Partouneaux did not hesitate:  although he had no more than three cannon with him, and three thousand five hundred soldiers, he determined to cut his way through, made his dispositions accordingly, and began his march.  He had at first to march along a slippery road, crowded with baggage and runaways; with a violent wind blowing directly in his face, and in a dark and icy-cold night.  To these obstacles were shortly added the fire of several thousand enemies, who lined the heights upon his right.  As long as he was only attacked in flank, he proceeded; but shortly after, he had to meet it in front from numberless troops well posted, whose bullets traversed his column through and through.

This unfortunate division then got entangled in a shallow; a long file of five or six hundred carriages embarrassed all its movements; seven thousand terrified stragglers, howling with terror and despair, rushed into the midst of its feeble lines.  They broke through them, caused its platoons to waver, and were every moment involving in their disorder fresh soldiers who got disheartened.  It became necessary to retreat, in order to rally, and take a better position, but in falling back, they encountered Platof’s cavalry.

Half of our combatants had already perished, and the fifteen hundred soldiers who remained found themselves surrounded by three armies and by a river.

In this situation, a flag of truce came, in the name of Wittgenstein and fifty thousand men, to order the French to surrender.  Partouneaux rejected the summons.  He recalled into his ranks such of his stragglers as yet retained their arms; he wanted to make a last effort, and clear a sanguinary passage to the bridge of Studzianka; but these men, who were formerly so brave, were now so degraded by their miseries, that they would no longer make use of their arms.

At the same time, the general of his vanguard apprised him that the bridges of Studzianka were burnt; an aide-de-camp, named Rochex, who had just brought the report, pretended that he had seen them burning.  Partouneaux believed this false intelligence, for, in regard to calamities, misfortune is credulous.

He concluded that he was abandoned and sacrificed; and as the night, the incumbrances, and the necessity of facing the enemy on three sides, separated his weak brigades, he desired each of them to be told to try and steal off, under favour of the darkness, along the flanks of the enemy.  He himself, with one of these brigades, reduced to four hundred men, ascended the steep and woody heights on his right, with the hope of passing through Wittgenstein’s army in the darkness, of escaping him, and rejoining Victor; or, at all events, of getting round by the sources of the Berezina.

But at every point where he attempted to pass, he encountered the enemy’s fires, and he turned again; he wandered about for several hours quite at random, in plains of snow, in the midst of a violent hurricane.  At every step he saw his soldiers transfixed by the cold, emaciated with hunger and fatigue, falling half dead into the hands of the Russian cavalry, who pursued him without intermission.