nd, seizing their breath the moment it was
exhaled, converted it into icicles, which hung from their beards all
about their mouths.

The miserable creatures still crawled shivering along, till the snow,
gathering in balls on the soles of their shoes, or a fragment of some
broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their
comrades, encountered in the way, caused them to stumble and fall. There
their groans were unheeded; the snow soon covered them; slight hillocks
marked the spots where they lay: there was their only grave. The road,
like a cemetery, was thickly studded with these elevations; the most
intrepid and the most indifferent were affected; they passed quickly on
with averted looks. But before them and around them there was nothing
but snow; this immense and dismal uniformity extended farther than the
eye could reach; the imagination was astounded: it seemed a vast
winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army. The only objects
not enveloped by it were some gloomy pines, trees of the tombs, with
their funereal verdure and their gigantic and motionless trunks
completing the solemnity of a general mourning, and of an army dying
amid nature already dead.

Everything, even to their very arms, still offensive at
Malo-jaroslavetz, but since defensive only, now turned against our men.
They seemed to their frozen limbs an insupportable weight. In the falls
they experienced, they dropped almost unperceived from their hands, and
were broken or buried in the snow. If they rose again it was without
them: they had not thrown them away, but hunger and cold had wrested
them from their grasp. The fingers of others were frozen to the muskets
they still held, depriving them of the motion necessary to keep up some
degree of warmth and of life.

We soon met with numbers of men belonging to all the different corps,
sometimes singly, sometimes in troops. They had not basely deserted
their colors: it was cold and exhaustion which had separated them from
them. In this mortal struggle, at once general and individual, they had
parted from each other, and there they were, disarmed, vanquished,
defenceless, without leaders, obeying nothing but the most urgent
instinct of self-preservation.

Most of them, attracted by the sight of by-paths, dispersed themselves
over the country in hopes of finding bread and shelter for the coming
night; but on their first passage all had been laid waste to the extent
of seven or eig