Nothing more stirred behind the barricade, and the French infantry soldiers with their officers passed in at the gate. In the gateway lay three men wounded and four dead. Two men in long peasant-coats had run away along the walls toward Znamenka.

“Clear this away,” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the corpses; and the French soldiers finished off the wounded, and flung the corpses over the fence below. Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear this away!” was all that was said of them, and they were flung away that they might not stink. Thiers has indeed devoted some eloquent lines to their memories. “These wretches had invaded the sacred citadel, had taken possession of the guns of the arsenal, and fired (the wretches) on the French. Some of them were sabred, and the Kremlin was purged of their presence.”

Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered the gates, and began pitching their camp on Senate-house Square. The soldiers flung the chairs out of the windows of the Senate- house into the square, and began making fires.

Other detachments marched across the Kremlin and encamped in Moroseyka, Lubyanka, and Pokrovka. Others pitched their camps in Vosdvizhenka, Znamenka, Nikolskaya, and Tverskaya. Not finding citizens to entertain them, the French everywhere bivouacked as in a camp pitched in a town, instead of quartering themselves on the houses.

Tattered, hungry, and exhausted, as they were, and dwindled to one-third their original numbers, the French soldiers yet entered Moscow in good discipline. It was a harassed and exhausted, yet still active and menacing army. But it was an army only up to the moment when the soldiers of the army dispersed all over the town. As soon as the soldiers began to disperse about the wealthy, deserted houses, the army was lost for ever, and in its place was a multitude of men, neither citizens nor soldiers, but something nondescript between, known as marauders. When five weeks later these same men set out from Moscow, they no longer made up an army. They were a mob of marauders, each of whom carried or dragged along with him a mass of objects he regarded as precious and useful. The aim of each of these men on leaving Moscow was not, as it had been, to fight as a soldier, but simply to keep the booty he had obtained. Like the ape, who slipping his hand into the narrow neck of a pitcher, and snatching up a handful of nuts inside it, will not open his fist for fear of losing his prize, even to his own ruin, the French on leaving Moscow were inevitably bound to come to ruin, because they dragged their plunder along with them, and it seemed as impossible to them to fling away their booty as it seems to the ape to let go of the nuts. Ten minutes after the several French regiments had dispersed about the various quarters of Moscow, not a soldier nor an officer was left among them. At the windows of the houses men could be seen in military coats and Hessian boots, laughing and strolling through the rooms. In the cellars, in the storerooms similar men were busily looking after the provisions; in the courtyards they were unlocking or breaking open the doors of sheds and stables; in the kitchens they were making up fires, and with bare arms mixing, kneading, and baking, and frightening, or trying to coax and amuse, women and children. Men there were in plenty everywhere, in all the shops and houses; but the army was no more.

That day one order after another was issued by the French commanders forbidding the troops to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding violence to the inhabitants, and pillaging, and proclaiming that a general roll-call was to take place that evening. But in spite of all such measures the men, who had made up an army, flowed about the wealthy, deserted city, so richly provided with luxuries and comforts. Like a starved herd, that keeps together crossing a barren plain, but at once on reaching rich pastures inevitably strays apart and scatters over them, the army was irresistibly lured into scattering over the wealthy town.

Moscow was without its inhabitants, and the soldiers were sucked up in her, like water into sand, as they flowed away irresistibly in all directions from the Kremlin, which they had entered first. Cavalry soldiers who had entered a merchant’s house abandoned with all its belongings, and finding stabling for their horses and to spare, yet went on to take the house next door, which seemed to them better. Many took several houses, chalking their names on them, and quarrelled and even fought with other companies for their possession. Soldiers had no sooner succeeded in securing quarters than they ran along the street