[The following is in regards to Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Russia.]
With the thermometer dropping to -30°C on November 7, and blizzards seemingly continuous, the retreat slowed to a crawl. Some 5,000 horses died in a matter of days. Men’s breath turned to icicles when it left their mouths, their lips stuck together and their nostrils froze up. In an echo of the desert ophthalmia of the Egyptian campaign, men were afflicted with snow-blindness.
Comradeship collapsed; men were charged a gold louis to sit by a fire, and declined to share any food or water; they ate the horses’ forage, and drove wagons over men who had slipped in front of them.
General Comte Louis de Langeron, a French émigré who commanded one of the Russian divisions, saw ‘a dead man, his teeth deep in the haunch of a horse which was still quivering’.
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Retreat." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 623. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
ed. Brett-James, Eyewitness Accounts pp. 233-9.
Langeron, Mémoires de Langeron p. 93.
Further Reading:
Алекса́ндр Фёдорович Ланжеро́н (Count Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron)
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