There were no magazines from which rations could have been distributed, and
the poor Polish peasants, upon whom requisitions should have been made, had
nothing for the soldiers. Disorder among the troops who thus far
distinguished themselves by strictest discipline, made its appearance. How
the army was harassed by the plague of dysentery, how the soldiers were
marching during great heat, insufficiently supplied in every way, and how
they suffered from manifold hardships, has been described in von Scherer's
dissertation. The Westphalian corps was in as precarious a condition as the
Wuerttembergian, as in fact the whole army and the Westphalian battalions
were already reduced to one-half their former number. Many soldiers had
remained behind on account of sickness or exhaustion, and officers were
sent back to bring them to the ranks again.
The whole army would have dissolved if the march had not been interrupted.
Napoleon ordered a stay. An order from him called for a rally of the
troops, for the completion of war material, ammunition, and horses and
provisions; but where to take all these things from? The war had not yet
begun, and the troops were already in danger of starvation. Only with
sadness and fear could the soldiers, under these circumstances, look into
the future.
In what way, says Ebstein, can this great want, this insufficient supply of
provisions, which made itself felt even at the beginning of the campaign,
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.
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