The behaviour of Bourgogne, a sergeant in the Imperial Guard, may serve to show by what shifts a hardy masterful nature fought its way through the wreckage of humanity around: "If I could meet anybody in the world with a loaf, I would make him give me half--nay, I would kill him so as to get the whole." These were his feelings: he acted on them by foraging in the forest and seizing a pot in which an orderly was secretly cooking potatoes for his general.
Bourgogne made off with the potatoes, devoured most of them half-boiled, returned to his comrades and told them he had found nothing.

Taking his place near their fire, he scooped out his bed in the snow, lay under his bearskin, and clasped his now precious knapsack, while the others moaned with hunger.

Yet, as his narrative shows, he was not naturally a heartless man: in such a situation man is apt to sink to the level of the wolf.

The best food obtainable was horseflesh, and hungry throngs rushed at every horse that fell, disputing its carcass with the packs of dogs or wolves that hung about the line of march.[274] Smolensk was now the thought dearest to every heart; and, buoyed with the hope of rest and food, the army tottered westwards as it had panted eastwards through the fierce summer heats with Moscow as its cynosure.

The hope that clung about Smolensk was but a cruel mirage.
The wreck of that city offered poor shelter; the stores were exhausted by the vanguard; and, to the horror of Eugene's Italians, men swarmed out of that fancied abode of plenty and pounced on every horse that stumbled to its doom on the slippery banks of the Dnieper.