Every thing, even to their very arms, still offensive at
Malo-Yaroslawetz, but since then defensive only, now turned against
them. These seemed to their frozen limbs insupportably heavy, in the
frequent falls which they experienced, they dropped from their hands and
were broken or buried in the snow. If they rose again, it was without
them; for they did not throw them away; hunger and cold wrested them
from their grasp. The fingers of many others were frozen to the musket
which they still held, which deprived them of the motion necessary for
keeping up some degree of warmth and life.

We soon met with numbers of men belonging to all the corps, sometimes
singly, at others in troops. They had not basely deserted their colours;
it was cold and inanition which had separated them from their columns.
In this general and individual struggle, they had parted from one
another, and there they were, disarmed, vanquished, defenceless, without
leaders, obeying nothing but the 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 eight leagues; they met with nothing but Cossacks,
and an armed population, which encompassed, wounded, and stripped them
naked, and then left them, with ferocious bursts of laughter, to expire
on the snow. These people, who had risen at the call of Alexander and
Kutusoff, and who had not then learned, as they since have, to avenge
nobly a country which they were unable to defend, hovered on both flanks
of the army under favour of the woods. Those whom they did not despatch
with their pikes and hatchets, they brought back to the fatal and
all-devouring high road.

Night then came on--a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow which
covered every thing, they knew not where to halt, where to sit, where to
lie down, where to find some root or other to eat, and dry wood to
kindle a fire! Fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders nevertheless
stopped those whom their moral and physical strength and the efforts of
their officers had kept together. They strove to establish themselves;
but the tempest, still active, dispersed the first preparations for
bivouacs. The pines, laden with frost, obstinately resisted the flames;
their snow, that from the sky which yet continued to fall fast, and that
on the gr