III

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 other; this not so much from inimical intention as from a very real indifference.  All their store of moral energy was expended in resisting the terrific enmity of Nature and the crushing sense of irretrievable disaster.