One of the most awful incidents of the retreat was the fate of the Russian prisoners, of whom some 2000--stragglers, convalescents, and civilians--were dragged with the army, under a guard made up of fragments and detachments of every nation. From the first the captives were treated with gross cruelty and neglect. The weakly ones who fell behind were done to death without mercy. Every night the survivors were huddled together, fireless, on the bare ground, without food save a little raw horse-flesh. Before long even this was not forthcoming, and the miserable prisoners, driven along and herded together like wild beasts by men who were losing the traces of humanity, perished amid horrible misery. Cannibalism is said to have raged among them. There is no darker stain on the escutcheon of Napoleon (who must be held ultimately responsible) than this treatment of men who were at any rate open enemies, and some of whom were not even combatants. Day by day the number of men in the ranks dwindled. Every bivouac was the graveyard of hundreds of men and thousands of horses; the line of march resembled a long battlefield. The roads were strewn with dead or dying men and horses, abandoned guns and vehicles, and wreckage of every kind. Amid this streamed westward in wild confusion the endless procession of disbanded men and male and female camp-followers, accompanied by vehicles of all kinds, through which the troops still with the colours could scarcely force their way. Many men were already so weak that they could hardly stumble along. Some became idiotic with privation and the spectacle of the misery about them. The plight of the troops in the ranks was no better; their devotion to duty only prolonged their sufferings. Ill-clad, starving, stricken with cold and disease, often half-blind from the effects of the glaring snow by day and the smoke of the fires at night, it is wonderful that they ever managed, as they did, to make some kind of fight. Their duties, when they had strength to carry them out, were confined to beating off the hovering Cossacks, and to destroying guns and waggons that would otherwise have been abandoned. From Dorogobuzh Eugène’s corps was diverted towards Dukhovchina with the intention of directing it thence upon Vitebsk to relieve the pressure upon Victor by Wittgenstein. The result was its practical destruction.