On days when the sun shone and I could see the great gleaming wilderness stretching forbiddingly about us, I kept imagining our poor shattered army on that murderous retreat and pictured the wretched men, coatless, no boots on their feet, without bread, without brandy to warm them, their morale and their physical strength reduced to nothing, wounded for the most part, by day dragging themselves along, a ghost army, by night stretched out in the open, corpselike, on that appalling snow in a cold more terrible still than I shivered in; and I wondered how even one soldier among them could have come through and lived to escape from this white hell. It must take an awful lot to make a man die.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs