The Great White Army Part 9

Night had fallen for the second time now, and we had entered a land of great s.p.a.ces. But more than that, we were traversing an enemy's country, and anon we espied a large body of Cossacks--three thousand as we judged--who plainly had observed us and immediately sat down to the pursuit. This was a turn that we might have looked for, but, in our imprudence, had risked. It was now each for himself and the devil take the laggards. We should be sabred to a man if these a.s.sa.s.sins rode us down, and, with a cry of "En avant!" we set spurs to our jaded horses and rode wildly across the plain. G.o.d alone could tell whether we should find the army or lose it.

It was a race for life with night and the mystery of night all about us.

How to tell you, of that memorable gallop I hardly know. No race at Chantilly ever found horses so tired or riders at such a tension. On we thundered, and on and on. Now we would cry that we were saved; again that all was lost. The dust enveloped us in clouds; the moon magnified the great plain we must cross to the woods beyond. Let us gain them and we might find the army after all. I had said as much when a figure pressed out of the hurly-burly and I knew it for that of a Cossack. He slashed at me with a great scimitar, and slashed again.

Then I heard a pistol shot, and seeing the fellow reeling in his saddle, I cut him through the skull to the very marrow. He was but the first of twenty, and so we went riding and slas.h.i.+ng and halloaing for a league or more until we had bested their leaders and were alone on the great plain once more. Alas! how brief a respite! We had thousands still to deal with, and they rode after us like devils. No sailors lost upon a black and stormy sea went more blindly than we upon that fateful night. The army had vanished; we believed no longer that we should find it.

Meanwhile, there were always the green devils behind us. I should give no true picture of this affair if I denied that there was another side to it. Some of our men fell and were hacked to pieces where they lay.

Others were overtaken and cut down by the ruthless swords of the Cossacks. We could not lift a finger to save them--ten would have perished for one who fell had we done so. Our one hope lay in the swiftness of our horses. "En avant!" we cried, and again "En avant!"

We must find the army or perish. Ah, what a vain hope and how Fate played with us! For my part I believed that all was over when I first saw the fire in the wood and heard my comrades cry out. The Russians were then but a hundred paces from us--the light that we saw might be anything. G.o.d knows, we raced for it--and to discover what? A priest and a woman--Zayde and the shorn monk, who I never doubted was a Cossack all the time.

There they were--hobn.o.bbing by a fire of logs and greatly startled when they heard the sound of hoofs. Immediately they ran off into the thicket, but not before we had recognised them--my nephew and I. They were hardly gone when a louder cry arose from every Frenchman in the wood; for now, as the very light of heaven itself, the glow of a dozen bivouac fires burst upon our aching eyes, and with one voice we cried: "Vive l'Empereur!" and swore that the army should avenge us.

VII

War teaches us many lessons, but none more useful than that of its accidents. You will have said already that we had found the army and that nothing remained but to ride up to the outposts and raise an alarm.

Let me answer that nothing was farther from the truth. We had neither found the army nor were any of our comrades there to avenge us. When I told this story in the year 1813 in Paris I well remember the laughter it excited. A squadron of hussars saved by a flight of monks! Thus the newspapers referred to it, and such was the naked truth. The monks saved us--the monks from the monastery we had sacked.

Never have I forgotten that moment when this ridiculous turn first became apparent to us. The Cossacks, I say, were at our heels, hope gone from us, all thought of the army abandoned, when we saw the bivouac fires and rode madly up to them. "Vive l'Empereur!" was our cry. Then we learned the truth.

There were a hundred or more monks in the woods: they had kindled the fires which cheered us. The Cossacks, perceiving the fires, and being deceived as we were, waited for no verification of a fact which seemed self-evident. The French army lay encamped in that place--who else would be there in these days of war and of a mighty host upon the march? Do you wonder that the mad devils stopped as though they heard already the roar of our guns, that they wheeled about and were gone as foxes whom the moon has discovered? They would have been madmen to have done anything else. The race had been run and we were the victors. So at least they thought, and so did Fortune smile upon us in that fateful hour.

Be sure we did not linger upon an accident so remarkable. The monks appeared to have no fear of us when we rode by, and the most part of them lay sleeping. We forbore to intrude upon their dreams; and going on at our leisure, we came up with the army at dawn and there recited the details of this amazing adventure.

It remains but to say a word of the bell and the treasure.

I have often discussed it with Leon, and we have come to the conclusion that there must have been monks left in the monastery after the main body had fled, and that they sounded the alarm upon the approach of the hussars. Their situation when we sacked that dismal building must have been parlous indeed, and G.o.d alone knew where they hid from us.

As for the treasure, I have since learned that it belonged to a certain Prince Karasin, a Tartar from beyond the Urals. He had been murdered by his servants just as I had supposed, and the woman upon whom he had lavished the treasure must have been a witness of the wickedness. Her subsequent fate I am unable to tell you, but my nephew Leon, with his accustomed gallantry, still swears that she was innocent, and, Valerie St. Antoine excepted, by far the most beautiful thing he ever discovered in that G.o.d-forsaken country.

CHAPTER IV

PHANTOM MUSIC

I

I never thought to see Valerie St. Antoine again after we had left Moscow; but here I was quite wrong, as you shall learn presently, and my next encounter with her was as strange an affair as any I remember during the war.

You will remember that we had marched out of Moscow on the 19th day of October, in the year 1812; but it was the 29th of that month when the snow began to fall.

Hitherto our journey had not been unpleasant and had filled us with few apprehensions. It is true that the Russians were active, and there were not many villages to pillage, so that some murmurings were heard at an early date, and men complained bitterly of the lack of bread.

