It might have been perhaps eleven o'clock at night. Some of the unfortunate men were asleep, others were warming their limbs at the fire, when we heard an indistinct noise behind us. Fire had broken out in two places—in the centre and at the other end of the barn. When we tried to open the doors, the horses fastened to the inside reared and prevented our passing. It was impossible to get to the other door for the smoke and flames.
The confusion was supreme. The men from the further side of the barn threw themselves in a compact mass against the inside of the door near where we slept, to prevent others from getting in. To do this more effectually, they had fixed the door firmly with a cross-bar of wood. In less than two minutes the whole place was in flames; the fire had begun in the straw where the men slept, and rapidly spread to the dry beams above their heads. Some men near the door tried to open it, but failed, as it opened inwards. A terrible scene, impossible to describe, took place; smothered groans and terrible shrieks were heard from the building. The unfortunate wretches inside climbed one upon the other, endeavouring to get out through the roof; but flames were already issuing through the holes there, and no sooner did the men appear, their clothes on fire, and the hair burnt off their heads, than they were driven back again by the force of the fire.
Then cries and shrieks of rage were heard, the fire became a vast tossing mass, through the convulsive efforts the poor wretches made to escape. It was the picture of hell.
We saved seven men by dragging them through a hole made by a plank torn from its place. One of them was an officer of our regiment. His hands were burnt and his clothes torn, and the other six were worse off still. It was impossible to save any more in this way, as the others were already half suffocated by the smoke, and by the weight of other men on the top of them; we had to leave them to be burnt with the rest. Some few flung themselves off the roof, and begged us to finish them off by shooting them.
Other men who were camping near, half dead with cold by their wretched fires, now came running up, attracted by the light of the flames. They came, not to offer help—they were too late for that—but to warm themselves, and cook their horseflesh on the points of their swords and bayonets. In their opinion, the disaster was an intervention of Providence, as the men burnt in the barn were the richest in the army, having brought away more treasure than any others from Moscow. In spite of their hunger and weakness, we saw men running the risk of the flames to drag out the bodies of their wretched comrades, in order to hunt for what they could find. Others said, 'It serves them right; if they had let us get on to the roof, this would not have happened.' Others, again, stretched out their hands to the warmth, saying, 'What a beautiful fire!' regardless of the fact that several hundreds of their comrades, perhaps even of their relatives, had given their bodies to feed the flames.
Before the dawn, I set out with my companion to rejoin the regiment. We walked on, thinking of all that had passed, stumbling over dead and dying men. The cold was even more intense than on the day before. We joined two men of the line who had their teeth in a bit of horseflesh. They said, if they waited any longer, it would be frozen too hard to eat. They assured us as a fact that they had seen foreign soldiers (Croats) of our army dragging corpses out of the fire, cutting them up and eating them. I never saw this sort of thing myself, but I believe it frequently happened during this fatal campaign.
What object could these men have, almost dying as they were, in telling us this story, if it were not true? It was not an occasion for lying. I am sure that if I had not found any horseflesh myself, I could have turned cannibal. To understand the situation, one must have felt the madness of hunger; failing a man to eat, one could have demolished the devil himself, if he were only cooked.
Since we left Moscow, a pretty Russian carriage drawn by four horses had followed the Guards' column. For the last two days, however, we only saw two; the others had either been killed and eaten, or had died of the cold and fatigue. In the carriage was a lady, probably a widow, still young, with her two daughters, of seventeen and fifteen years of age. They were from Moscow, of French origin, and had yielded to the entreaties of one of our superior officers to accompany him to France. Perhaps the officer intended to marry the lady, for he was no longer very young. Be that as it may, these unhappy ladies were, like us, exposed to the terrible cold, and to all the miseries of hunger and want, feeling it, no doubt, far more keenly than we did.
The day was breaking when we got to the place where our regiment had slept, and the army was already in motion. During the last two days the regiments were diminished by a third of their number, and it was only too evident, from the slow, painful progress of many of the men, that they would succumb before the day was over. I saw the carriage containing the unfortunate ladies emerge from a little wood on to the highroad; there it stopped close to me, and I heard cries and groans proceeding from it. The officer in charge of the ladies opened the door, got into the carriage, and presently lifted out a dead body to the sappers waiting outside. One of the poor girls had just died. She was dressed in gray silk, with a cape of the same colour trimmed with ermine. She was still beautiful, but very thin. We were all very much touched at this sight, in spite of our usual indifference to tragic scenes, and when I saw the officer in tears, I wept also.
As the sappers took the girl's body away, I glanced into the carriage, and there I saw the mother and the other girl fallen one over the other. They seemed to be quite unconscious, and, indeed, their sufferings were ended that evening. I think they were all three buried by the sappers in the same grave, near Valoutina. The Lieutenant-Colonel, reproaching himself for this misfortune, tried at Krasnoë and other battles to meet his death; and in January, a few days after our arrival at Elbingen, he died of grief.