“They had met with all who were marching to join the masses, and all who had separated from them; lastly, all who were not excited either by the presence of the chiefs, or by example, or by the war.  The appearance of each troop, according to its distance from home, excited hope, anxiety, or pity.

“In Germany, as far as the Oder, where a thousand objects were incessantly reminding them of France, these recruits imagined themselves not wholly cut off from it; they were ardent and jovial; but beyond the Oder, in Poland, where the soil, productions, inhabitants, costumes, manners, in short every thing, to the very habitations, wore a foreign aspect; where nothing, in short, resembled a country which they regretted; they began to be dismayed at the distance they had traversed, and their faces already bore the stamp of fatigue and lassitude.

“By what an extraordinary distance must they then be separated from France, since they had already reached unknown regions, where every thing presented to them an aspect of such gloomy novelty! how many steps they had taken, and how many more they had yet to take!  The very idea of return was disheartening; and yet they were obliged to march on, to keep constantly marching! and they complained that ever since they left France, their fatigues had been gradually increasing, and the means of supporting them continually diminishing.”

The truth is, that wine first failed them, then beer, even spirits; and, lastly, they were reduced to water, which in its turn was frequently wanting.  The same was the case with dry provisions, and also with every necessary of life; and in this gradual destitution, depression of mind kept pace with the successive debilitation of the body.  Agitated by a vague inquietude, they marched on amid the dull uniformity of the vast and silent forests of dark pines.  They crept along these large trees, bare and stripped to their very tops, and were affrighted at their weakness amid this immensity.  They then conceived gloomy and absurd notions respecting the geography of these unknown regions; and, overcome by a secret horror, they hesitated to penetrate farther into such vast deserts.

From these sufferings, physical and moral, from these privations, from these continual bivouacs, as dangerous near the pole as under the equator, and from the infection of the air by the putrified carcases of men and horses that strewed the roads, sprang two dreadful epidemics—­the dysentery and the typhus fever.  The Germans first felt their ravages; they are less nervous and less sober than the French; and they were less interested in a cause which they regarded as foreign to them.  Out of 22,000 Bavarians who had crossed the Oder, 11,000 only reached the Duena; and yet they had never been in action.  This military march cost the French one-fourth, and the allies half of their army.