[*] This story can be found in The Country Parson. — eBook
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“So the box is pretty full, is it, messmate?” he said to a man whom he found outside.
“You will be a knowing fellow if you manage to get inside,” the officer returned, without turning round or stopping his occupation of hacking at the woodwork of the house with his sabre.
“Philip, is that you?” cried the aide-de-camp, recognizing the voice of one of his friends.
“Yes. Aha! is it you, old fellow?” returned M. de Sucy, looking round at the aide-de-camp, who like himself was not more than twenty-three years old. “I fancied you were on the other side of this confounded river. Do you come to bring us sweetmeats for dessert? You will get a warm welcome,” he added, as he tore away a strip of bark from the wood and gave it to his horse by way of fodder.
“I am looking for your commandant. General Eble has sent me to tell him to file off to Zembin. You have only just time to cut your way through that mass of dead men; as soon as you get through, I am going to set fire to the place to make them move — ”
“You almost make me feel warm! Your news has put me in a fever; I have two friends to bring through. Ah! but for those marmots, I should have been dead before now, old fellow. On their account I am taking care of my horse instead of eating him. But have you a crust about you, for pity’s sake? It is thirty hours since I have stowed any victuals. I have been fighting like a madman to keep up a little warmth in my body and what courage I have left.”
“Poor Philip! I have nothing — not a scrap! — But is your General in there?”
“Don’t attempt to go in. The barn is full of our wounded. Go up a bit higher, and you will see a sort of pig-sty to the right — that is where the General is. Good-bye, my dear fellow. If ever we meet again in a quadrille in a ballroom in Paris — ”
He did not finish the sentence, for the treachery of the northeast wind that whistled about them froze Major Philip’s lips, and the aide-de-camp kept moving for fear of being frost-bitten. Silence soon prevailed, scarcely broken by the groans of the wounded in the barn, or the stifled sounds made by M. de Sucy’s horse crunching on the frozen bark with famished eagerness. Philip thrust his sabre into the sheath, caught at the bridle of the precious animal that he had managed to keep for so long, and drew her away from the miserable fodder that she was bolting with apparent relish.
“Come along, Bichette! come along! It lies with you now, my beauty, to save Stephanie’s life. There, wait a little longer, and they will let us lie down and die, no doubt;” and Philip, wrapped in a pelisse, to which doubtless he owed his life and energies, began to run, stamping his feet on the frozen snow to keep them warm. He was scarce five hundred paces away before he saw a great fire blazing on the spot where he had left his carriage that morning with an old soldier to guard it. A dreadful misgiving seized upon him. Many a man under the influence of a powerful feeling during the Retreat summoned up energy for his friend’s sake when he would not have exerted himself to save his own life; so it was with Philip. He soon neared a hollow, where he had left a carriage sheltered from the cannonade, a carriage that held a young woman, his playmate in childhood, dearer to him than any one else on earth.
Some thirty stragglers were sitting round a tremendous blaze, which they kept up with logs of wood, planks wrenched from the floors of the caissons, and wheels, and panels from carriage bodies. These had been, doubtless, among the last to join the sea of fires, huts, and human faces that filled the great furrow in the land between Studzianka and the fatal river, a restless living sea of almost imperceptibly moving figures, that sent up a smothered hum of sound blended with frightful shrieks. It seemed that hunger and despair had driven these forlorn creatures to take forcible possession of the carriage, for the old General and his young wife, whom they had found warmly wrapped in pelisses and traveling cloaks, were now crouching on the earth beside the fire, and one of the carriage doors was broken.
As soon as the group of stragglers round the fire heard the footfall of the Major’s horse, a frenzied yell of hunger went up from them. “A horse!” they cried. “A horse!”
All the voices went up as one voice.
“Back! back! Look out!” shouted two or three of them, leveling their muskets at the animal.
“I will pitch you neck and crop into your fire, you blackguards!” cried Philip, springing in front of the mare. “There are dead horses lying up yonder; go and look for them!”
