It is our trust
That there is yet another world to mend
All error and mischance.
Louis d'Arragon knew the road well enough from Konigsberg to the Niemen.
It runs across a plain, flat as a table, through which many small
streams seek their rivers in winding beds. This country was not thinly
inhabited, though the villages had been stripped, as foliage is stripped
by a cloud of locusts. Each cottage had its ring of silver birch-trees
to protect it from the winds which sweep from the Baltic and the steppe.
These had been torn and broken down by the retreating army, in a vain
hope of making fire with green wood.
It was quite easy to keep in the steps of the retreating army, for the
road was marked by recumbent forms huddled on either side. Few vehicles
had come so far, for the broken country near to Vilna and around Kowno
had presented slopes up which the starving horses were unable to drag
their load.
D'Arragon reached Kowno without mishap, and there found a Russian
colonel of Cossacks who proved friendly enough, and not only appreciated
the value of his passport and such letters of recommendation as he had
been able to procure at Konigsberg, but gave him others, and forwarded
him on his journey.
He still nourished a lingering belief in De Casimir's word. Charles must
have been left behind at Vilna to recover from his exhaustion. He would,
undoubtedly, make his way westward as soon as possible. He might have
got away to the South. Any one of these huddled human landmarks might be
Charles Darragon.
Louis was essentially a thorough man. The sea is a mistress demanding
a whole and concentrated attention--and concentration soon becomes a
habit. Louis did not travel at night, for fear of passing Charles on
the road, alive or dead. He knew his cousin better than any in the
Frauengasse had learnt to know this gay and inconsequent Frenchman. A
certain cunning lay behind the happy laugh--a great capacity was hidden
by the careless manner. If ready wit could bring man through the dangers
of the retreat, Charles had as good a chance of surviving as any.
Nevertheless, Louis rarely passed a dead man on the road, but drew
up, and quitting his sleigh, turned over the body, which was almost
invariably huddled with its back offered to the deadly, prevailing North
wind. Against each this wind had piled a sloping bank of that fine snow
which, even in the lightest breeze, drifts over the surface of the land
like an ivory mist, waist high, and cakes the clothes. In a high wind it
will rise twenty feet in the air, and blind any who try to face it.
As often as not a mere glance sufficed to show that this was not
Charles, for few of the bodies were clad. Many had been stripped, while
still living, by their half-frozen comrades. But sometimes Louis had to
dust the snow from strange bearded faces before he could pass on with a
quick sigh of relief.
Beyond Kowno, the country is thinly populated, and spreading
pine-forests bound the horizon. The Cossacks--the wild men of Toula, who
reaped the laurels of the rearguard fighting--were all along the road.
D'Arragon frequently came upon a picket--as often as not the men were
placidly sitting on a frozen corpse, as on a seat--and stopped to say a
few words and gather news.
“You will find your friend at Vilna,” said one young officer, who had
been attached to General Wilson's staff, and had many stories to tell of
the energetic and indefatigable English commissioner. “At Vilna we
took twenty thousand prisoners--poor devils who came and asked us for
food--and I don't know how many officers. And if you see Wilson there,
remember me to him. If Napoleon has need to hate one man more than
another for this business, it is that firebrand, Wilson. Yes, you will
assuredly find your cousin at Vilna among the prisoners. But you must
not linger by the road, for they are being sent back to Moscow to
rebuild that which they have caused to be destroyed.”
He laughed and waved his gloved hand as D'Arragon drove on.
After the broken land and low abrupt hills of Kowno, the country was
flat again until the valley of the Vilia opened out. And here, almost
within sight of Vilna, D'Arragon drove down a short hill which must ever
be historic. He drove slowly, for on either side were gun-carriages deep
sunken in the snow where the French had left them. This hill marked
the final degeneration of the Emperor's army into a shapeless rabble
hopelessly flying before an exhausted enemy.
