To enable you to pursue the train of events, as far as I was capable of
informing myself respecting them, I will endeavour to relate them as
they occurred. It was not till the arrival of marshal Marmont with his
corps of the army in this neighbourhood that any idea of the probability
of a general engagement at Leipzig began to be entertained. That
circumstance happened in the beginning of October. These guests brought
along with them every species of misery and distress, which daily
increased in proportion as those hosts of destroyers kept gradually
swelling into a large army. They were joined from time to time by
several other corps; the city was nearly surrounded by bivouacs; and,
gracious God! what proceedings! what havoc!--We had frequently been
informed that all Saxony, from Lusatia to the Elbe, resembled one vast
desert, where nothing was to be seen but towns laid waste and
plundered, villages reduced to ashes, naked and famishing
inhabitants;--that there was no appearance of any other living creature;
nay, not even a trace of vegetation remaining. These accounts we
naturally regarded as exaggerations, little imagining that in a short
time we should have to give to our distant friends the same details of
horror respecting our own vicinity. Too true it is that no nation has
made such progress in the art of refinement, and is so ingenious in
devising infernal torments, as that, which, under the name of allies and
protectors, has made us so inexpressibly wretched. Ever since the battle
of Lützen, Leipzig had been one of the principal resources of the grand
French army, and they showed it no mercy. Numberless hospitals
transformed it into one great infirmary; many thousands of troops,
quartered in the habitations of the citizens, one prodigious _corps de
garde_; and requisitions of meat, bread, rice, brandy, and other
articles, one vast poor-house, where the indigent inhabitants were in
danger of starving. But for this well-stored magazine, the great French