be explained? It has been shown how Napoleon exerted himself to meet the
extraordinary difficulty of supplying the grand army of half a million of
men and 100,000 horses with provisions, how well he was aware of the great
danger in this regard, how he superintended and hastened the work of
providing for men and horses by every possible means, that he understood
all the circumstances surrounding the march of the grand army through a
vast country populated by few, and these mostly serfs who had barely
sufficient food for themselves and no means to replenish their stock in
case it should have been exhausted by Napoleon's system of requisition, not
to speak of the marauding to which the French soldiers were soon forced to
resort. Ebstein says that the cause of the sad, the wretched condition
concerning supplies was due to the fact that incompetent officers had been
appointed as commissaries of the army; they held high military rank, were
independent and could not be easily reached for their faults. It happened
that soldiers were starving near well filled magazines, such magazines at
Kowno, Wilna, Minsk, Orcha being not only well, but over, filled, while the
passing troops were in dire need. We shall later on come to frightful
details of this kind.

The miserable maintenance had from the beginning a demoralizing effect on
the men, manifested by desertion, insubordination, marauding, vandalism.
General Sir Robert Wilson, British commissioner with the headquarters of
the Russian army, quoted by Ebstein, says: "The French army, from its very
entrance into the Russian territory (and this cannot be repeated too often
to lend the proper weight to the consequences resulting therefrom),
notwithstanding order on order and some exemplary punishments, had been
incorrigibly guilty of every excess. It had not only seized with violence
all that its wants demanded, but destroyed in mere wantonness what did not
tempt its cupidity. No vandal ferocity was ever more destructive. Those
crimes, however, were not committed with impunity. Want, sickness, and an