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.
This unfortunate general was still struggling with the heavens, with men, and with his own despair, when he felt even the earth give way under his feet. In fact, being deceived by the snow, he had fallen into a lake, which was not frozen sufficiently hard to bear him, and in which he would have been drowned. Then only he yielded and gave up his arms.
While this catastrophe was accomplishing, his other three brigades, being more and more hemmed in upon the road, lost all power of movement. They delayed their surrender till the next morning, first by fighting, and then by parleying; they then all fell in their turn; a common misfortune again united them with their general.
Of the whole division, a single battalion only escaped: it had been left the last in Borizof. It quitted it in the midst of the Russians of Platof and of Tchitchakof, who were effecting in that town, and at that very moment, the junction of the armies of Moscow and of Moldavia. This battalion, being alone and separated from its division, might have been expected to be the first to fall, but that very circumstance saved it. Several long trains of equipages and disbanded soldiers were flying towards Studzianka in different directions; drawn aside by one of these crowds, mistaking his road, and leaving on his right that which had been taken by the army, the leader of this battalion glided to the borders of the river, followed all its windings and turnings, and protected by the combat of his less fortunate comrades, by the darkness, and the very difficulties of the ground, moved off in silence, escaped from the enemy, and brought to Victor the confirmation of Partouneaux's surrender.
When Napoleon heard the news, he was struck with grief, and exclaimed, "How unfortunate it was, that when all appeared to be saved, as if miraculously, this defection had happened, to spoil all!" The expression was improper, but grief extorted it from him, either because he anticipated that Victor, being thus weakened, would be unable to hold out long enough next day; or because he had made it a point of honour to have left nothing during the whole of his retreat in the hands of the enemy, but stragglers, and no armed and organised corps. In fact, this division was the first and the only one which laid down its arms.