he was resorting to a kind of outrageous propaganda : mere skirmishes between his men and murat 's advance guard were magnified into great victories-even if his forces came back with but a single prisoner and having lost several men themselves-and he exaggerated even the already-heartening reports of the french decline , filling his dispatches with such numbers as would have shortly ended with napoleon sitting in moscow alone but for a single mule and a barrel of beer .