* * * * *

CHAPTER VII.

THE HORRORS OF WAR.

The Russians had at last allowed themselves to be carried away by the example set them by the Austrians and Saxons.  Like them, they roamed through Berlin, robbing and plundering, unmindful of discipline, and forgetting the severe punishments which Tottleben inflicted on those whose misdeeds reached his ear.

Like the Austrians, the Cossacks entered houses with wanton arrogance, and, under the pretext of being Russian safeguards, they stole, and robbed, and ill-treated in the rudest manner those who opposed their demands.  They had even managed to reduce their robbery and extortion to a kind of system, and to value the human person after a new fashion.  It was a sort of mercantile transaction, and the Cossacks were the brokers in this new-fashioned business.  Stealthily and unheard, they slipped into houses, fell upon the unsuspecting women and children, and dragged them out, not to capture them as the Romans did the Sabine women, but to hold them as so much merchandise, to be redeemed by their friends and relatives at high and often enormous ransoms.

But the Cossacks drew but small profit from this hunt after noble human game.  They were only servants, acting under orders from their officers.  These latter divided the booty, throwing to the Cossacks a small reward for their skill in robbing.

Thus, for some days, Berlin was not only subjugated by the enemy, but a prey to robbers and slave-dealers, and moans and lamentations were heard in every house.  All the more merrily did the enemy’s soldiers carouse and enjoy themselves, laugh and joke.  For them Berlin was nothing more than an orange to be squeezed dry, whose life-blood was to be drawn out to add new zest to their own draught of life.

The young Russian officers were sitting together in the large room of their barracks.  They were drinking and making merry, and striking their glasses noisily together; draining them to the health of the popular, handsome, and brilliant comrade who had just entered their circle, and who was no other than he whom Gotzkowsky’s daughter, in the sorrow of her heart, was mourning as dead!—­no one else than the Russian colonel, Count Feodor von Brenda.

He had been right, therefore, in trusting to Fortune.  Fortune had favored him, as she always does those who boldly venture all to win all, and who sport with danger as with a toy.  Indeed, it was an original and piquant adventure which the Russian colonel had experienced, the more piquant because it had threatened him with death, and at one moment his life had been in extreme danger.  It had delighted him for once to experience all the horrors of death, the palpitation, the despair of a condemned culprit; to acquire in his own person a knowledge of the great and overpowering feelings, which he had read so much about in books,