Chapter 6 - Page 2

leopard-skin
shabraques, and at that instant the years fell away from me and I
saw my own beautiful men and horses, even as they had swept
behind their young colonel, in the pride of our youth and our
strength, just forty years ago. Up flew my cane. "Chargez! En
avant! Vive l'Empereur!"

It was the past calling to the present. But oh, what a thin,
piping voice! Was this the voice that had once thundered from
wing to wing of a strong brigade? And the arm that could scarce
wave a cane, were these the muscles of fire and steel which had
no match in all Napoleon's mighty host? They smiled at me. They
cheered me. The Emperor laughed and bowed. But to me the
present was a dim dream, and what was real were my eight hundred
dead Hussars and the Etienne of long ago.

Enough--a brave man can face age and fate as he faced Cossacks
and Uhlans. But there are times when Montrachet is better than
the wine of Bordeaux.

It is to Russia that they go, and so I will tell you a story of
Russia. Ah, what an evil dream of the night it seems! Blood and
ice. Ice and blood. Fierce faces with snow upon the whiskers.
Blue hands held out for succour. And across the great white
plain the one long black line of moving figures, trudging,
trudging, a hundred miles, another hundred, and still always the
same white plain. Sometimes there were fir-woods to limit it,
sometimes it stretched away to the cold blue sky, but the black
line stumbled on and on. Those weary, ragged, starving men, the
spirit frozen out of them, looked neither to right nor left, but
with sunken faces and rounded backs trailed onward and ever
onward, making for France as wounded beasts make for their lair.
There was no speaking, and you could scarce hear the shuffle of
feet in the snow. Once only I heard them laugh. It was outside
Wilna, when an aide-de-camp rode up to the head of that dreadful
column and asked if that were the Grand Army. All who were
within hearing looked round, and when they saw those broken men,
those ruined regiments, those fur-capped skeletons who were once
the Guard, they laughed, and the laugh crackled down the column
like a feu de joie. I have heard many a groan and cry and scream
in my life, but nothing so terrible as the laugh of the Grand
Army.

But why was it that these helpless men were not destroyed by the
Russians? Why was it that they were not speared by the Cossacks
or herded into droves, and driven as prisoners into the heart of
Russia? On every side as you watched the black snake winding
over the snow you saw also dark, moving shadows which came and
went like cloud drifts on either flank and behind. They were the
Cossacks, who hung round us like wolves round the flock.

But the