Distinct with footprints yet
Of many a mighty marcher gone that way.
There are many who overlook the fact that in Northern lands, more
especially in such plains as Lithuania, Courland, and Poland, travel in
winter is easier than at any other time of year. The rivers, which run
sluggishly in their ditch-like beds, are frozen so completely that
the bridges are no longer required. The roads, in summer almost
impassable--mere ruts across the plain--are for the time ignored, and
the traveller strikes a bee-line from place to place across a level of
frozen snow.
Louis d'Arragon had worked out a route across the plain, as he had been
taught to shape a course across a chart.
“How did you return from Kowno?” he asked Barlasch.
“Name of my own nose,” replied that traveller. “I followed the line of
dead horses.”
“Then I will take you by another route,” replied the sailor.
And three days later--before General Rapp had made his entry into
Dantzig--Barlasch sold two skeletons of horses and a sleigh at an
enormous profit to a staff officer of Murat's at Gumbinnen.
They had passed through Rapp's army. They had halted at Konigsberg to
make inquiry, and now, almost in sight of the Niemen, where the land
begins to heave in great waves, like those that roll round Cape Horn,
they were asking still if any man had seen Charles Darragon.
“Where are you going, comrades?” a hundred men had paused to ask them.
“To seek a brother,” answered Barlasch, who, like many unprincipled
persons, had soon found that a lie is much simpler than an explanation.
But the majority glanced at them stupidly without comment, or with only
a shrug of their bowed shoulders. They were going the wrong way. They
must be mad. Between Dantzig and Konigsberg they had indeed found a few
travellers going eastward--despatch-bearers seeking Murat--spies going
northwards to Tilsit, and General Yorck still in treaty with his own
conscience--a prominent member of the Tugendbund, wondering, like many
others, if there were any virtue left in the world. Others, again, told
them that they were officers ordered to take up some new command in the
retreating army.
Beyond Konigsberg, however, D'Arragon and Barlasch found themselves
alone on their eastward route. Every man's face was set towards the
west. This was not an army at all, but an endless procession of tramps.
Without food or shelter, with no baggage but what they could carry on
their backs, they journeyed as each of us must journey out of this world
into that which lies beyond--alone, with no comrade to help them over
the rough places or lift them when they fell. For there was only one
man of all this rabble who rose to the height of self-sacrifice, and a
persistent devotion to duty. And he was coming last of all.
Many had started off in couples--with a faithful friend--only to quarrel
at last. For it is a peculiarity of the French that they can only have
one friend at a time. Long ago--back beyond the Niemen--all friendships
had been dissolved, and discipline had vanished before that. For when
Discipline and a Republic are wedded we shall have the millennium.
Liberty, they cry: meaning, I may do as I like. Equality: I am better
than you. Fraternity: what is yours is mine, if I want it.
So they quarrelled over everything, and fought for a place round the
fire that another had lighted. They burnt the houses in which they had
passed a night, though they knew that thousands trudging behind them
must die for lack of this poor shelter.
At the Beresina they had fought on the bridge like wild animals, and
those who had horses trod their comrades underfoot, or pushed them over
the parapet. Twelve thousand perished on the banks or in the river; and
sixteen thousand were left behind to the mercy of the Cossacks.
At Vilna the people were terrified at the sight of this inhuman rabble,
which had commanded their admiration on the outward march. And the
commander, with his staff, crept out of the city at night, abandoning
sick, wounded, and fighting men.
At Kowno they crowded numbly across the bridge, fighting for precedence,
when they might have walked at leisure across the ice. They were
no longer men at all, but dumb and driven animals, who fell by the
roadside, and were stripped by their comrades before the warmth of life
had left their limbs.
“Excuse me, comrade? I thought you were dead,” said one, on being
remonstrated with by a dying man. And he went on his way reluctantly,
for he knew that in a few minutes another would snatch the booty. But
for the most part they were not so scrupulous.
At first D'Arragon, to whom these horrors were new, attempted to help
such as appealed to him, but Barlasch laughed at him.
“Yes,” he said. “Take the medallion, and promise to send it to his
mother. Holy Heaven--they all have medallions, and they all have
mothers. Every Frenchman remembers his mother--when it is too late. I
will get a cart. By to-morrow we shall fill it with keepsakes. And here
is another. He is hungry. So am I, comrade. I come from Moscow--bah!”
And so they fought their way through the stream. They could have
journeyed by a quicker route--D'Arragon could have steered a course
across the frozen plain as over a sea--but Charles must necessarily be
in this stream. He might be by the wayside. Any one of these pitiable
objects, half blind, frost-bitten, with one limb or another swinging
useless, like a snapped branch, wrapped to the eyes in filthy
furs--inhuman, horrible--any one of these might be Desiree's husband.
They never missed a chance of hearing news. Barlasch interrupted the
last message of a dying man to inquire whether he had ever heard of
Prince Eugene. It was startling to learn how little they knew. The
majority of them were quite ignorant of French, and had scarcely heard
the name of the commander of their division. Many spoke in a language
which even Barlasch could not identify.
“His talk is like a coffee-mill,” he explained to D'Arragon, “and I do
not know to what regiment he belonged. He asked me if I was Russki--I!
Then he wanted to hold my hand. And he went to sleep. He will wake among
the angels--that parishioner.”
Not only had no one heard of Charles Darragon, but few knew the name of
the commander to whose staff he had been attached in Moscow. There
was nothing for it but to go on towards Kowno, where it was understood
temporary head-quarters had been established.
Rapp himself had told D'Arragon that officers had been despatched to
Kowno to form a base--a sort of rock in the midst of a torrent to divert
the currents. There had then been a talk of Tilsit, and diverting the
stream, or part of it towards Macdonald in the north. But D'Arragon knew
that Macdonald was likely to be in no better plight than Murat; for
it was an open secret in Dantzig that Yorck, with four-fifths of
Macdonald's army, was about to abandon him.
