that waggons with bread and forage, and herds of cattle, shall follow
the marching columns. Whenever the army halts, magazines are immediately
established; and, if even the stores necessary for it are required at
the cost of the country, this case bears no comparison with that where
every attendant on the waggon-train is at full liberty to pillage till
his rapacity is satisfied. Woe to the country where, as in our's,
hundreds of thousands of such commissaries are allowed to exercise their
destructive office at discretion! Ask the inhabitants of more than
twenty villages round Leipzig, and many hundred others at a greater
distance, which certainly fared no better, what soldiers they were who
carried off roofs, doors, windows, floors, and every kind of household
furniture and agricultural implements, and threw them like useless
lumber into the watch-fires?--Ask those unfortunates what soldiers they
were who pillaged barns and cellars, and ransacked every corner of the
houses; who tore the scanty clothes from the backs of the poorest class;
who broke open every box and chest, and who searched every dunghill,
that nothing might escape them?--They will tell you that it was the so
highly vaunted French guards, who always led the way, and were the
instructors of their comrades.

It is a great misfortune for a country when, in time of war, the supply
of the troops is left to themselves by the military authorities, and
when that supply is calculated only from one day to another; but this
calamity has no bounds when they are French troops who attack your
stores. It is not enough for them to satisfy the calls of appetite;
every article is an object of their rapacity: nothing whatever is left
to the plundered victim. What they cannot cram into their knapsacks and
cartouch-boxes is dashed in pieces and destroyed. Of the truth of this
statement the environs of Leipzig might furnish a thousand proofs. The
most fortunate of the inhabitants were those who in good time removed