Dying of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and want of sleep, these
unfortunates reached a shore where they saw before them wood,
provisions, innumerable camp equipages, and carriages,--in short a
whole town at their service. The village of Studzianka had been wholly
taken to pieces and conveyed from the heights on which it stood to the
plain. However forlorn and dangerous that refuge might be, its
miseries and its perils only courted men who had lately seen nothing
before them but the awful deserts of Russia. It was, in fact, a vast
asylum which had an existence of twenty-four hours only.
Utter lassitude, and the sense of unexpected comfort, made that mass
of men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the
artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on
this mass,--visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst
of the trackless snow,--this shot and shell seemed to the torpid
creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm,
despised by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck
only here and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes!
Stragglers arrived in groups continually; but once here those
perambulating corpses separated; each begged for himself a place near
a fire; repulsed repeatedly, they met again, to obtain by force the
hospitality already refused to them.
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