foraging in the forest and seizing a pot in which an orderly was secretly cooking potatoes for his general.  Bourgogne made off with the potatoes, devoured most of them half-boiled, returned to his comrades and told them he had found nothing.  Taking his place near their fire, he scooped out his bed in the snow, lay under his bearskin, and clasped his now precious knapsack, while the others moaned with hunger.  Yet, as his narrative shows, he was not naturally a heartless man:  in such a situation man is apt to sink to the level of the wolf.  The best food obtainable was horseflesh, and hungry throngs rushed at every horse that fell, disputing its carcass with the packs of dogs or wolves that hung about the line of march.[274]

Smolensk was now the thought dearest to every heart; and, buoyed with the hope of rest and food, the army tottered westwards as it had panted eastwards through the fierce summer heats with Moscow as its cynosure.  The hope that clung about Smolensk was but a cruel mirage.  The wreck of that city offered poor shelter; the stores were exhausted by the vanguard; and, to the horror of Eugene’s Italians, men swarmed out of that fancied abode of plenty and pounced on every horse that stumbled to its doom on the slippery banks of the Dnieper.  With inconceivable folly, Napoleon, or his staff, had provided no means for roughing the horses’ shoes.  The Cossacks, when they knew this, exclaimed to Wilson:  “God has made Napoleon forget that there was a winter here.”

Disasters now thickened about the Grand Army.  During his halt at Smolensk (November 9th-14th), Napoleon heard that Victor’s force on the Dwina had been worsted by the Russians, and there was ground for fearing that the Muscovite army of the Ukraine would cut into the line of retreat.  The halt at Smolensk also gave time for Kutusoff to come up parallel with the main force, and had he pressed on with ordinary speed and showed a tithe of his wonted pugnacity, he might have captured the Grand Army and its leader.  As it was, his feeble attack on the rearguard at Krasnoe only gave Ney an opportunity of showing his dauntless courage.  The “bravest of the brave” fought his way through clouds of Cossacks, crossed the Dnieper, though with the loss of all his guns, and rejoined the main body.  Napoleon was greatly relieved on hearing of the escape of this Launcelot of the Imperial chivalry.  He ordered cannon to be fired at suitable intervals so as to forward the news if it were propitious; and on hearing their distant boomings, he exclaimed to his officers:  “I have more than 400,000,000 francs in the cellars of the Tuileries, and would gladly have given the whole for the ransom of my faithful companion in arms."[275]