Mortier hastened his flight; but as he was retiring, some greedy Cossacks and miserable-looking Muscovites, allured probably by the prospect of pillage, approached: they listened, and, imboldened by the apparent quiet which pervaded the fortress, they ventured to penetrate into it: they ascended; and their greedy hands were already stretched forth to lay hold on their plunder, when in an instant they were all hurled into the air with the buildings they had come to pillage, and with thirty thousand stand of arms that had been left in them; and soon their mangled limbs, mingled with fragments of walls and shattered weapons, thrown to a great distance, descended in a horrible shower.
The earth shook under the feet of Mortier: at Fominskoé, thirty miles off, the emperor heard the explosion; and in that indignant tone in which he sometimes addressed Europe, he published the following day a bulletin, at Borowsk, announcing that "the Kremlin, the arsenal, the magazines, were all destroyed; that that ancient citadel, which dated from the origin of the monarchy, and was the first palace of the Czars, no longer existed; that Moscow was now but a heap of ruins, without importance either political or military. He had abandoned it to Russian beggars and plunderers, in order to march against Kutusoff, to throw himself on the left wing of that general, to drive him back, and then to proceed quietly to the banks of the Dwina, where he should take up his winter quarters." Then, apprehensive lest he should appear to be retreating, he added that "there he should be within eighty leagues of Wilna and of St. Petersburg, a double advantage; that is to say, twenty marches nearer to his resources and his object." By this remark he hoped to give to his retreat the air of an offensive movement.
It was on this occasion he declared that "he had refused to give orders for the entire destruction of the country which he was quitting: he felt a repugnance to aggravate the miseries of its inhabitants. To punish the Russian incendiary, and a few wretches who made war like Tartars, he would not ruin nine thousand proprietors, and leave two hundred thousand serfs, innocent of all these barbarities, absolutely destitute of resources."