There is no hint in his letters that he anticipated a disastrous retreat.  The weather hitherto had been “as fine as that at Fontainebleau in September,” and he purposed retiring by a more southerly route which had not been exhausted by war.  Full of confidence, then, he set out on the 19th, with 115,000 men, persuaded that he would easily reach friendly Lithuania and his winter quarters “before severe cold set in.”  The veil was rudely torn from his eyes when, south of Malo-Jaroslavitz, his Marshals found the Russians so strongly posted that any further attack seemed to be an act of folly.  Eugene’s corps had suffered cruelly in an obstinate fight in and around that town, and the advice of Berthier, Murat, and Bessieres was against its renewal.  For an hour or more the Emperor sat silently gazing at a map.  The only prudent course now left was to retreat north and then west by way of Borodino, over his devastated line of advance.[273] Back, then, towards Borodino the army mournfully trudged (October 26th): 

“Everywhere (says Labaume) we saw wagons abandoned for want of horses to draw them.  Those who bore along with them the spoils of Moscow trembled for their riches; but we were disquieted most of all at seeing the deplorable state of our cavalry.  The villages which had but lately given us shelter were level with the ground:  under their ashes were the bodies of hundreds of soldiers and peasants....  But most horrible was the field of Borodino, where we saw the forty thousand men, who had perished there, yet lying unburied.”

For a time, Kutusoff forbore to attack the sore-stricken host; but, early in November, the Russian horse began to infest the line of march, and at Viasma their gathering forces were barely held off:  had Kutusoff aided his lieutenants, he might have decimated his famished foes.

Hitherto the weather had been singularly mild and open, so much so that the superstitious peasants looked on it as a sign that God was favouring Napoleon.  But, at last, on November the 6th, the first storm of winter fell on the straggling array, and completed its miseries.  The icy blasts struck death to the hearts of the feeble; and the puny fighting of man against man was now merged in the awful struggle against the powers of the air.  Drifts of snow blotted out the landscape; the wandering columns often lost the road and thousands forthwith ended their miseries.  Except among the Old Guard all semblance of military order was now lost, and battalions melted away into groups of marauders.

The search for food and fuel became furious, even when the rigour of the cold abated.  The behaviour of Bourgogne, a sergeant in the Imperial Guard, may serve to show by what shifts a hardy masterful nature fought its way through the wreckage of humanity around:  “If I could meet anybody in the world with a loaf, I would make him give me half—­nay, I would kill him so as to get the whole.”  These were his feelings:  he acted on them by