... At Smolensk Beaupre himself had a narrow escape from
freezing to death; he narrates: During the frightful night when we left
Smolensk I felt much harassed; toward 5 in the morning, a feeling of
lassitude impelled me to stop and rest. I sat down on the trunk of a birch,
beside eight frozen corpses, and soon experienced an inclination to sleep,
to which I yielded the more willingly as at that moment it seemed
delicious. Fortunately I was aroused from that incipient somnolency--which
infallibly would have brought on torpor--by the cries and oaths of two
soldiers who were violently striking a poor exhausted horse that had fallen
down.
I emerged from that state with a sort of shock.
The sight of what was beside me strongly recalled to my mind the danger to
which I exposed myself; I took a little brandy and started to run to remove
the numbness of my legs, the coldness and insensibility of which were as if
they had been immersed in an iced bath.
He then describes his experience in similar cases: It happened three or
four times that I assisted some of those unfortunates who had just fallen
and began to doze, to rise again and endeavored to keep them in motion
after having given them a little sweetened brandy.
It was in vain; they could neither advance nor support themselves, and they
fell again in the same place, where of necessity they had to be abandoned
to their unhappy lot. Their pulse was small and imperceptible. Respiration,
infrequent and scarcely sensible in some, was attended in others by
complaints and groans.
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