Half on the road and half in the ditch were hundreds of carriages which
had been hurriedly smashed up to provide firewood. Carts, still laden
with the booty of Moscow, stood among the trees. Some of them contained
small square boxes of silver coin, brought by Napoleon to pay his army
and here abandoned. Silver coin was too heavy to carry. The rate of
exchange had long been sixty francs in silver for a gold napoleon or a
louis. The cloth coverings of the cushions had been torn off to shape
into rough garments; the straw stuffing had been eaten by the horses.
Inside the carriages were--crouching on the floor--the frozen bodies of
fugitives too badly wounded or too ill to attempt to walk. They had sat
there till death came to them. Many were women. In one carriage four
women, in silks and fine linen, were huddled together. Their furs had
been dragged from them either before or after death.
Louis stopped at the bottom and looked back. De Casimir at all events
had succeeded in surmounting this obstacle which had proved fatal to
so many--the grave of so many hopes--God's rubbish-heap, where gold
and precious stones, silks and priceless furs, all that greedy men had
schemed and striven and fought to get, fell from their hands at last.
Vilna lies all down a slope--a city built upon several hills--and the
Vilia runs at the bottom. That Way of Sorrow, the Smolensk Road, runs
eastward by the river bank, and here the rearguard held the Cossacks in
check while Murat hastily decamped, after dark, westwards to Kowno. The
King of Naples, to whom Napoleon gave the command of his broken army
quite gaily--“a vous, Roi de Naples,” he is reported to have said, as he
hurried to his carriage--Murat abandoned his sick and wounded; did not
even warn the stragglers.
D'Arragon entered the city by the narrow gate known as the Town Gate,
through which, as through that greater portal of Moscow, every man must
pass bareheaded.
“The Emperor is here,” were the first words spoken to him by the officer
on guard.
But the streets were quiet enough, and the winner in this great game
of chance maintained the same unostentatious silence in victory as that
which, in the hour of humiliation, had baffled Napoleon.
It was almost night, and D'Arragon had been travelling since daylight.
He found a lodging, and, having secured the comfort of the horse
provided by the lame shoemaker of Konigsberg, he went out into the
streets in search of information.
Few cities are, to this day, so behind the times as Vilna. The streets
are still narrow, winding, ill-paved, ill-lighted. When D'Arragon
quitted his lodging, he found no lights at all, for the starving
soldiers had climbed to the lamps for the sake of the oil, which they
had greedily drunk. It was a full moon, however, and the patrols at the
street corners were willing to give such information as they could. They
were strangers to Vilna like Louis himself, and not without suspicion;
for this was a city which had bidden the French welcome. There had been
dancing and revelry on the outward march. The citizens themselves were
afraid of the strange, wild-eyed men who returned to them from Moscow.
At last, in the Episcopal Palace, where head-quarters had been hurriedly
established, Louis found the man he sought, the officer in charge of the
arrangements for despatching prisoners into Russia and to Siberia.
He was a grizzled warrior of the old school, speaking only French and
Russian. He was tired out and hungry, but he listened to Louis' story.
“There is the list,” he said, “it is more or less complete. Many have
called themselves officers who never held a commission from the Emperor
Napoleon. But we have done what we can to sort them out.”
So Louis sat down in the dimly lighted room and deciphered the names of
those officers who had been left behind, detained by illness or wounds
or the lack of spirit to persevere.
“You understand,” said the Russian, returning to his work, “I cannot
afford the time to help you. We have twenty-five thousand prisoners to
feed and keep alive.”
“Yes--I understand,” answered Louis, who had the seaman's way of making
himself a part of his surroundings.
The old colonel glanced at him across the table with a grim smile.
“The Emperor,” he said, “was sitting in that chair an hour ago. He may
come back at any moment.”
“Ah!” said Louis, following the written lines with a pencil.
But no interruption came, and at last the list was finished. Charles was
not among the officers taken prisoner at Vilna.
“Well?” inquired the Russian, without looking up.
“Not there.”
The old officer took a sheet of paper and hurriedly wrote a few words on
it.
