You must know that the bread and forage waggons of a great French army are destined merely, as they pass through the villages, to receive the stores collected from all the barns, cellars, lofts, and stables, which are taken by force from the wretched husbandman, who is beaten, cut, and mangled, till he puts-to his last horse, and till he carries his last sheaf of corn and his last loaf of bread to the next bivouac; and then he may think himself fortunate, if he is suffered to return home without horses or waggon, and is not compelled to accompany the depredators many miles without sustenance of any kind.  In all other armies, whether Russians, Prussians, Austrians, or Swedes, when the troops are not drawn out in line of battle opposite to the enemy, in which case it is necessary to send back the carriages into the rear, care is always taken that waggons with bread and forage, and herds of cattle, shall follow the marching columns.  Whenever the army halts, magazines are immediately established; and, if even the stores necessary for it are required at the cost of the country, this case bears no comparison with that where every attendant on the waggon-train is at full liberty to pillage till his rapacity is satisfied.  Woe to the country where, as in our’s, hundreds of thousands of such commissaries are allowed to exercise their destructive office at discretion!  Ask the inhabitants of more than twenty villages round Leipzig, and many hundred others at a greater distance, which certainly fared no better, what soldiers they were who carried off roofs, doors, windows, floors, and every kind of household furniture and agricultural implements, and threw them like useless lumber into the watch-fires?—­Ask those unfortunates what soldiers they were who pillaged barns and cellars, and ransacked every corner of the houses; who tore the scanty clothes from the backs of the poorest class; who broke open every box and chest, and who searched every dunghill, that nothing might escape them?—­They will tell you that it was the so highly vaunted French guards, who always led the way, and were the instructors of their comrades.

It is a great misfortune for a country when, in time of war, the supply of the troops is left to themselves by the military authorities, and when that supply is calculated only from one day to another; but this calamity has no bounds when they are French troops who attack your stores.  It is not enough for them to satisfy the calls of appetite; every article is an object of their rapacity:  nothing whatever is left to the plundered victim.  What they cannot cram into their knapsacks and cartouch-boxes is dashed in pieces and destroyed.  Of the truth of this statement the environs of Leipzig might furnish a thousand proofs.  The most fortunate of the inhabitants were those who in good time removed their stores and cattle to a place of safety, and left their houses to their fate.  He who neglected this precaution, under the idea that the presence of the owner would