To complete the supply
of provisions before entering upon the campaign the troops exhausted the
land by making extensive requisitions. The emperor had wished that all
should go on regularly and that everything taken from the inhabitants
should be paid for, but this the soldiers did not consider. They took and
emptied the granaries, tore down the straw from the roofs of the peasants'
houses, barns, and stables to make litter for their horses, and treated the
inhabitants not as friends, but as if they were people of a conquered land.
The cavalry which passed first helped themselves for their horses to all
the hay and all the grass, the artillery and the train were obliged to take
from the fields the green barley and oats, and the army altogether ruined
the population where it passed. The men obliged to disperse during a part
of the day as foragers, got into the habit of disbanding and of looseness
of discipline, and the impossibility manifested itself to keep in order and
in ranks the multitude of different races, different in languages, who with
their many vehicles represented a regular migration.
Everything became monotonous--the country, the absence of an enemy. They
found Prussia and especially Poland, ugly, dirty, miserable, all the houses
were full of dirt and vermin, domestic animals of all kinds were the
intimate syntrophoi of the peasants in their living rooms. The soldiers
bore badly the inconvenience of the lodging, the coolness of the night
following the burning heat of the day, the fogs in the mornings.
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