The passage of the fourth Army Corps was not made under such happy auspices, but the men were cheered by the news that on the 28th June Napoleon had entered Vilna. This enabled them to shake off to some extent the depressing effects of the wet weather, and the presence of Eugène, Viceroy of Italy, and the dauntless Junot, both of whom personally superintended the construction of the bridge, did much to inspire enthusiasm. There was no enemy to contest them, and the crossing was effected in good order.
“Scarcely had we reached the opposite shore,” says Captain Eugène Labaume, who was with the expedition, “when we seemed to breathe a new air. However, the roads were dreadfully bad, the forests gloomy, and the villages completely deserted; but imagination, inflamed by a spirit of conquest, was enchanted with everything, and cherished illusions which were but too soon destroyed.
“In fact, our short stay at Pilony, in the midst of a tempestuous rain, was marked by such extraordinary disasters, that any man, without being superstitious, would have regarded them as the presage of future misfortunes. In this wretched village, the Viceroy himself had no house to shelter him; and we were heaped upon one another under wretched sheds, or else exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather. An extreme scarcity made us anticipate the horrors of famine. The rain fell in torrents, and overwhelmed both men and horses; the former escaped, but the badness of the roads completed the destruction of the latter. They were seen dropping by hundreds in the environs of Pilony; the road was covered with dead horses, overturned waggons and scattered baggage. It was in the month of July that we suffered thus from cold, and rain, and hunger. So many calamities excited within us sad forebodings of the future, and everyone began to dread the event of an enterprise, the commencement of which was so disastrous; but the sun reappeared on the horizon, the clouds dispersed, our fears were scattered with them, and at that moment we thought that the fine season would last for ever.”
The captain’s narrative is replete with similar instances, showing the almost complete failure of the commissariat on which so much care and anxiety had been bestowed, the treacherous nature of the weather, and the impossibility in so barren a country of putting into effect Napoleon’s maxim that war should support itself. Indeed, the truth was shown of another of the Emperor’s principles, that “an army marches on its stomach.” In the paragraph immediately following the one quoted above, Labaume says that on entering Kroni the soldiers again found the houses deserted, “which convinced us that the enemy, in order to ruin the country through which we were to pass, and deprive us of all the means of subsistence, had carried along with them the inhabitants and the cattle.” In a march of fifty miles no fewer than 10,000 horses succumbed.