The Great White Army Part 18

Behind me there shone the lights of the house I had quitted, bright stars beyond a frozen sea. I knew that the next hour would find me in the Russian general's tent, and that my shrift must be short. What mattered the regiment of hussars the Emperor was to send? My body would be frozen on the snows before they could ride out.

Upon this there fell an apathy difficult to understand.

We had suffered so much during those terrible days--hunger and thirst, and blood and wounds--that any man might have opened his arms to death as to a friend. And here was the end of it for me. What mattered it?

In a vision, I beheld the lights of my own France, the home which sheltered all dear to me, the land towards which my eyes had been lifted these many weeks. Never again might I look upon that smiling country. Night and the unknown were my portion. There would be few to remember my name to-morrow.

From such thoughts a reality most absurd awoke me.

I have set down this narrative of events as I lived and knew them, and have kept nothing from you, that you may judge of things, not as we look for them, but as an unromantic destiny determines that they shall be.

I say that I awoke with a start, believing myself to be upon a horse and at the very threshold of the Russian camp. Depict my astonishment when, opening my eyes, I beheld again madame's salle a manger, the tables spread with meat and drink, the forms of the intoxicated Russians on the floor all about me, and above them the red coats of our own Hussars of the Guard! For an instant I believed that the witch in ermine had cast a spell upon me, and that this was but a vision of her enchantment. Then the merry laughter of my own comrades disillusioned me and I staggered, dizzy and dumbfounded, to my feet.

"Name of a dog," I cried to them, "and what does this mean?"

They answered me with a merriment which became a shout.

"It means that the liquor was very good and that you got very drunk,"

says their captain, clapping me on the shoulder ... and at him I stared all bewildered.

"Drunk!" I cried. "You say that I was drunk!"

"Undoubtedly.... His Majesty told us to take care of you...."

"Then he is not here?" I exclaimed in wonder.

"He is already six leagues on the road to Wilna," was the answer. A child might have put me over at that. I clapped my hands to my fevered brow and began to believe them. Drunk I had been ... but by drink had I saved the Emperor's life.

And I had done him an injustice in my dream. He has not forgotten, as I knew full well.

IX

You will see how it all happened, and will need no further words from me.

Taking the Cossacks down to madame's salle a manger to keep them from the Emperor, I also had been overpowered by their cursed liquor, and had fallen under the table with the rest of them. There I dreamed of Russian camps, and France, and death, and all the nonsense of it, and there I awoke to find our own Red Hussars in possession of the dwelling. How they laughed at me! Yet what music their laughter proved to be!

As to old Madame Zchekofsky, I veritably believe that she played a double part that night with all a woman's cunning. Desiring the Emperor's friends.h.i.+p, she encouraged his belief in her daughter's power of prophecy, at the same time trying to keep in with the Russians by informing them of our presence in the house at a moment when she believed we would already have left it. Thus her anxiety and that disquiet I had observed with such misgiving.

I saw her in Paris in the memorable year 1815, and her daughter was with her. Naturally my nephew Leon desired to know so mysterious a personage, and I fancy she found his gifts of prophecy not less considerable than her own. This, however, was long after the terrible weeks when so many thousands of brave Frenchmen left their bones upon the snows of Russia because the Emperor had willed it.

CHAPTER VII

LITTLE PETROVKA

I

The Emperor was often in personal danger during the retreat from Moscow, but never more so, I think, than after the Battle of Krasnoe.

You must depict us at this time as a rabble rather than an army. There were few regiments save those of the Guard which maintained even a semblance of order. Men fell out at a whim. We had nothing upon either side of us but the frozen steppes and the woods in which the wolves howled. Our own people had burned the villages through which we straggled towards a distant horizon of our salvation. The road itself was black with the bodies of the dying and dead. I shall not dwell upon such pitiful scenes, but recall only those which seem to me of interest to my fellow countrymen.

Often have I been asked how the Emperor carried himself during these days, and that is a question which I have made some attempt already to answer.

Chiefly he walked with the grenadiers. There were occasions when he entered his famous travelling carriage, and pa.s.sed some hours in it; but no one was more ready than he to share the hards.h.i.+ps of the journey, and certainly none faced peril with a greater sang-froid. How it came about that His Majesty escaped disaster, I cannot tell you.

There were many occasions when a little courage upon the part of the Cossacks would have destroyed the hope of France for ever. So often were we who guarded him but a palsied band of nondescripts, that I wonder to this day at that hesitation which allowed the greatest of our soldiers to slip through Russian hands.

Let me give you an instance to show what I mean.

