THE morning of the 8th of September found the army of Napoleon bivouacked among the dead and wounded on the field of Borodino. Only the Guard was really ready for further combat. The corps of Davout and Ney were terribly cut up; the 17th, 30th and 106th Regiments were nearly destroyed. The cavalry, which had to compensate for Napoleon’s comparative weakness in infantry, had suffered fearfully. Nearly all its corps and divisional commanders were killed or wounded; several regiments were almost annihilated. The four corps of the reserves counted some 19,000 men on September 2nd; on the 20th they could muster little more than 10,000. Thousands of horses had been killed, and there was no present possibility of being able to replace them, while the wounded animals were mostly doomed to perish from lack of forage and proper care. The cavalry of the Guard alone was in a state for serious combat. The fate of the wounded was horrible. Means of every kind for tending them were lacking, and fortunate were those whose end was hastened by the incurable nature of their hurts, or thirst and starvation. Days elapsed before all had received so much as first aid; and this was but the commencement of their miseries. The great monastery of Kolotskoï became the principal hospital, and in its buildings the victims of Borodino were huddled literally in heaps, without beds even of straw, without food or fire, and without a tenth of the medical aid that was needed. Some of the wounded officers were able to buy food, at enormous prices, from the convoys which passed these dens of horror; but for the unhappy rank and file, who possessed little or no money, there was no hope. Sanitation there was none, and the unfortunate beings died in thousands, amid filth, pestilence and neglect. François says that in one hospital a dead officer was found who, in the agonies of starvation, _had devoured his own arm to the bone_. It is a painful task even to touch upon these sickening details, but to fail to do so is to neglect the primary duty of an historian. Besides the enormous diminution of the effective strength, the state of the ammunition-trains was by no means reassuring. There is reason to believe that the artillery had fired 90,000 rounds during the 5th and 7th; the infantry must have expended millions of cartridges. It is certain that, immediately after Borodino, Napoleon was anxiously pressing for fresh supplies of ammunition; and it is doubtful if he could have delivered another pitched battle before they arrived. Worse than all, the spirit of the troops was grievously depressed. The gaiety which commonly characterises Frenchmen, even in untoward circumstances, had vanished. Gloomy silence reigned during the march and in the bivouacs. The negative results of the great battle had completed the discouragement of the troops. The French soldiers, at any rate, were too intelligent not to have some inkling of the disasters that might too probably lie before them.