One letter reads that the French killed emaciated horses and cooked a kind of soup from their bones. Another man wrote to his family that his friends had made a stew from the meat of some cats that they had caught. The main complaint in the letters was against the terrible Russian frost and abundance of snow. Here is a line on the subject: “The temperature has kept -5 degrees for a week. We have no warm clothes and we have to sleep in the open or, with luck, in carts”.