On the evening of the 28th Davout was near Vereia. He reported that the Russians were already showing infantry--these were of course Paskievich’s division. He begged the Emperor to put a stop to the wholesale burning of villages by the corps ahead of him. Demoralisation was spreading fast, and the men were abandoning the ranks in crowds. The usual straggling array of march of the Napoleonic hosts was a bad preparation for a retreat in face of an enemy. The field of Borodino was crossed by the Guard at daybreak on the 29th. It still presented a fearful spectacle. Junot’s men had been unable to bury many even of the French dead; and the ground was strewn with rotting corpses mingled with the wreckage of the terrible struggle. The hospitals at Kolotskoï and elsewhere were mere charnel-houses in which the dead lay heaped with the living, amid pestilence, filth, and destitution. About 1500 unhappy creatures still remained, Junot having been unable to remove them. Napoleon issued an order that every private carriage or other non-military vehicle was to carry one or two. Its effect was simply to hasten the end of the unfortunate invalids, who were so much additional encumbrance to men already beginning to feel the pinch of want. They were abandoned by the drivers at the earliest opportunity: some apparently were murdered outright; not one, probably, lived to reach Smolensk. Food was becoming scarce. As far as Mozhaïsk the country was not entirely devastated, and the leading troops had been able to feed their horses; but there was nothing for the rear-guard, whose plight was rendered all the worse by the reckless destruction of shelter by the corps ahead of them. After Mozhaïsk the wasted countryside afforded little or no forage; the horses, already exhausted and over-worked, were reduced to such substitutes for fodder as thatch and autumn leaves, and died by hundreds every day. The destruction of the means of transport meant the loss of much of the already too scanty supply of food. When it was not lost outright it was pillaged by the stragglers and simply served to keep alive these useless beings, while better and braver men died of starvation. By November 3rd such supplies as had been brought were almost entirely exhausted; the only resource of the starving horde was the flesh of the horses which were continually breaking down. The officers, of course, and the head-quarters, were better provided; and some of the men had still remains of their plunder, but these were the exceptions.