The battle occurred on August 17th and reduced Napoleon's forces by an additional 8000-9000 men. It was described by one Russian eye witness: "I had often seen soldiers fall, but never had I seen so many felled by a single salvo, weltering in their own blood and without arms or legs....I felt completely forsaken, and I was suddenly overcome with such fear that I would willingly have hidden in a mousehole." Nicolson, p, 54
"The town ditches, the banks of the river, the streets, were clogged with dead. 'I walked through the mass of corpses,' wrote a French officer, Duverger, 'the fire had carbonized them, and shrunk them to the size of children.'" Another person wrote "They lay there in piles, charred, almost without human forms, among the smoking ruins and flaming beams. The position of many of the corpses indicated the horrible torments that mush have preceded death. I trembled with horror at the spectacle, which will always haunt my memory." Nicolson p. 56-7
Smolensk was described by Larrey as: "'one vast hospital'. Although Larrey and his medical staff find 'some brandy, wines and a few medications and our reserve ambulances had at last caught up' nothing suffices. The surgeons are working day and night. 'Already during the second night we already lacked anything to bandage the wounded with.' Among the fifteen surviving brick buildings he's using are the Archives: 'In lieu of linen dressings, which had been used up after the first few days, we made use of paper found there. The parchment served for splints and bandages; tow and birch cotton (setula alba) served as lint; and the papers also did good service for bedding down the sick. But what difficulties had to be surmounted! What trouble we had to go to! Even so, despite the scanty means at our disposal, all indicated operations had been carried out within the first 24 hours. Myself I amputated eleven arms at the scapulo-humeral articulation.'" (Austin 1993) (See Bibliography)
Submitted for LIS 385T by Kathy Scott, October 1996
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