“What a rum customer the officer is! — Once, twice, will you get out of the way?” returned a giant grenadier. “You won’t? All right then, just as you please.”
A woman’s shriek rang out above the report. Luckily, none of the bullets hit Philip; but poor Bichette lay in the agony of death. Three of the men came up and put an end to her with thrusts of the bayonet.
“Cannibals! leave me the rug and my pistols,” cried Philip in desperation.
“Oh! the pistols if you like; but as for the rug, there is a fellow yonder who has had nothing to wet his whistle these two days, and is shivering in his coat of cobwebs, and that’s our General.”
Philips looked up and saw a man with worn-out shoes and a dozen rents in his trousers; the only covering for his head was a ragged foraging cap, white with rime. He said no more after that, but snatched up his pistols.
Five of the men dragged the mare to the fire, and began to cut up the carcass as dexterously as any journeymen butchers in Paris. The scraps of meat were distributed and flung upon the coals, and the whole process was magically swift. Philip went over to the woman who had given the cry of terror when she recognized his danger, and sat down by her side. She sat motionless upon a cushion taken from the carriage, warming herself at the blaze; she said no word, and gazed at him without a smile. He saw beside her the soldier whom he had left mounting guard over the carriage; the poor fellow had been wounded; he had been overpowered by numbers, and forced to surrender to the stragglers who had set upon him, and, like a dog who defends his master’s dinner till the last moment, he had taken his share of the spoil, and had made a sort of cloak for himself out of a sheet. At that particular moment he was busy toasting a piece of horseflesh, and in his face the major saw a gleeful anticipation of the coming feast.
The Comte de Vandieres, who seemed to have grown quite childish in the last few days, sat on a cushion close to his wife, and stared into the fire. He was only just beginning to shake off his torpor under the influence of the warmth. He had been no more affected by Philip’s arrival and danger than by the fight and subsequent pillaging of his traveling carriage.
At first Sucy caught the young Countess’ hand in his, trying to express his affection for her, and the pain that it gave him to see her reduced like this to the last extremity of misery; but he said nothing as he sat by her side on the thawing heap of snow, he gave himself up to the pleasure of the sensation of warmth, forgetful of danger, forgetful of all things else in the world. In spite of himself his face expanded with an almost fatuous expression of satisfaction, and he waited impatiently till the scrap of horseflesh that had fallen to his soldier’s share should be cooked. The smell of charred flesh stimulated his hunger. Hunger clamored within and silenced his heart, his courage, and his love. He coolly looked round on the results of the spoliation of his carriage. Not a man seated round the fire but had shared the booty, the rugs, cushions, pelisses, dresses, — articles of clothing that belonged to the Count and Countess or to himself. Philip turned to see if anything worth taking was left in the berline. He saw by the light of the flames, gold, and diamonds, and silver lying scattered about; no one had cared to appropriate the least particle. There was something hideous in the silence among those human creatures round the fire; none of them spoke, none of them stirred, save to do such things as each considered necessary for his own comfort.
It was a grotesque misery. The men’s faces were wrapped and disfigured with the cold, and plastered over with a layer of mud; you coul
d see the thickness of the mask by the channel traced down their cheeks by the tears that ran from their eyes, and their long slovenly-kept beards added to the hideousness of their appearance. Some were wrapped round in women’s shawls, others in horse-cloths, dirty blankets, rags stiffened with melting hoar-frost; here and there a man wore a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, in fact, there was not one of them but wore some ludicrously odd costume. But the men themselves with such matter for jest about them were gloomy and taciturn.
