The Point Of Honor: A Military Tale
Page 11
III
The retreat from Moscow submerged all private feelings in a sea ofdisaster and misery. Colonels without regiments, D'Hubert and Feraudcarried the musket in the ranks of the sacred battalion--a battalionrecruited from officers of all arms who had no longer any troops tolead.
In that battalion promoted colonels did duty as sergeants; the generalscaptained the companies; a marshal of France, Prince of the Empire,commanded the whole. All had provided themselves with muskets pickedup on the road, and cartridges taken from the dead. In the generaldestruction of the bonds of discipline and duty holding together thecompanies, the battalions, the regiments, the brigades and divisionsof an armed host, this body of men put their pride in preserving somesemblance of order and formation. The only stragglers were those whofell out to give up to the frost their exhausted souls. They plodded ondoggedly, stumbling over the corpses of men, the carcasses of horses,the fragments of gun-carriages, covered by the white winding-sheet ofthe great disaster. Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence ofthe plains, shining with a livid light under a sky the colour of ashes.Whirlwinds of snow ran along the fields, broke against the dark column,rose in a turmoil of flying icicles, and subsided, disclosing itcreeping on without the swing and rhythm of the military pace. Theystruggled onward, exchanging neither words nor looks--whole ranksmarched, touching elbows, day after day, and never raising their eyes,as if lost in despairing reflections. On calm days, in the dumb blackforests of pines the cracking of overloaded branches was the only sound.Often from daybreak to dusk no one spoke in the whole column. It waslike a _macabre_ march of struggling corpses towards a distant grave.Only an alarm of Cossacks could restore to their lack-lustre eyes asemblance of martial resolution. The battalion deployed, facing about,or formed square under the endless fluttering of snowflakes. A cloud ofhorsemen with fur caps on their heads, levelled long lances and yelled"Hurrah! Hurrah!" around their menacing immobility, whence, with muffleddetonations, hundreds of dark-red flames darted through the air thickwith falling snow. In a very few moments the horsemen would disappear,as if carried off yelling in the gale, and the battalion, standingstill, alone in the blizzard, heard only the wind searching their veryhearts. Then, with a cry or two of "_Vive l'Empereur!_" it would resumeits march, leaving behind a few lifeless bodies lying huddled up, tinydark specks on the white ground.
Though often marching in the ranks or skirmishing in the woods sideby side, the two officers ignored each other; this not so much frominimical intention as from a very real indifference. All their store ofmoral energy was expended in resisting the terrific enmity of Nature andthe crushing sense of irretrievable disaster.
Neither of them allowed himself to be crushed. To the last they countedamong the most active, the least demoralised of the battalion; theirvigorous vitality invested them both with the appearance of an heroicpair in the eyes of their comrades. And they never exchanged more thana casual word or two, except one day when, skirmishing in front of thebattalion against a worrying attack of cavalry, they found themselvescut off by a small party of Cossacks. A score of wild-looking, hairyhorsemen rode to and fro, brandishing their lances in ominous silence.The two officers had no mind to lay down their arms, and Colonel Feraudsuddenly spoke up in a hoarse, growling voice, bringing his firelock tothe shoulder:
"You take the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert; I'll settle the next one.I am a better shot than you are."
Colonel D'Hubert only nodded over his levelled musket. Their shoulderswere pressed against the trunk of a large tree; in front, deepsnowdrifts protected them from a direct charge.
088.jpg "You take the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert"]
Two carefully aimed shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacksreeled in their saddles. The rest, not thinking the game good enough,closed round their wounded comrades and galloped away out of range. Thetwo officers managed to rejoin their battalion, halted for the night.During that afternoon they had leaned upon each other more than once,and towards the last Colonel D'Hubert, whose long legs gave him anadvantage in walking through soft snow, peremptorily took the musketfrom Colonel Feraud and carried it on his shoulder, using his own as astaff.
