body.

Only those were saved who had been able to keep up their circulation by
means of hot drinks or other stimulants and who, noticing numbness, had
rubbed the affected parts with snow. Those who did not or could not resort
to these precautions found themselves paralyzed, or stricken with sudden
gangraene, in the morning when the camp broke up.

The hospitals of Koenigsberg admitted about 10 thousand soldiers of
Napoleon's army, only a small number of whom had been wounded, most of
them with frozen extremities, who had, as the physicians of that time
called it, a pest, the fever of congelation which was terribly contagious.

The heroic Larrey although exhausted from fatigue had come to these
hospitals to take care of the sick, but he became infected with the
contagion himself and was taken sick.

A great calamity was the want of shoes; we have seen that this was already
felt in Moscow, before they set out on the endless march over ice and snow.

The soldiers had their feet wrapped in rags, pieces of felt or leather, and
when a man had fallen on the road some of his comrades would cut off his
feet and carry them to the next camp fire to remover the rags--for their
own use.

But the general appearance of the emaciated soldiers with long beards, and
faces blackened by the smoke of camp-fires, the body wrapped in dirty rags
of wearing apparel brought from Moscow, was such that it was difficult to
recognize them as soldiers.