provisions and wood to last six months of severe cold weather. To
prevent these gigantic supplies from encumbering the heart of the
city, and yet render them as convenient as practicable to every
locality, a row of wood houses was constructed to circle
completely round the city, and outside of these was a row of
granaries, and in these were deposited the whole of the supplies.
Napoleon had entered the city with his army, and was himself
occupying the palace of the Kremlin, when, one night, by order of
the Russian governor, every wood house and every granary
simultaneously burst into a blaze. All efforts to extinguish them
were vain, and Napoleon found himself compelled to march his army
through the fire. Retiring to an eminence he saw the whole city
enveloped in vast sheets of flame, and clouds of smoke, and
apparently all on fire. And far as he was concerned it might as
well have been, for though houses enough were left to supply
every soldier with a room, yet without provisions or fuel, and a
Russian army to cut off supplies, he and his army could not
subsist there. During the fire some houses were probably burnt,
but the city was not. In the Kremlin a magazine blew up, cracking
the church of Ivan more than a hundred feet up, but setting
nothing on fire.

"Mr. Douglas saw the fire-marks around the city, where wood
houses and granaries for winter supplies now stand as of old; but
there appears no marks of conflagration within the city."

Any wary sceptic, indeed, might have found much ground for doubt in
the very accounts themselves that were given of the conflagration.
For, the Russians have always denied that _they_ burned it; and the
French equally disclaimed the act. Each of the two parties between