Grangier thought (as he afterwards told me) that I was light-headed, and, taking me by the arm, he led me down the road, saying:
'We must get on, or we shall not catch up with the regiment.'
We came up with it, however, after passing the thousands of men from all kinds of regiments who walked confusedly, hardly able to drag themselves along. We foresaw, on looking at them, that the journey, if long, would be a fatal one to most of us.
The march was indeed a long one; we passed a place where the Emperor was supposed to sleep, although he had got far in advance of it. A great number of men stopped here, for it was very late, and we heard that two leagues separated us yet from our bivouac in a large forest.
The road here was very wide, and bordered on each side by birch-trees.[32] There was plenty of room for us and the carts and waggons; but when evening came on there was nothing to be seen all the length of the road but dead horses, and the further we advanced, the more the road became blocked with carts and dying horses: whole teams succumbed at once from fatigue. The men who could go no further stopped and made bivouacs underneath large trees; here they said they had wood at hand to make fires from the broken carts, and horseflesh to eat, and these they would not find further on.
For a long time I had walked alone in the midst of a miscellaneous rabble, forcing myself on to reach the camping-place arranged. The road became more difficult at every step, as it had begun to freeze again on the top of the half melted snow, and I fell continually. In the midst of these miseries the night suddenly fell.
The north wind had redoubled its fury. I had lost sight of my comrades; several men, lost like myself, strangers to me, who did not belong to my regiment, by superhuman efforts dragged themselves along to come up with their own regiments. They did not answer when I spoke to them; they were too weak even for that. Others fell down dying, never to rise again. Soon I was alone, with only dead bodies along the road to guide me. The trees had quite disappeared; it was perhaps seven o'clock. The snow, now falling heavily, prevented my seeing the direction in which I was going, and the violent wind had already filled up the traces of the advancing column.