Mortier hastened his flight; but while he was rapidly retiring, some greedy Cossacks and squalid Muscovites, allured probably by the prospect of pillage, approached; they listened, and emboldened by the apparent quiet which pervaded the fortress, they ventured to penetrate into it; they ascended, and their hands, eager after plunder, were already stretched forth, when in a moment they were all destroyed, crushed, hurled into the air, with the buildings which they had come to pillage, and thirty thousand stand of arms that had been left behind there:  and then their mangled limbs, mixed with fragments of walls and shattered weapons, blown to a great distance, descended in a horrible shower.

The earth shook under the feet of Mortier.  At Feminskoe, ten leagues off, the Emperor heard the explosion, and he himself, in that tone of anger in which he sometimes addressed Europe, published the following day a bulletin, dated from Borowsk, to this effect, that “the Kremlin, the arsenal, the magazines were all destroyed; that the ancient citadel, which dated from the origin of the monarchy, and the first palace of the Czars, no longer existed; that Moscow was now but a heap of ruins, a filthy and unwholesome sink, without importance, either political or military.  He had abandoned it to Russian beggars and plunderers to march against Kutusoff, to throw himself on the left wing of that general, to drive him back, and then to proceed quietly to the banks of the Duena, where he should take up his winter-quarters.”  Then, apprehensive lest he should appear to be retreating, he added, that “there he should be within eighty leagues of Wilna and Petersburg, a double advantage; that is to say, twenty marches nearer to his resources and his object.”  By this remark he hoped to give to his retreat the air of an offensive march.

It was on this occasion that he declared, that “he had refused to give orders for the destruction of the whole country which he was quitting; he felt a repugnance to aggravate the miseries of its inhabitants.  To punish the Russian incendiary and a hundred wretches who make war like Tartars, he would not ruin nine thousand proprietors, and leave two hundred thousand serfs, innocent of all these barbarities, absolutely destitute of resources.”

He had not then been soured by misfortune; but in three days every thing had changed.  After coming in collision with Kutusoff, he retreated through this same town of Borowsk, and no sooner had he passed through it than it ceased to exist.  It was thus that in future all was destined to be burned behind him.  While conquering, he had preserved:  when retiring, he resolved to destroy:  either from necessity, to ruin the enemy and to retard his march, every thing being imperative in war; or by way of reprisal, the dreadful consequence of wars of invasion, which in the first place authorize every means of defence, while these afterwards operate as motives to those of attack.