They answered the
roll of the drums calling them together, clad in dirty rags and with torn
shoes, in fast diminishing numbers. During the last weeks of their stay in
Moscow many had reached the last stage of misery, after having wandered
through the streets looking for a little bit of nourishment, dressed up as
for a carnival, but without desire to dance, as one remarked in grim humor.
These were the men whose destination had brought them many hundreds of
miles from home to the semi-Asiatic capital of the Ivans, who had been
drinking in the glory and the joy of warriors, and who now died from hunger
and cold, with their laurels still intact. Thanks to the authorized
military requisitions and the excesses of the stragglers of the Grand Army,
a desert had been made of the city before Napoleon had begun his retreat.
No more cattle, no provisions, and the inhabitants gone, camping with wife
and children in the deepest parts of the forests. Those who had remained or
returned to the villages, organized against marauders whom they received
with pitchforks or rifles, and these peasants gave no quarter.
"The enemy appeared nearly every day in our village (Bogorodsic)," says
Maria Stepanova, the wife of a pope, "and as soon as they were perceived
all men took up arms; our cossacks charged them with their long sabers or
shot them with their pistols, and behind the cossacks were running the
peasants, some with axes, some with pitchforks. After every excursion they
brought ten or more prisoners which they drowned in the Protka which runs
near the village, or they fusilladed them on the prairie.
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