Chapter 3

The retreat from Moscow submerged all private feelings in a sea of
disaster and misery. Colonels without regiments, D'Hubert and Feraud
carried the musket in the ranks of the sacred battalion--a battalion
recruited from officers of all arms who had no longer any troops to
lead.

In that battalion promoted colonels did duty as sergeants; the generals
captained the companies; a marshal of France, Prince of the Empire,
commanded the whole. All had provided themselves with muskets picked
up on the road, and cartridges taken from the dead. In the general
destruction of the bonds of discipline and duty holding together the
companies, the battalions, the regiments, the brigades and divisions
of an armed host, this body of men put their pride in preserving some
semblance of order and formation. The only stragglers were those who
fell out to give up to the frost their exhausted souls. They plodded on
doggedly, stumbling over the corpses of men, the carcasses of horses,
the fragments of gun-carriages, covered by the white winding-sheet of
the great disaster. Their passage did not disturb the mortal silence of
the 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 it
creeping on without the swing and rhythm of the military pace. They
struggled onward, exchanging neither words nor looks--whole ranks
marched, touching elbows, day after day, and never raising their eyes,
as if lost in despairing reflections. On calm days, in the dumb black
forests of pines the cracking of overloaded branches was the only sound.
Often from daybreak to dusk no one spoke in the whole column. It was
like a _macabre_ march of struggling corpses towards a distant grave.
Only an alarm of Cossacks could restore to their lack-lustre eyes a
semblance of martial resolution. The battalion deployed, facing about,
or formed square under the endless fluttering of snowflakes. A cloud of
horsemen with fur caps on their heads, levelled long lances and yelled
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" around their menacing immobility, whence, with muffled
detonations, hundreds of dark-red flames darted through the air thick
with falling snow. In a very few moments the horsemen would disappear,
as if carried off yelling in the gale, and the battalion, standing
still, alone in the blizzard, heard only the wind searching their very
hearts. Then, with a cry or two of "_Vive l'Empereur!_" it would resume
its march, leaving behind a few lifeless bodies lying huddled up, tiny
dark specks on the white ground.

Though often marching in the ranks or skirmishing in the woods side
by side, the two officers ignored each