§ 14. Dreadful snow-storm on the 6th of November; its effects upon the troops.
The spirits of the troops were nevertheless still supported by the example of their leaders, by the hopes of finding all their wants supplied at Smolensk, and still more by the aspect of a yet brilliant sun, that universal source of hope and life, which seemed to contradict and deny the spectacles of despair and death that already encompassed us.
But on the 6th of November the heavens changed. Their azure disappeared. The army marched enveloped in a chilling mist. This mist became thicker, and presently a blinding storm of snow descended upon it. It seemed as if the sky itself were falling, and uniting with the earth and our enemies to complete our destruction. All objects rapidly changed their appearance, becoming utterly confounded, and not to be recognized any more: we proceeded without knowing where we were, without perceiving the point to which we were bound; everything was converted into an obstacle to stop our progress. While we were struggling with the tempest of wind and snow, the latter, driven by the storm, lodged and accumulated in every hollow, concealing unknown abysses, which perfidiously opened beneath our feet. There the soldiers were ingulfed, and the weakest, resigning themselves to their fate, found their grave in these treacherous pits.
Those who followed turned aside; but the tempest, driving into their faces the snow that was descending from the sky and that which it raised from the earth, seemed resolved to arrest their farther progress. The Russian winter, in this new form, attacked them at every point: it penetrated through their light garments, and their rent and worn-out shoes. Their wet clothes froze to their bodies: an icy envelope encased them, and stiffened all their limbs. A piercing and violent wind almost prevented respiration; and, seizing their breath the moment it was exhaled, converted it into icicles, which hung from their beards all about their mouths.
The miserable creatures still crawled shivering along, till the snow, gathering in balls on the soles of their shoes, or a fragment of some broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their comrades, encountered in the way, caused them to stumble and fall. There their groans were unheeded; the snow soon covered them; slight hillocks marked the spots where they lay: there was their only grave. The road, like a cemetery, was thickly studded with these elevations; the most intrepid and the most indifferent were affected; they passed quickly on with averted looks. But before them and around them there was nothing but snow; this immense and dismal uniformity extended farther than the eye could reach; the imagination was astounded: it seemed a vast winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army. The only objects not enveloped by it were some gloomy pines, trees of the tombs, with their funereal verdure and their gigantic and motionless trunks completing the solemnity of a general mourning, and of an army dying amid nature already dead.
Everything, even to their very arms, still offensive at Malo-jaroslavetz, but since defensive only, now turned against our men. They seemed to their frozen limbs an insupportable weight. In the falls they experienced, they dropped almost unperceived from their hands, and were broken or buried in the snow. If they rose again it was without them: they had not thrown them away, but hunger and cold had wrested them from their grasp. The fingers of others were frozen to the muskets they still held, depriving them of the motion necessary to keep up some degree of warmth and of life.
We soon met with numbers of men belonging to all the different corps, sometimes singly, sometimes in troops. They had not basely deserted their colors: it was cold and exhaustion which had separated them from them. In this mortal struggle, at once general and individual, they had parted from each other, and there they were, disarmed, vanquished, defenceless, without leaders, obeying nothing but the most urgent instinct of self-preservation.
Most of them, attracted by the sight of by-paths, dispersed themselves over the country in hopes of finding bread and shelter for the coming night; but on their first passage all had been laid waste to the extent of seven or eight leagues: they met only with Cossacks and an armed population, which gathered around them, wounded and stripped them naked, and then left them, with bursts of savage laughter, to perish in the snow. These people, who had risen at the call of Alexander and Kutusoff, and who had not then learned, as they since have, to avenge nobly a country which they had been unable to defend, hovered on both flanks of the army under favor of the woods. Those whom they did not despatch with their pikes and hatchets, they drove back to the fatal and all-devouring high road.
Night then came on: a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow, which covered everything, where were they to halt, where sit, where lie down, where find even a root to satisfy their hunger, or dry wood to kindle a fire? Fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders nevertheless stopped those whom their moral and physical strength and the efforts of their officers had still kept together. They strove to establish themselves; but the tempest, not yet subsided, dispersed the first preparations for bivouacs. The pines, laden with frost, obstinately resisted ignition; while the snow, which still continued to fall from the sky, and that on the ground, which melted with the effect of the first heat, extinguished their kindling fires, and, with them, the strength and spirits of the men.
When at length the flames gained the ascendancy, the officers and soldiers around them commenced preparing their wretched repast: it consisted of lean and ragged pieces of flesh torn from the horses that had given out, and at most a few spoonfuls of rye flour mixed with snow-water. The next morning circular ranges of soldiers extended lifeless marked the sites of the bivouacs, and the ground about them was strewed with the bodies of several thousand horses.