These paternal manners, which made the private soldier the military comrade of the ruler of Europe; these forms, which revived the still-regretted usages of the republic, delighted the troops.  He was a monarch, but the monarch of the Revolution; and they could not but love a fortunate sovereign who led them on to fortune; in him there was every thing to excite, and nothing to reproach them.

Never did field of victory exhibit a spectacle more capable of exalting; the presentation of that eagle so richly merited, the pomp of these promotions, the shouts of joy, the glory of those warriors, recompensed on the very spot where it had just been acquired; their valour proclaimed by a voice, every accent of which rung throughout attentive Europe; by that great captain whose bulletins would carry their names over the whole world, and more especially among their countrymen, and into the bosoms of their families, which they would at once cheer and make proud:  how many favours at once! they were absolutely intoxicated with them:  he himself seemed at first to allow himself to share their transports.

But when he was out of sight of his troops, the attitude of Ney and Murat, and the words of Poniatowski, who was as frank and judicious in council as he was intrepid in the field, tranquillized him; and when the close heat of the day began to overpower him, and he learned from the reports that his men had proceeded eight leagues without overtaking the enemy, the spell was entirely dissolved.  On his return to Smolensk, the jolting of his carriage over the relics of the fight, the stoppages caused on the road by the long file of the wounded who were crawling or being carried back, and in Smolensk itself by the tumbrels of amputated limbs about to be thrown away at a distance; in a word, all that is horrible and odious out of fields of battle, completely disarmed him.  Smolensk was but one vast hospital, and the loud groans which issued from it drowned the shout of glory which had just been raised on the fields of Valoutina.

The reports of the surgeons were frightful:  in that country a spirit distilled from grain is used instead of wine and brandy made from grapes.  Narcotic plants are mixed with it.  Our young soldiers, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, conceived that this liquor would cheer them; but its perfidious heat caused them to throw out at once all the fire that was yet left in them, after which they sank exhausted, and became the victims of disease.

Others, less sober, or more debilitated, were seized with dizziness, stupefaction, and torpor; they squatted into the ditches and on the roads.  Their half-open, watery, and lack-lustre eyes seemed to watch, with insensibility, death gradually seizing their whole frame; they expired sullenly and without a groan.

At Wilna, it had not been possible to establish hospitals for more than six thousand sick:  convents, churches, synagogues, and barns, served to receive the suffering multitude.  In these dismal places, which were sometimes unhealthy, but still too few, and too crowded, the sick were frequently without food, without beds, without covering, and without even straw and medicines.  The surgeons were inadequate to the duty, so that every thing, even to the very hospitals, contributed to create disease, and nothing to cure.