state of beggary. Testimony such as this is invaluable and damning. Organised plunder was rampant, and the French officers, brutalised and morally degraded by years of war maintaining war, were reckless of the misery inflicted. The Prussian official Schön tells how Davout, on entering Gumbinnen and finding supplies in his opinion not adequate, owing to the abject poverty to which Prussia had been reduced, coolly ordered his troops to pillage the town! The 1st Corps was the best administered in the army; and Davout is commonly held up to admiration by French writers as the pattern of honour and loyalty. But his execution of orders was commonly ruthless, and there were in Napoleon’s army but too many officers who lacked even Davout’s very limited sense of honour. Davout would sack a town remorselessly, as readily as Suchet massacred women and children at Lerida; but Suchet would hang a man who committed murder, and Davout, while subjecting people to every kind of officially ordered oppression, would sternly check private plunder or outrage. But other generals were less strict, and the bad characters who are found in every army had opportunities of committing all kinds of outrages. Napoleon himself at last complained of the misconduct of Ney’s 3rd Corps. Ney was a worse disciplinarian than Davout, though a humane and kindly tempered man, but neither Ney nor Davout can really be blamed. The troops, by Napoleon’s order, were to be supplied at the expense of the country, and the usual discipline of the French army was so shattered by years of organised brigandage that the rest naturally followed. The terrible misery inflicted upon Germany and other countries by Napoleonic warfare may be studied at length in reports and despatches, and furnishes a very grim commentary upon the moral value of military discipline. Napoleon left Paris on the 9th of May, accompanied by the Empress, and reached Dresden on the 16th, where all his unwilling or willing allies and vassals were gathered to meet him. The details of his stay--how kings waited in his antechamber, how he made presents to them, how queens waited upon Maria Louisa--need not be repeated. The episode was a memorable example of pride preceding a fall.