Napoleon himself remained in Vilna for over a fortnight. The 4th and 6th Corps had only just reached the Niemen, and it was absolutely necessary to bring up to the front the magazines from Königsberg. He also wished to organise Lithuania, or rather to exploit it. A provisional government of French partisans was set up at Vilna; garrisons were distributed; and officials placed over the various towns and districts. The first act of the Government was to order levies of horse and foot for Napoleon’s service; one cavalry regiment was to consist entirely of Lithuanian squires, and to be attached to the Imperial Guard. Otherwise the Government could exercise practically no civil functions; its duties were simply such as arose from the military occupation of the country. The peasants were reduced to abject misery by endless requisitions, and by the lawless violence of the stragglers who swarmed everywhere. The French _sous-préfet_ of Novi Troki, a place less than 20 miles from Vilna, was plundered and stripped by marauding soldiers on his way thither, and if such an event could take place within a day’s march of Napoleon’s head-quarters, the state of affairs farther afield may be imagined. Napoleon’s stringent orders against pillage and disorder were little better than useless. The pillage arose simply from lack of food, and the latter was the natural outcome of the fact that the expedition was too large to work in the existing conditions. Napoleon had taken immense pains to organise it, and up to a point he had foreseen and provided for everything. But he had not taken into full account physical difficulties: he had, amongst other blunders, organised a wheeled transport for which roads hardly existed, and he had failed to perceive that the vast magnitude of his enterprise automatically created fresh obstacles to success, or at any rate enormously increased those which already existed.