le columns
of French and Lithuanians to see to its execution. We, who were
irritated at the sight of the pillagers, were eager to pursue and punish
them; but when we had stripped them of the bread, or of the cattle which
they had been robbing, and when we saw them, slowly retiring, sometimes
eyeing us with a look of condensed despair, sometimes bursting into
tears; and when we heard them murmuring, that, "not content with giving
them nothing, we wrested every thing from them, and that, consequently,
our intention must be to let them perish of hunger;" We, then, in our
turn, accusing ourselves of barbarity to our own people, called them
back, and restored their prey to them. Indeed, it was imperious
necessity which impelled to plunder. The officers themselves had no
other means of subsistence than the share which the soldiers allowed
them.

A position of so much excess engendered fresh excesses. These rude men,
with arms in their hands, when assailed by so many immoderate wants,
could not remain moderate. When they arrived near any habitations, they
were famished; at first they asked, but, either for want of being
understood, or from the refusal or impossibility of the inhabitants to
satisfy their demands, and of their inability to wait, altercations
generally arose; then, as they became more and more exasperated with
hunger, they became furious, and after tumbling either cottage or palace
topsy-turvy, without finding the subsistence they were in quest of,
they, in the violence of their despair, accused the inhabitants of being
their enemies, and revenged themselves on the proprietors by destroying
their property.

There were some who actually destroyed themselves, rather than proceed
to such extremities; others did the same after having done so: these
were the youngest. They placed their foreheads on their muskets, and
blew out their brains in the middle of the high-road. But many became
hardened; one excess led them to another, as people often grow angry
with the blows which they inflict. Among the latter, some vagabonds took
vengeance of their distresses upon persons; in the midst of so
inauspicious an aspect of nature, they became denaturalized; abandoned
to themselves at so great a distance from home, they imagined that every
thing was allowed them, and that their own sufferings authorized them in
making others suffer.

In an army so numerous, and composed of so many nations, it was natural
also to find more mal