On the outskirts of a village, half-buried in the snow, an old woodenbarn burned with a clear and immense flame. The sacred battalion ofskeletons muffled in rags crowded greedily the windward side, stretchinghundreds of numbed, bony hands to the blaze. Nobody had noted theirapproach. Before entering the circle of light playing on the multitudeof sunken, glassy-eyed, starved faces, Colonel D'Hubert spoke in histurn:
"Here's your firelock, Colonel Feraud. I can walk better than you."
Colonel Feraud nodded, and pushed on towards the warmth of the fierceflames. Colonel D'Hubert was more deliberate, but not the less benton getting a place in the front rank. Those they pushed aside triedto greet with a faint cheer the reappearance of the two indomitablecompanions in activity and endurance. Those manly qualities had never,perhaps, received a higher tribute than this feeble acclamation.
This is the faithful record of speeches exchanged during the retreatfrom Moscow by Colonels Feraud and D'Hubert. Colonel Feraud'staciturnity was the outcome of concentrated rage. Short, hairy,black-faced with layers of grime, and a thick sprouting of a wiry beard,a frost-bitten hand, wrapped in filthy rags, carried in a sling, heaccused fate bitterly of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man ofDestiny. Colonel D'Hubert, his long moustache pendent in icicles on eachside of his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed with the glare ofsnows, the principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coatlooted with difficulty from the frozen corpse of a camp followerfound in an abandoned cart, took a more thoughtful view of events. Hisregularly handsome features now reduced to mere bony fines and fleshlesshollows, looked out of a woman's black velvet hood, over which wasrammed forcibly a cocked hat picked up under the wheels of an empty armyfourgon which must have contained at one time some general officer'sluggage. The sheepskin coat being short for a man of his inches, endedvery high up his elegant person, and the skin of his legs, blue with thecold, showed through the tatters of his nether garments. This, underthe circumstances, provoked neither jeers nor pity. No one cared how thenext man felt or looked. Colonel D'Hubert himself hardened to exposure,suffered mainly in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency ofhis costume. A thoughtless person may think that with a whole host ofinanimate bodies bestrewing the path of retreat there could not havebeen much difficulty in supplying the deficiency. But the great majorityof these bodies lay buried under the falls of snow, others had beenalready despoiled; and besides, to loot a pair of breeches from a frozencorpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist. It requirestime. You must remain behind while your companions march on. And ColonelD'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. They arose from a point ofhonour, and also a little from dread. Once he stepped aside he could notbe sure of ever rejoining his battalion. And the enterprise demanded aphysical effort from which his starved body shrank. The ghastly intimacyof a wrestling match with the frozen dead opposing the unyieldingrigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant to the inborn delicacyof his feelings.
Luckily, one day grubbing in a mound of snow between the huts of avillage in the hope of finding there a frozen potato or some vegetablegarbage he could put between his long and shaky teeth, Colonel D'Hubertuncovered a couple of mats of the sort Russian peasants use to line thesides of their carts. These, shaken free of frozen snow, bent about hisperson and fastened solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nethergarment, a sort of stiff petticoat, rendering Colonel D'Hubert aperfectly decent but a much more noticeable figure than before.
Thus accoutred he continued to retreat, never doubting of his personalescape but full of other misgivings. The early buoyancy of his beliefin the future was destroyed. If the road of glory led through suchunforeseen passages--he asked himself, for he was reflective, whetherthe guide was altogether trustworthy. And a patriotic sadness notunmingled with some personal concern, al
together unlike the unreasoningindignation against men and things nursed by Colonel Feraud, oppressedthe equable spirits of Colonel D'Hubert. Recruiting his strength in alittle German town for three weeks, he was surprised to discover withinhimself a love of repose. His returning vigour was strangely pacific inits aspirations. He meditated silently upon that bizarre change ofmood. No doubt many of his brother officers of field rank had the samepersonal experience. But these were not the times to talk of it. In oneof his letters home Colonel D'Hubert wrote: "All your plans, my dearLeonie, of marrying me to the charming girl you have discovered in yourneighbourhood, seem farther off than ever. Peace is not yet. Europewants another lesson. It will be a hard task for us, but it will be donewell, because the emperor is invincible."
Thus wrote Colonel D'Hubert from Pomerania to his married sister Leonie,settled