But we were given to understand that all this would be set straight presently, and that we should find untouched supplies at Smolensk, the first big town between Moscow and the frontier. Meanwhile, many carried a little store of provisions in their knapsacks, and the officers were generally well looked after despite the difficulties. We found marching easy in the early days, and even when the rain fell, and the roads became heavy, the wagons were not seriously hampered. All went light-heartedly, thinking of our beloved France and of the triumph we were to celebrate there.

Then came the snow. It began to fall on the evening of the 29th, as I have said, and, save that there was cold rain during the following week, we never saw the green ground again until we came to the valley of the Rhine. Ah, the first of these terrible days--how well I remember it!

Leon and I rode side by side, a great press of hors.e.m.e.n before us; behind us, in a seemingly unbroken line, the carts and wagons of the transport. Upon either side were the hussars and the lancers, the _cha.s.seurs a cheval_, the Guards from Portugal, the Italians, with Prince Eugene. The Emperor himself was then half a day's march ahead of us, but we expected to come up with him at Slawkowo, and there to enjoy our well-earned rest. We had frost, as you shall hear, but there is no pen that can tell you of what we suffered by the way.

There had been black clouds rolling down from the northward all day, but the snow itself did not burst upon us until the hour of sunset. It came heralded by a distant sound as of thunder upon a far horizon; but this was no thunder that we heard--only a north wind roaring across that interminable plain.

Anon it came upon us with the fury of a southern tempest. Flakes of snow almost as big as a man's hand tumbled out of that leaden sky, were caught by the howling wind, and scattered in a fine powder which cut like steel. Soon everything was obliterated: the summer had finished before our eyes. Where there had been green gra.s.s and verdant woods, and even wild flowers by the roadside, there was now nothing but a monstrous sea, with here and there the white woods standing up as so many mighty s.h.i.+ps upon a frozen ocean.

The army, marching hitherto in such good spirits, became but specks in this white wilderness. Never had Frenchmen known such cold, and great was the terror with which it inspired them. We saw cloaks flying and heads bent before the blast; we heard the curses of the transport men, the shrill complaints of cantinieres; but above all the ceaseless howling of the blast, as though the G.o.d of Russia cried a vengeance upon us, and this was the hour of it.

All this was bad enough, but more was to follow when the Cossacks came like so many devils from the darkness.

They wheeled about us, piping a shrill defiance and waving their lances ominously. In our turn we were too sore stricken to attack them, and we rode like cravens, who submitted to fate without lifting a finger.

Not until Marshal Ney himself came up with cannon did we drive the scarecrows off, and even then it was but a brief respite, for they were as swift as eagles and as elusive. Many a good fellow had a Russian lance in him that night, and the snow-field for his bed. It was a new page in the story of a triumph we had hoped to celebrate in Paris.

For myself I felt the cold bitterly, and I do not doubt that Leon suffered no less. We had heavy cloaks and we rode good horses; but the frost was beyond anything I have known or could imagine, and presently the trail of the army could be followed by the dead and dying it shed upon the march.

Dreadful was it to see those poor fellows, and to know that we could not help them. There they lay, some already white and still in the death sleep; others moaning for pain of the cold; others, again, imploring their fellows to shoot them for G.o.d's sake. All, however, pa.s.sed on without pity. The wind devoured us; the snow had become a very avalanche.

Now this lasted for an hour, almost until the darkness had set in; but when it ceased we perceived, to our astonishment, a considerable town upon the horizon, and this put new life into us. Spurring our jaded horses, Leon and I galloped on, telling each other that we should certainly find bread and shelter in such a place, and that the rigour of the night could safely be defied there. We had gone, I suppose, about a third of a mile in this way when we came without warning upon a wrecked carriage, and immediately drew rein at the unexpected discovery we made therein.

II

I have told you that Leon will rarely pa.s.s a pretty woman, whatever be her nationality, and when he drew rein at the sight of the wrecked carriage it was a woman's face which arrested him.

"One moment, my uncle," says he; "you really are in a devil of a hurry."

I drew rein with him and walked my horse up to the carriage. It was plainly the equipage of a person of rank--a s.p.a.cious berline, drawn by four horses, and a brilliant yellow in colour. Of more import was the fact that the coachman sat dead and frozen upon the box, and that the horses had drawn the vehicle over the bank of the road, and there left it poised as a stick upon a conjurer's finger. A minute later and it turned over gently in the snow, and the horses, maddened by the mishap, plunged frantically and went galloping across the plain. At the same moment we heard cries from within the berline, and, dismounting and leaping upon it, we took three women from the coach, of whom but one was alive. She was Valerie St. Antoine, and she recognised us immediately.

"Help, sir, for G.o.d's sake!" says she, as Leon caught her in his arms and instantly wrapped his own cloak about her. We did not tell her that the others were beyond help, yet such was the case.

Of the two, one was an elderly and distinguished-looking woman with white hair, and the second as pretty a child of fifteen years of age as I had seen since I left Prussia. Both had perished of want and cold.

They were locked in each other's arms, and quite dead when we took them from the carriage.

"Who are these poor people?" I asked Valerie.

She buried her face in her hands.

"The Baroness de Nivois and her granddaughter. They have been five years in Moscow. They were my friends--G.o.d help me!"

"But, mademoiselle," said I, "what sent you upon such an errand as this?"

She looked at me, I think, with some amazement at my want of understanding.

"What Frenchwoman remains in Moscow now?" she asked coldly. And then as quickly she turned to Leon and inquired of him where the Emperor would be.

"I must see him immediately," says she; "it was for that I followed the army. Captain Courcelles, will you not help me?"

He replied that nothing would give him greater pleasure.