food but
snow, a little frozen beetroot, horseflesh, or a handful of meal.

The miserable creatures were dropping down, overcome by hunger, thirst,
weariness, and sleep, when they reached the shores of the Beresina and
found fuel and fire and victuals, countless wagons and tents, a whole
improvised town, in short. The whole village of Studzianka had been
removed piecemeal from the heights of the plain, and the very perils and
miseries of this dangerous and doleful habitation smiled invitingly to
the wayfarers, who beheld no prospect beyond it but the awful Russian
deserts. A huge hospice, in short, was erected for twenty hours of
existence. Only one thought--the thought of rest--appealed to men weary
of life or rejoicing in unlooked-for comfort.

They lay right in the line of fire from the cannon of the Russian
left; but to that vast mass of human creatures, a patch upon the
snow, sometimes dark, sometimes breaking into flame, the indefatigable
grapeshot was but one discomfort the more. For them it was only a storm,
and they paid the less attention to the bolts that fell among them
because there were none to strike down there save dying men, the
wounded, or perhaps the dead. Stragglers came up in little bands at
every moment. These walking corpses instantly separated, and wandered
begging from fire to fire; and meeting, for the most part, with
refusals, banded themselves together again, and took by force what
they could not otherwise obtain. They were deaf to the voices of their
officers prophesying death on the morrow, and spent the energy required
to cross the swamp in building shelters for the night and preparing a
meal that often proved fatal. The coming death no longer seemed an evil,
for it gave them an hour of slumber before it came. Hunger and thirst
and cold--these were evils, but not death.

At last wood and fuel and canvas and shelters failed, and hideous brawls
began between destitute late comers and the rich already in possession
of a lodging. The weaker were driven away, until a few last fugitives
before the Russian advance were obliged to make their bed in the snow,
and lay down to rise no more.

Little by little the mass of half-dead humanity became so dense, so
deaf, so torpid,--or perhaps it should be said so happy--that Marshal
Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under
Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through
this forest of men, so as to cros