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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 soldiers who were the first to enter Smolensk found flour, brandy and wine, but these things were devoured in an instant. There were 10 thousand wounded in the so-called hospitals, and among these unfortunates typhus and hospital gangraene developed rapidly; the sick lying on the floor without even straw.
Without exaggeration it could be said of these unfortunates that they shed bloody tears. These severe forms of ophthalmy caused by extreme cold would have ended in gangraene of the affected parts if death had not relieved the misery of these unfortunates. But Bourgeois describes another very severe form of ophthalmy among the soldiers which caused total blindness.
On the abdomen, the neck, the chest and especially on the feet of the corpses of these men there were gangraenous spots of different sizes, a plain proof that the acute inflammation, gangraene and putrefaction had been caused by the excessive irritation of the extremely weak body. Circumstances forbade necropsy in these cases.
Anxious to warm themselves, most of the soldiers hastened to bring their limbs near the flame; but this sudden exposure to extreme heat, after having suffered from the other extreme cold was acting on the feeble circulation in the tissues and produced gangraene of the feet, the hands, even of the face, causing paralysis either partial, of the extremities, or general, of the whole body.
Unfortunately, he approached a fire to warm himself and felt a severe pain in the stump; extensive inflammation, with swelling, set in; gangraene followed and, notwithstanding most skillful attendance, he died soon after his arrival at Wilna. So far von Scherer.
The effect of intense cold on wounds was very severe: Violent inflammation, enormous swelling, gangraene the latter often due to the impossibility of proper care. Larger wounds sometimes could not be dressed on the retreat, and while the cold weather lasted gangraene and death followed in quick succession. The effect of cold was noticed also on wounds which had healed and cicatrized.
Many, not yet arrived at the limit of their sufferings, distributed themselves in the hospitals on this side of the Rhine, and even as far as the south of France, where they came to undergo various extirpations, incisions, and amputations, necessitated by the physical disorder so often inseparable from profound gangraene.
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