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 tomorrow 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, frostbitten, 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 Désirée’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 headquarters 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 Danzig 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 pinewoods, 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 noncommissioned 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
