“But you yourself must have been in danger at times, and it would be interesting to hear you tell of your personal adventures.”

“Perhaps,” answered the commandant.

“Well, then, tell me about the adventure that made the deepest impression upon you.  Come! do not hesitate.  I shall not think that you are wanting in modesty even if you should tell me of some piece of heroism on your part; and when a man is quite sure that he will not be misunderstood, ought he not to find a kind of pleasure in saying, ’I did thus’?”

“Very well, then, I will tell you about something that gives me a pang of remorse from time to time.  During fifteen years of warfare it never once happened that I killed a man, save in legitimate defence of self.  We are drawn up in a line, and we charge; and if we do not strike down those before us, they will begin to draw blood without asking leave, so you have to kill if you do not mean to be killed, and your conscience is quite easy.  But once I broke a comrade’s back; it happened in a singular way, and it has been a painful thing to me to think of afterwards—­the man’s dying grimace haunts me at times.  But you shall judge for yourself.

“It was during the retreat from Moscow,” the commandant went on.  “The Grand Army had ceased to be itself; we were more like a herd of over-driven cattle.  Good-bye to discipline!  The regiments had lost sight of their colors, every one was his own master, and the Emperor (one need not scruple to say it) knew that it was useless to attempt to exert his authority when things had gone so far.  When we reached Studzianka, a little place on the other side of the Beresina, we came upon human dwellings for the first time after several days.  There were barns and peasants’ cabins to destroy, and pits full of potatoes and beetroot; the army had been without vitual, and now it fairly ran riot, the first comers, as you might expect, making a clean sweep of everything.

“I was one of the last to come up.  Luckily for me, sleep was the one thing that I longed for just then.  I caught sight of a barn and went into it.  I looked round and saw a score of generals and officers of high rank, all of them men who, without flattery, might be called great.  Junot was there, and Narbonne, the Emperor’s aide-de-camp, and all the chiefs of the army.  There were common soldiers there as well, not one of whom would have given up his bed of straw to a marshal of France.  Some who were leaning their backs against the wall had dropped off to sleep where they stood, because there was no room to lie down; others lay stretched out on the floor—­it was a mass of men packed together so closely for the sake of warmth, that I looked about in vain for a nook to lie down in.  I walked over this flooring of human bodies; some of the men growled, the others said nothing, but no one budged.  They would not have moved out of the way of a cannon ball just then; but under the circumstances, one was not obliged to practise the