distress had arrived at its highest pitch, when the thousands from the field of battle applied there for relief.  Not even bread could any longer be dispensed to these unfortunates.  Many wandered about without any kind of shelter.  Then did we witness scenes which would have thrilled the most obdurate cannibals with horror.  No eye could have beheld a sight more hideous at Smolensk, on the Berezyna, or on the road to Wilna—­there at least Death more speedily dispatched his victims.  Thousands of ghastly figures staggered along the streets, begging at every window and at every door; and seldom indeed had Compassion the power to give.  These, however, were ordinary, familiar spectacles.  Neither was it rare to see one of these emaciated wretches picking up the dirtiest bones, and eagerly gnawing them; nay, even the smallest crumb of bread which had chanced to be thrown into the street, as well as apple-parings and cabbage-stalks, were voraciously devoured.  But hunger did not confine itself within these disgusting limits.  More than twenty eye-witnesses can attest that wounded French soldiers crawled to the already putrid carcasses of horses, with some blunt knife or other contrived with their feeble hands to cut the flesh from the haunches, and greedily regaled themselves with the carrion.  They were glad to appease their hunger with what the raven and the kite never feed on but in cases of necessity.  They even tore the flesh from human limbs, and broiled it to satisfy the cravings of appetite; nay, what is almost incredible, the very dunghills were searched for undigested fragments to devour.  You know me, and must certainly believe that I would not relate as facts things which would be liable to be contradicted by the whole city.  Thus the hospitals became a hot-bed of pestilence, from which the senses of hearing, smell, and sight, turned with disgust, and one of the most fatal of those vampyres which had so profusely drained our vitals, and now dispensed destruction to those who had fed them and to the sick themselves.

The great church-yard exhibited a spectacle of peculiar horror.  The peaceful dead and their monuments had been spared no more than any other corner of the city.  Here also the king of terrors had reaped a rich harvest.  The slight walls had been converted into one great fort, and loop-holes formed in them.  Troops had long before bivouacked in this spot, and the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian prisoners, were here confined, frequently for several successive days, in the most tempestuous weather and violent rain, without food, straw, or shelter.  These poor fellows had nevertheless spared the many handsome monuments of the deceased, and only sought a refuge from the wet, or a lodging for the night, in such vaults as they found open.  This spacious ground, which rather resembled a superbly embellished garden than a burial-place, now fell under the all-desolating hands of the French.  It soon bore not the smallest resemblance to itself; what Art had, in the space