It was the morning of November 25th. We had pa.s.sed a forlorn village some miles beyond Krasnoe. The column was headed by a bevy of generals, few of whom were mounted. Behind them there marched a miserable company of officers, all dragging themselves along painfully, and not a few of them having their feet frozen, and wrapped in rugs or bits of sheepskin. The Emperor himself marched in the midst of the cavalry of the Guard. He went on foot, and carried a baton. His cloak was large and lined with fur, and upon his head he wore a dark red velvet cap with a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of black fox. Prince Murat walked on his right-hand side, and on his left Prince Eugene, while behind him came the Marshals Berthier, Ney, Mortier, and Lefebvre, with others whose regiments had been almost annihilated in the recent battles.

Behind these again were the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Guard. There were seven or eight hundred of them walking in perfect silence, and carrying the eagles of their different regiments.

The scene itself was an open plain glistening with frost, and often broken by those dismal clumps of pines with which we were so familiar.

A village lay ahead of us, a ravine and a river upon our right hand.

We knew that the Cossacks were sheltered by the distant woods, and that any moment might bring them down upon us. And yet we went as stolidly as men who are marching from a field of victory.

Is it to be wondered at that the Russians were perplexed by these tactics, and that even the boldest of them had no heart for a venture which would have destroyed the hope of France in a twinkling?

This is not to tell you that they did not attack us. Hardly had we come up to the outskirts of the village when we perceived a battery drawn up by the river and another before the very gates of the hamlet.

We had no guns with us at the moment, and we stood there like sheep while the Russians pounded us and their sh.e.l.ls decimated our tottering ranks. Lame and helpless and weary, weakened by hunger and the perils of the march, who would have said that so pitiful a force could have withstood the a.s.sault even of five thousand brave men? Yet, as I say, they were content to pound us with their artillery, and although we saw great ma.s.ses of their cavalry about the village, never once did they charge us as we expected them to do.

Presently our own guns came up, and we were able to meet the enemy on better terms. Marshal Ney now put himself at the head of the cha.s.seurs, and boldly charged the Cossacks to the left of the village.

His troops suffered severely in this onset, and when he returned to us the frozen plain was dotted with the writhing forms of our countrymen who had been shot down. These poor fellows had suffered so much during recent days that for the most part they died without a struggle. Such as survived were left to the mercy of the Russians, for we were in no position to help them, and we had to suffer the mortifying spectacle of seeing the wounded stripped bare and left upon the snows by the fiends who came out of the woods.

I thought surely that His Majesty was lost this day, and when I saw him standing in the very path of the sh.e.l.ls, surrounded by no more than forty Fusiliers of the Guard, it seemed indeed to me that the end had come. The Cossacks had but to charge and their booty would have been sure. That they did not do so must be set down to those motives of prudence which animated their General Kutusoff to the end. He knew that the Grand Army was peris.h.i.+ng before his eyes, and that the elements would do what the Russians themselves had left undone. When he retired that day we must have lost at least three thousand men, who were left in the hands of his butchers.

But the Emperor was saved by such cowardice, and he slept that night in the village which Kutusoff's guns had failed to hold.

II

The morning broke clear and sunny, but hardly were we upon the road when the north wind began to blow and our sufferings to recommence.

The Russians had drawn off for the time being, and we neither saw them nor heard their guns. The troops themselves, no longer fearing an attack, marched in that disorder of which I have spoken. Hardly a regiment could have been distinguished even by one familiar with our army. We were but scattered groups of malcontents, and every man thought only of his own safety.

I had not seen my nephew Leon during the battle, and was very glad to re-discover him not far from the bivouac. He was marching with other officers of the Velites when I came up, and I perceived at once that he had made a captive. The latter might, at the first glance, have been taken for a lad of seventeen, clad in stout riding-breeches, and wearing a tunic of rich fur.

The bright eyes of the prisoner and the cheerful manner evidently won upon my comrades, and I was not very much astonished to discover presently that the prisoner was of the other s.e.x, and to hear that she had been caught in the village that very morning, and herself had volunteered to show us the road to the Berezina.

Such things happened almost every day while we were in Russia, and for a native woman to adopt the garb of a soldier was by no means an uncommon thing. The only difference in this case was that the girl herself appeared to be well born, and beyond the station where such monkey tricks would be looked for. It occurred to me at once that she might have been sent out to betray us, and I spoke of it to Leon before he had gone a league.

"Where did you find her?" I asked him.

He parried the question, as a young man would when he has found a companion to his liking.

"She came out of the last house in the village just as we were marching past. I wish I could understand their cursed lingo, mon oncle. I think she comes from a place called Druobona, but am not very sure. In either case, it does not matter," he added carelessly, "for I do not suppose she will go back there when we have done with her."

This was said with a laugh which I did not like to hear, and I rebuked him sharply for his levity.