ck the peasantry, and whether through
fear of the contagion, or through the uselessness of hunting down men who
were treading to the grave by thousands, the peasantry ceased to follow us.
Yet such was the wretchedness of that hideous progress, that this
cessation of hostility was scarcely a relief. The animation of the
skirmishes, though it often cost life, yet kept the rest more alive; the
strategem, the adventure, the surprise, nay, even the failure and escape,
relieved us from the dreadful monotony of the life, or rather the
half-existence, to which we were now condemned. Our buoyant and brilliant
career was at an end; we were now only the mutes and mourners of a funeral
procession of seventy thousand men.

I still look back with an indescribable shudder at the scenes which we
were compelled to witness from day to day during that month of misery; for
the march, which began in the first days of October, was protracted till
its end. I had kept up my spirits when many a more vigorous frame had sunk,
and many a maturer mind had desponded; but the perpetual recurrence of the
same dreary spectacles, the dying, and the more fortunate dead, covering
the highways, the fields, and the village streets, at length sank into my
soul. Some recollections of earlier principles, and the memory of my old
friend Vincent, prevented my taking the summary and unhappy means of
ridding myself of my burden, which I saw daily resorted to among the
soldiery--a bullet through the brain, or a bayonet through the heart,
cured all. But, thanks to early impressions, I was determined to wait the
hand of the enemy, or the course of nature. Many a night I lay down beside
my starving charger, with something of a hope that I should never see
another morning; and many a morning, when I dragged my feeble limbs from
the cold and wet ground, I looked round the horizon for the approach of
some enemy's squadron, or peasant band, which might give me an honourable
chance of escape from an existence now no longer endurable. But all was in
vain. For leagues round no living object was visible, except that long
column, silently and slowly winding on through the distance, like an army
of spectres.

My diminished squadron had at length become almost the only rear-guard.
From a hundred and fifty as fine fellows as ever sat a charger, we were
now reduced to a third. All its officers, youths of the first families of
Prussia, had either been left behind dying in the villa