“The soldiers, vainly struggling with the snow and the wind, that rushed upon them with tempestuous violence, could no longer distinguish the road; and falling into the ditches which bordered it, there found a grave. Others pressed on their journey, though scarcely able to drag themselves along. They were badly mounted, badly clothed, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink, shivering with cold, and groaning with pain. Becoming selfish through despair, they afforded neither succour nor even one glance of pity to those who, exhausted by fatigue and disease, expired around them. On that dreadful day, how many unfortunate beings, perishing by cold and famine, struggled hard with the agonies of death! We heard some of them faintly bidding adieu to their friends and comrades. Others, as they drew their last breath, pronounced the name of their mothers, their wives, their native country, which they were never more to see; the rigour of the frost seized on their benumbed limbs, and penetrated through their whole frame. Stretched on the road, we could distinguish only the heaps of snow that covered them, and which, at almost every step, formed little undulations, like so many graves. At the same time vast flights of ravens, abandoning the plain to take refuge in the neighbouring forests, croaked ominously as they passed over our heads; and troops of dogs, which had followed us from Moscow, and lived solely on our mangled remains, howled around us, as if they would hasten the period when we were to become their prey. “From that day the army lost its courage and its military attitude. The soldier no longer obeyed his officer; the officer separated himself from his general; the disbanded regiments marched in disorder; searching for food, they spread themselves over the plain, pillaging whatever fell in their way. No sooner had the soldiers separated from the ranks, than they were assailed by a population eager to avenge the horrors of which it had been the victim. The Cossacks came to the succour of the peasants, and drove back to the great road, already filled with the dying and the dead, those of the followers who escaped from the carnage made among them.” [Illustration: Marshal Ney defending the Rearguard By Adolphe Yvon By permission of Braun, Clément & Co., Dornach (Alsace)]