“Try the Basile Hospital to-morrow morning,” he said. “That will gain
you admittance. It is to be cleared out by the Emperor's orders. We have
about twenty thousand dead to dispose of as well--but they are in no
hurry.”
He laughed grimly, and bade Louis good night.
“Come to me again,” he called out after him, drawn by a sudden chord
of sympathy to this stranger, who had the rare capacity of confining
himself to the business in hand.
By daybreak the next morning Louis was at the hospital of St. Basile.
It had been prepared by the Duc de Bassano under Napoleon's orders when
Vilna was selected as the base of the great army. When the Russians
entered Vilna after the retreating remnant of Murat's rabble, they found
the dead and the dying in the streets and the market-place. Some had
made fires and had lain themselves down around them--to die. Others were
without food or firing, almost without clothes. Many were barefoot. All,
officers and men alike, were in rags. It was a piteous sight; for half
of these men were no longer human. Some were gnawing at their own limbs.
Many were blind, others had lost their speech or hearing. Nearly all
were marred by some disfigurement--some terrible sore, the result of a
frozen wound, of frostbite, of scurvy, of gangrene.
The Cossacks, half civilized as they were, wild with the excitement of
killing and the chase of a human quarry, stood aghast in the streets of
Vilna.
When the Emperor arrived, he set to work to clear the streets first, to
get these piteous men indoors. There was no question yet of succouring
them. It was not even possible to feed them all. The only thought was to
find them some protection against the ruthless cold.
The first thought was, of course, directed to the hospitals. They looked
in and saw a storehouse of the dead. The dead could wait; but the living
must be housed.
So the dead waited, and it was their turn now at the St. Basile
Hospital, where Louis presented himself at dawn.
“Looking for some one?” asked a man in uniform, who must have been
inside the hospital, for he hurried down the steps with a set mouth and
quailing eyes.
“Yes.”
“Then don't go in--wait here.”
Louis looked in and took the doctor's advice. The dead were stored in
the passages, one on the top of the other, like bales of goods in a
warehouse.
Some attempt seemed to have been made to clear the wards, but those
whose task it had been had not had time to do more than drag the dead
out into the passage.
The soldiers were now at work in the lower passage. Carts began to
arrive. An officer told off to this dread duty came up hurriedly smoking
a cigarette, his high fur collar about his ears. He glanced at Louis,
and bowed to him.
“Looking for some one?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then stand here beside me. It is I who have to keep count. They say
there are eight thousand in here. They will be carried past here to the
carts. Have a cigarette.”
It is hard to talk when the thermometer registers more than twenty
degrees of frost, for the lips stiffen and contract into wrinkles like
the lips of a very old woman. Perhaps neither of the watchers was in the
humour to begin an acquaintance.
They stood side by side, stamping their feet to keep the blood going,
without speaking. Once or twice Louis stepped forward, and at a signal
from the officer the bearers stopped. But Louis shook his head, and they
passed on. At midday the officer was relieved, his place being taken by
another, who bowed stiffly to Louis and took no more notice of him. For
war either hardens or softens. It never leaves a man as it found him.
All day the work was carried on. Through the hours this procession of
the bearded dead went silently by. At the invitation of a sergeant,
Louis took some soup and bread from the soldiers' table. The men
laughingly apologized for the quality of both.
Towards evening the officer who had first come on duty returned to his
work.
“Not yet?” he asked, offering the inevitable cigarette.
“Not yet,” answered Louis, and even as he spoke he stepped forward and
stopped the bearers. He brushed aside the matted hair and beard.
“Is that your friend?” asked the officer.
“Yes.”
It was Charles at last.
“The doctor says these have been dead two months,” volunteered the first
bearer, over his shoulder.
“I am glad you have found him,” said the officer, signing to the men to
go on with their burden. “It is better to know--is it not?”
“Yes,” answered Louis slowly. “It is better to know.”
And something in his voice made the Russian officer turn and watch him
as he went away.