Most of the faces were strange: others were so altered that the features had to be sought for as in the face of a mummy. Neither Charles nor de Casimir was among the horsemen. One or two of them bowed, as their leader had done, to the two girls.
“That is Captain de Villars,” said Mathilde, “and the other I do not know. Nor that tall man who is bowing now. Who are they?”
Désirée did not answer. None of these men was Charles. Unconsciously holding her two mittened hands at her throat, she searched each face.
They were well placed to see even those who followed on foot. Many of them were not French. It would have been easy to distinguish Charles or de Casimir among the dark-visaged southerners. Désirée was not conscious of the crowd around her. She heard none of the muttered remarks. All her soul was in her eyes.
“Is that all?” she said at length—as the others had said at the entrance to the town.
She found she was standing hand-in-hand with Mathilde, whose face was like marble.
At last, when even the crowd had passed away beneath the Grünes Thor, they turned and walked home in silence.
XIX
Kowno
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 beeline 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 Danzig—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 Königsberg 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 Danzig and Königsberg 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 Königsberg, 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 Bérésina 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
