The few who survived all these horrors, men who had fought in all Napoleon's campaigns, and wore the cross of the Legion of Honor on their breasts, were now so wasted with famine that they wept when they saw a loaf of bread!
The total loss in this terrible campaign was somewhere near 450,000 men; fatigue, hunger and cold had caused the death of 132,000; and the Russians had taken prisoners of 193,000—including forty-eight generals and three thousand regimental officers. The eagles and standards left in the enemy's hands were seventy-five in number and the pieces of cannon nearly one thousand.
From a Painting by H. Bellange
Review of Troops in the Place du Carrousel, Paris
[XIII]
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1813
To the premature cold, and burning of Moscow, Napoleon attributed the failure of his campaign in Russia. His arrival at the Tuileries had been preceded by the 29th bulletin in which the fatal events of the campaign were fully and graphically recited. While he had not been able to conquer the elements he found the Senate and all the public bodies full of adulation and willingness to obey his commands. However, what had been foreseen by almost every person of discernment, except Napoleon, soon followed, viz., an alliance against France by Prussia, Russia and Austria.
New conscriptions were now called for and yielded; regiments arrived from Spain and Italy; every arsenal resounded with the preparation of new artillery. "The wonderful energies of Napoleon's mind," says Scott, "and the influence which he could exert over the minds of others, were never so striking as at this period of his reign. He had returned to the seat of his Empire at a dreadful crisis, and in a most calamitous condition. His subjects had been ignorant for three weeks whether he was dead or alive. When he arrived it was to declare a dreadful catastrophe. * * * Yet Napoleon came, and seemed but to stamp on the earth, and armed legions arose at his call: the doubts and discontents of the public disappeared as mists at sunrising, and the same confidence which had attended his prosperous fortunes, revived in its full extent, despite of his late reverses."