Next day the Emperor wrote to Maret confessing the truth. "The army is numerous, but shockingly disorganized," he declared. "A fortnight would be necessary to bring it once more under the standards; and how can we find a fortnight? Cold and privation have disorganized it. We may reach Vilna--can we maintain ourselves there? If we only could, even for the first eight days! But suppose we were attacked within that time, it is doubtful if we should be able to remain. Food! food! food!--without that there are no atrocities which this unruly throng would not commit against the town. In this situation I may regard my presence in Paris as essential for France, for the Empire--yes, even for the army." He also composed on the same day a bulletin, since famous, which was dated December third. It speciously declared that until November sixth the Emperor had been everywhere successful; thereafter the elements had done their fell work. The only complete truth it contained was the closing sentence: "The health of his Majesty was never better." As the sorry remnants of the grand army moved toward Vilna, they grew scantier and scantier. Many were delirious from hunger and cold, many were in the agonies of typhus fever. On December third there were still nine thousand in the ranks; on the fifth the marshals were assembled to hear Napoleon explain his determination to leave at once for Paris, and immediately afterward he took his departure.
It was not a very "grand army" which was left behind under Murat's command, with orders to form behind the Niemen. On the eighth the thermometer marked twenty-five degrees below zero, and a few unarmed wretches, perhaps five hundred in all, trailed after their leader into Vilna. Their ears and throats, their legs and feet, were swathed in rags; their bodies were wrapped in the threadbare garments of their dead comrades, or in such cast-off woman's apparel as they had been able to secure by the way. They were followed by Ney with four hundred, Wrede with two thousand, and finally by two or three thousand stragglers. After a few half-hearted and ineffectual efforts to organize this mob into the semblance of an army, Murat abandoned the attempt and posted away to his kingdom of Naples--a course severely censured by the Emperor. This was the closing scene of Napoleon's great drama of invasion. His men and horses had succumbed to summer heats as rapidly and extensively as to winter frosts; he had brought ruin to his enterprise by miscalculating the proportions of inanimate nature and human strategy, and by fatal indecision at critical moments when the statesman's delay was the soldier's ruin. Russia, like Spain, had the strength of low organisms; her vigor was not centralized in one member, the destruction of which would be the destruction of the whole; Moscow was not the Russian empire, as Berlin was the Prussian kingdom.