In the evening of this long day, as the imperial column approached Gjatz, it was surprised to find Russians quite recently killed on the way.  It was remarked, that each of them had his head shattered in the same manner, and that his bloody brains were scattered near him.  It was known that two thousand Russian prisoners were marching on before, and that their guard consisted of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Poles.  On this discovery, each, according to his disposition, was indignant, approved, or remained indifferent.  Around the Emperor these various feelings were mute.  Caulaincourt broke out into the exclamation, that “it was an atrocious cruelty.  Here was a pretty specimen of the civilization which we were introducing into Russia!  What would be the effect of this barbarity on the enemy?  Were we not leaving our wounded and a multitude of prisoners at his mercy?  Did he want the means of wreaking the most horrible retaliation?”

Napoleon preserved a gloomy silence, but on the ensuing day these murders had ceased.  These unfortunate people were then merely left to die of hunger in the enclosures where, at night, they were confined like cattle.  This was no doubt a barbarity too; but what could we do?  Exchange them? the enemy rejected the proposal.  Release them? they would have gone and published the general distress, and, soon joined by others, they would have returned to pursue us.  In this mortal warfare, to give them their lives would have been sacrificing our own.  We were cruel from necessity.  The mischief arose from our having involved ourselves in so dreadful an alternative.

Besides, in their march to the interior of Russia, our soldiers, who had been made prisoners, were not more humanely treated, and there, certainly, imperious necessity was not an excuse.

At length the troops arrived with the night at Gjatz; but this first day of winter had been cruelly occupied.  The sight of the field of battle, and of the two forsaken hospitals, the multitude of waggons consigned to the flames, the Russians with their brains blown out, the excessive length of the march, the first severities of winter, all concurred to render it horrible:  the retreat became a flight; and Napoleon, compelled to yield and run away, was a spectacle perfectly novel.

Several of our allies enjoyed it with that inward satisfaction which is felt by inferiors, when they see their chiefs at length thwarted, and obliged in their turn to give way.  They indulged that miserable envy that is excited by extraordinary success, which rarely occurs without being abused, and which shocks that equality which is the first want of man.  But this malicious joy was soon extinguished and lost in the universal distress.

The wounded pride of Napoleon justified the supposition of such reflections.  This was perceived in one of the halts of that day:  there, on the rough furrows of a frozen field, strewed with wrecks both Russian and French, he attempted, by the energy of his words, to relieve himself from the weight of the insupportable responsibility of so many disasters.  “He had in fact dreaded this war, and he devoted its author to the execration of the whole world.  It was ——­ whom he accused of this; it was that Russian minister, sold to the English, who had fomented it, and the traitor had drawn into it both Alexander and himself.”