The silence was unbroken save by the crackling of the wood, the roaring of the flames, the far-off hum of the camp, and the sound of sabres hacking at the carcass of the mare. Some of the hungriest of the men were still cutting tidbits for themselves. A few miserable creatures, more weary than the others, slept outright; and if they happened to roll into the fire, no one pulled them back. With cut-and-dried logic their fellows argued that if they were not dead, a scorching ought to be sufficient warning to quit and seek out more comfortable quarters. If the poor wretch woke to find himself on fire, he was burned to death, and nobody pitied him. Here and there the men exchanged glances, as if to excuse their indifference by the carelessness of the rest; the thing happened twice under the Countess’ eyes, and she uttered no sound. When all the scraps of horseflesh had been broiled upon the coals, they were devoured with a ravenous greediness that would have been disgusting in wild beasts.
“And now we have seen thirty infantrymen on one horse for the first time in our lives!” cried the grenadier who had shot the mare, the one solitary joke that sustained the Frenchmen’s reputation for wit.
Before long the poor fellows huddled themselves up in their clothes, and lay down on planks of timber, on anything but the bare snow, and slept — heedless of the morrow. Major de Sucy having warmed himself and satisfied his hunger, fought in vain against the drowsiness that weighed upon his eyes. During this brief struggle he gazed at the sleeping girl who had turned her face to the fire, so that he could see her closed eyelids and part of her forehead. She was wrapped round in a furred pelisse and a coarse horseman’s cloak, her head lay on a blood-stained cushion; a tall astrakhan cap tied over her head by a handkerchief knotted under the chin protected her face as much as possible from the cold, and she had tucked up her feet in the cloak. As she lay curled up in this fashion, she bore no likeness to any creature.
Was this the lowest of camp-followers? Was this the charming woman, the pride of her lover’s heart, the queen of many a Parisian ballroom? Alas! even for the eyes of this most devoted friend, there was no discernible trace of womanhood in that bundle of rags and linen, and the cold was mightier than the love in a woman’s heart.
Then for the major the husband and wife came to be like two distant dots seen through the thick veil that the most irresistible kind of slumber spread over his eyes. It all seemed to be part of a dream — the leaping flames, the recumbent figures, the awful cold that lay in wait for them three paces away from the warmth of the fire that glowed for a little while. One thought that could not be stifled haunted Philip — ”If I go to sleep, we shall all die; I will not sleep,” he said to himself.
He slept. After an hour’s slumber M. de Sucy was awakened by a hideous uproar and the sound of an explosion. The remembrance of his duty, of the danger of his beloved, rushed upon his mind with a sudden shock. He uttered a cry like the growl of a wild beast. He and his servant stood upright above the rest. They saw a sea of fire in the darkness, and against it moving masses of human figures. Flames were devouring the huts and tents. Despairing shrieks and yelling cries reached their ears; they saw thousands upon thousands of wild and desperate faces; and through this inferno a column of soldiers was cutting its way to the bridge, between the two hedges of dead bodies.
“Our rearguard is in full retreat,” cried the major. “There is no hope left!”
“I have spared your traveling carriage, Philip,” said a friendly voice.
Sucy turned and saw the young aide-de-camp by the light of the flames.
“Oh, it is all over with us,” he answered. “They have eaten my horse. And how am I to make this sleepy general and his wife stir a step?”
“Take a brand, Philip, and threaten them.”
“Threaten the Countess?...”
“Good-bye,” cried the aide-de-camp; “I have only just time to get across that unlucky river, and go I must, there is my mother in France!... What a night! This herd of wretches would rather lie here in the snow, and most of them would sooner be burned alive than get up.... It is four o’clock, Philip! In two hours the Russians will begin to move, and you will see the Beresina covered with corpses a second time, I can tell you. You haven’t a horse, and you cannot carry the Countess, so come along with me,” he went on, taking his friend by the arm.
“My dear fellow, how am I to leave Stephanie?”
Major de Sucy grasped the Countess, set her on her feet, and shook her roughly; he was in despair. He compelled her to wake, and she stared at him with dull fixed eyes.
“Stephanie, we must go, or we shall die here!”
For all answer, the Countess tried to sink down again and sleep on the earth. The aide-de-camp snatched a brand from the fire and shook it in her face.
“We must save her in spite of herself,” cried Philip, and he carried her in his arms to the carriage. He came back to entreat his friend to help him, and the two young men took the old general and put him beside his wife, without knowing whether he were alive or dead. The major rolled the men over as they crouched on the earth, took away the plundered clothing, and heaped it upon the husband and wife, then he flung some of the broiled fragments of horseflesh into a corner of the carriage.
“Now, what do you mean to do?” asked the aide-de-camp.
“Drag them along!” answered Sucy.
“You are mad!”
“You are right!” exclaimed Philip, folding his arms on his breast.
Suddenly a desperate plan occurred to him.
“Look you here!” he said, grasping his sentinel by the unwounded arm. “I leave her in your care for one hour. Bear in mind that you must die sooner than let any one, no matter whom, come near the carriage!”
The major seized a handful of the lady’s diamonds, drew his sabre, and violently battered those who seemed to him to be the bravest among the sleepers. By this means he succeeded in rousing the gigantic grenadier and a couple of men whose rank and regiment were undiscoverable.
“It is all up with us!” he cried.
“Of course it is,” returned the grenadier; “but that is all one to me.”
“Very well then, if die you must, isn’t it better to sell your life for a pretty woman, and stand a chance of going back to France again?”
“I would rather go to sleep,” said one of the men, dropping down into the snow; “and if you worry me again, major, I shall stick my toasting-iron into your body.”
“What is it all about, sir?” asked the grenadier. “The man’s drunk. He is a Parisian, and likes to lie in the lap of luxury.”
“You shall have these, good fellow,” said the major, holding out a riviere of diamonds, “if you will follow me and fight like a madman. The Russians are not ten minutes away; they have horses; we will march up to the nearest battery and carry off two stout ones.”
“How about the sentinels, major?”
“One of us three — ” he began; then he turned from the soldier and looked at the aide-de-camp. — ”You are coming, aren’t you, Hippolyte?”
Hippolyte nodded assent.
“One of us,” the major went on, “will look after the sentry. Besides, perhaps those blessed Russians are also fast asleep.”
“All right, major; you are a good sort! But will you take me in your carriage?” asked the grenadier.
“Yes, if you don’t leave your bones up yonder. — If I come to grief, promise me, you two, that you will do everything in your power to save the Countess.”
“All right,” said the grenadier.
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br /> They set out for the Russian lines, taking the direction of the batteries that had so cruelly raked the mass of miserable creatures huddled together by the river bank. A few minutes later the hoofs of two galloping horses rang on the frozen snow, and the awakened battery fired a volley that passed over the heads of the sleepers; the hoof-beats rattled so fast on the iron ground that they sounded like the hammering in a smithy. The generous aide-de-camp had fallen; the stalwart grenadier had come off safe and sound; and Philip himself received a bayonet thrust in the shoulder while defending his friend. Notwithstanding his wound, he clung to his horse’s mane, and gripped him with his knees so tightly that the animal was held as in a vise.
“God be praised!” cried the major, when he saw his soldier still on the spot, and the carriage standing where he had left it.
“If you do the right thing by me, sir, you will get me the cross for this. We have treated them to a sword dance to a pretty tune from the rifle, eh?”
“We have done nothing yet! Let us put the horses in. Take hold of these cords.”
“They are not long enough.”
“All right, grenadier, just go and overhaul those fellows sleeping there; take their shawls, sheets, anything — ”
“I say! the rascal is dead,” cried the grenadier, as he plundered the first man who came to hand. “Why, they are all dead! how queer!”
“All of them?”
“Yes, every one. It looks as though the horseflesh a la neige was indigestible.”
Philip shuddered at the words. The night had grown twice as cold as before.
“Great heaven! to lose her when I have saved her life a score of times already.”
He shook the Countess, “Stephanie! Stephanie!” he cried.
She opened her eyes.
“We are saved, madame!”
“Saved!” she echoed, and fell back again.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1185