The road to Kowno was not to be mistaken. On either side of it, like
fallen landmarks, the dead lay huddled on the snow. Sometimes D'Arragon
and Barlasch found the remains of a fire, where, amid the ashes, the
chains and rings showed that a gun-carriage had been burnt. The trees
were cut and scored where, as a forlorn hope, some poor imbecile had
stripped the bark with the thought that it might burn. Nearly every
fire had its grim guardian; for the wounds of the injured nearly always
mortified when the flesh was melted by the warmth. Once or twice, with
their ragged feet in the ashes, a whole company had never awakened from
their sleep.
Barlasch pessimistically went the round of these bivouacs, but rarely
found anything worth carrying away. If he recognized a veteran by
the grizzled hair straggling out of the rags in which all faces were
enveloped, or perceived some remnant of a Garde uniform, he searched
more carefully.
“There may be salt,” he said. And sometimes he found a little. They
had been on foot since Gumbinnen, because no horse would be allowed by
starving men to live a day. They existed from day to day on what they
found, which was, at the best, frozen horse. But Barlasch ate singularly
little.
“One thinks of one's digestion,” he said vaguely, and persuaded
D'Arragon to eat his portion because it would be a sin to throw it away.
At length D'Arragon, who was quick enough in understanding rough men,
said--
“No, I don't want any more. I will throw it away.”
And an hour later, while pretending to be asleep, he saw Barlasch get
up, and crawl cautiously into the trees where the unsavoury food had
been thrown.
“Provided,” muttered Barlasch one day, “that you keep your health. I am
an old man. I could not do this alone.”
Which was true, for D'Arragon was carrying all the baggage now.
“We must both keep our health,” answered Louis. “I have eaten worse
things than horse.”
“I saw one yesterday,” said Barlasch, with a gesture of disgust; “he
had three stripes on his arm, too; he was crouching in a ditch eating
something much worse than horse, mon capitaine. Bah! It made me sick.
For three sous I would have put my heel on his face. And later on at the
roadside I saw where he or another had played the butcher. But you saw
none of these things, mon capitaine?”
“It was by that winding stream where a farm had been burnt,” said Louis.
Barlasch glanced at him sideways.
“If we should come to that, mon capitaine....”
“We won't.”
They trudged on in silence for some time. They were off the road now,
and D'Arragon was steering by dead-reckoning. Even amid the pine-woods,
which seemed interminable, they frequently found remains of an
encampment. As often as not they found the campers huddled over their
last bivouac.
“But these,” said Barlasch, pointing to what looked like a few bundles
of old clothes, continuing the conversation where he had left it after a
long silence, as men learn to do who are together day and night in some
hard enterprise, “even these have a woman dinning the ears of the good
God for them, just as we have.”
For Barlasch's conception of a Deity could not get further than the
picture of a great Commander who in times of stress had no leisure to
see that non-commissioned officers did their best for the rank and file.
Indeed, the poor in all lands rather naturally conclude that God will
think of carriage-people first.
They came within sight of Kowno one evening, after a tiring day over
snow that glittered in a cloudless sun. Barlasch sat down wearily
against a pine tree, when they first caught sight of a distant
church-tower. The country is much broken up into little valleys
here, through which streams find their way to the Niemen. Each river
necessitated a rapid descent and an arduous climb over slippery snow.
“Voila,” said Barlasch. “That is Kowno. I am done. Go on, mon capitaine.
I will lie here, and if I am not dead to-morrow morning, I will join
you.”
Louis looked at him with a slow smile.
“I am tired as you,” he said. “We will rest here until the moon rises.”
Already the bare larches threw shadows three times their own length on
the snow. Near at hand it glittered like a carpet of diamonds, while the
distance was of a pale blue, merging to grey on the horizon. A far-off
belt of pines against a sky absolutely cloudless suggested infinite
space--immeasurable distance. Nothing was sharp and clearly outlined,
but hazy, silvery, as seen through a thin veil. The sea would seem to be
our earthly picture of infinite space, but no sea speaks of distance so
clearly as the plain of Lithuania--absolutely flat, quite lonely. The
far-off belt of pines only leads the eye to a shadow beyond, which is
another pine-wood; and the traveller walking all day towards it knows
that when at length he gets there he will see just such another on the
far horizon.
Louis sat down wearily beside Barlasch. As far as eye could see, they
were alone in this grim white world. They had nothing to say to each
other. They sat and watched the sun go down with drawn eyes and a queer
stolidity which comes to men in great cold, as if their souls were numb.
As the sun sank, the shadows turned bluer, and all the snow gleamed like
a lake. The silver tints slowly turned to gold; the greys grew darker.
The distant lines of pines were almost black now, a silhouette against
the golden sky. Near at hand the little inequalities in the snow loomed
blue, like deeper pools in shallow water.
The sun sank very slowly, moving along the horizon almost parallel with
it towards two bars of golden cloud awaiting it, the bars of the West
forming a prison to this poor pale captive of the snows. The stems of a
few silver-birch near at hand were rosy now, and suddenly the snow
took a similar tint. At the same moment, a wave of cold seemed to sweep
across the world.
The sun went down at length, leaving a brownish-red sky. This, too,
faded to grey in a few minutes, and a steely cold gripped the world as
in a vice.
Louis d'Arragon made a sudden effort and rose to his feet, beneath which
the snow squeaked.
“Come,” he said. “If we stay, we shall fall asleep, and then--”
Barlasch roused himself and looked sleepily at his companion. He had a
patch of blue on either cheek.
“Come!” shouted Louis, as if to a deaf man. “Let us go on to Kowno, and
find out whether he is alive or dead.”