“Is it the French or the Russians that are coming?” asked a child near to Désirée.
“Both,” was the answer.
“But which will come first?”
“Wait and see—silentium,” replied the careful Danziger, looking over his shoulder.
Désirée had changed her clothes, and wore beneath her furs the dress that had been prepared for the journey to Zoppot so long ago. Mathilde had noticed the dress, which had not been seen for six months. Lisa, more loquacious, nodded to it as to a friend when helping Désirée with her furs.
“You have changed,” she said, “since you last wore it.”
“I have grown older—and fatter,” answered Désirée cheerfully.
And Lisa, who had no imagination, seemed satisfied with the explanation. But the change was in Désirée’s eyes.
With Sebastian’s permission—almost at his suggestion—they had selected the Grüne Brücke as the point from which to see the sight. This bridge spans the Mottlau at the entrance to the Langenmarkt, and the roadway widens before it narrows again to pass beneath the Grünes Thor. There is rising ground where the road spreads like a fan, and here they could see and be seen.
“Let us hope,” said Sebastian, “that two of these gentlemen may perceive you as they pass.”
But he did not offer to accompany them.
By half-past eleven the streets were full. The citizens knew their governor, it seemed. He would not keep them waiting. Although Rapp lacked that power of appealing to the imagination which has survived Napoleon’s death with such astounding vitality that it moves men’s minds today as surely as it did a hundred years ago, he was shrewd enough to make use of his master’s methods when such would seem to serve his purpose. He was not going to creep into Danzig like a whipped dog into his kennel.
He had procured a horse at Elbing. Between that town and the Mottlau he had halted to form his army into something like order, to get together a staff with which to surround himself.
But the Danzigers did not cheer. They stood and watched him in a sullen silence as he rode across the bridge now known as the “Milk-Can.” His bridle was twisted round his arm, for all his fingers were frostbitten. His nose and his ears were in the same plight, and had been treated by a Polish barber who, indeed, effected a cure. One eye was almost closed. His face was astonishingly red. But he carried himself like a soldier, and faced the world with the audacity that Napoleon taught to all his disciples.
Behind him rode a few staff officers, but the majority were on foot. Some effort had been made to revive the faded uniforms. One or two heroic souls had cast aside the fur cloaks to which they owed their life, but the majority were broken men without spirit, without pride—appealing only to pity. They hugged themselves closely in their ragged cloaks and stumbled as they walked. It was impossible to distinguish between the officers and the men. The biggest and the strongest were the best clad—the bullies were the best fed. All were black and smoke-grimed—with eyes reddened and inflamed by the dazzling snow through which they stumbled by day, as much as by the smoke into which they crouched at night. Every garment was riddled by the holes burnt by flying sparks—every face was smeared with blood that ran from the horseflesh they had torn asunder with their teeth while it yet smoked.
Some laughed and waved their hands to the crowd. Others, who had known the tragedy of Vilna and Kowno, stumbled on in stubborn silence still doubting that Danzig stood—that they were at last in sight of food and warmth and rest.
“Is that all?” men asked each other in astonishment. For the last stragglers had crossed the new Mottlau before the head of the procession had reached the Grüne Brücke.
“If I had such an army as that,” said a stout Danziger, “I should bring it into the city quietly, after dusk.”
But the majority were silent, remembering the departure of these men—the triumph, the glory, and the hope. For a great catastrophe is a curtain that for a moment shuts out all history and makes the human family little children again who can but cower and hold each other’s hands in the dark.
“Where are the guns?” asked one.
“And the baggage?” suggested another.
“And the treasure of Moscow?” whispered a Jew with cunning eyes, who had hidden behind his neighbour when Rapp glanced in his direction.
Emerging on the bridge, the General glanced at the old Mottlau. A crowd was collected on it. The citizens no longer used the bridges but crossed without fear where they pleased, and heavy sleighs passed up and down as on a high-road. Rapp saw it, made a grimace, and, turning in his saddle, spoke to his neighbour, an engineer officer, who was to make an immortal name and die in Danzig.
The Mottlau was one of the chief defences of the city, but instead of a river the Governor found a high-road!
Rapp alone seemed to look about him with the air of one who knew his whereabouts. In the straggling trail of men behind him, not one in a hundred looked for a friendly face. Some stared in front of them with lifeless eyes, while others, with a little spirit plucked up at the end of a weary march, glanced up at the gabled houses with the interest called forth by the first sight of a new city.
It was not until long afterwards that the world, piecing together information purposely delayed and details carefully falsified, knew that of the four hundred thousand men who marched triumphantly to the Niemen, only twenty thousand recrossed that river six months later, and of these two-thirds had never seen Moscow.
Rapp, whose bloodshot eyes searched the crowd of faces turned towards him, recognized a number of people. To Mathilde he bowed gravely, and with a kindlier glance turned in his saddle to
