riches, the unfortunate men, stupid with cold, took up their abode in
the deserted bivouacs, broke up the material which they found there to
build themselves cabins, made fuel of everything that came to hand,
cut up the frozen carcasses of the horses for food, tore the cloth and
the curtains from the carriages for coverlets, and went to sleep,
instead of continuing their way and crossing quietly during the night
that cruel Beresina, which an incredible fatality had already made so
destructive to the army.

The apathy of these poor soldiers can only be conceived by those who
remember to have crossed vast deserts of snow without other
perspective than a snow horizon, without other drink than snow,
without other bed than snow, without other food than snow or a few
frozen beet-roots, a few handfuls of flour, or a little horseflesh.
Dying of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and want of sleep, these
unfortunates reached a shore where they saw before them wood,
provisions, innumerable camp equipages, and carriages,--in short a
whole town at their service. The village of Studzianka had been wholly
taken to pieces and conveyed from the heights on which it stood to the
plain. However forlorn and dangerous that refuge might be, its
miseries and its perils only courted men who had lately seen nothing
before them but the awful deserts of Russia. It was, in fact, a vast
asylum which had an existence of twenty-four hours only.

Utter lassitude, and the sense of unexpected comfort, made that mass
of men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the
artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on
this mass,--visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst
of the trackless snow,--this shot and shell seemed to the torpid
creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm,