A position of so much excess engendered fresh excesses.  These rude men, with arms in their hands, when assailed by so many immoderate wants, could not remain moderate.  When they arrived near any habitations, they were famished; at first they asked, but, either for want of being understood, or from the refusal or impossibility of the inhabitants to satisfy their demands, and of their inability to wait, altercations generally arose; then, as they became more and more exasperated with hunger, they became furious, and after tumbling either cottage or palace topsy-turvy, without finding the subsistence they were in quest of, they, in the violence of their despair, accused the inhabitants of being their enemies, and revenged themselves on the proprietors by destroying their property.

There were some who actually destroyed themselves, rather than proceed to such extremities; others did the same after having done so:  these were the youngest.  They placed their foreheads on their muskets, and blew out their brains in the middle of the high-road.  But many became hardened; one excess led them to another, as people often grow angry with the blows which they inflict.  Among the latter, some vagabonds took vengeance of their distresses upon persons; in the midst of so inauspicious an aspect of nature, they became denaturalized; abandoned to themselves at so great a distance from home, they imagined that every thing was allowed them, and that their own sufferings authorized them in making others suffer.

In an army so numerous, and composed of so many nations, it was natural also to find more malefactors than in smaller ones:  the causes of so many evils induced fresh ones; already enfeebled by famine, it was necessary to make forced marches in order to escape from it, and to reach the enemy.  At night when they halted, the soldiers thronged into the houses; there, worn out with fatigue and want, they threw themselves upon the first dirty straw they met with.

The most robust had barely spirits left to knead the flour which they found, and to light the ovens with which all those wooden houses were supplied; others had scarcely strength to go a few paces in order to make the fires necessary to cook some food; their officers, exhausted like themselves, feebly gave orders to take more care, and neglected to see that their orders were obeyed.  A piece of burnt wood, at such times escaping from an oven, or a spark from the fire of the bivouacs, was sufficient to set fire to a castle or a whole village, and to cause the deaths of many unfortunate soldiers who had taken refuge in them.  In other respects, these disorders were very rare in Lithuania.