This is the faithful record of speeches exchanged during the retreat from Moscow by Colonels Feraud and D’Hubert.  Colonel Feraud’s taciturnity was the outcome of concentrated rage.  Short, hairy, black-faced with layers of grime, and a thick sprouting of a wiry beard, a frost-bitten hand, wrapped in filthy rags, carried in a sling, he accused fate bitterly of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of Destiny.  Colonel D’Hubert, his long moustache pendent in icicles on each side of his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed with the glare of snows, the principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coat looted with difficulty from the frozen corpse of a camp follower found in an abandoned cart, took a more thoughtful view of events.  His regularly handsome features now reduced to mere bony fines and fleshless hollows, looked out of a woman’s black velvet hood, over which was rammed forcibly a cocked hat picked up under the wheels of an empty army fourgon which must have contained at one time some general officer’s luggage.  The sheepskin coat being short for a man of his inches, ended very high up his elegant person, and the skin of his legs, blue with the cold, showed through the tatters of his nether garments.  This, under the circumstances, provoked neither jeers nor pity.  No one cared how the next man felt or looked.  Colonel D’Hubert himself hardened to exposure, suffered mainly in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency of his costume.  A thoughtless person may think that with a whole host of inanimate bodies bestrewing the path of retreat there could not have been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency.  But the great majority of these bodies lay buried under the falls of snow, others had been already despoiled; and besides, to loot a pair of breeches from a frozen corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist.  It requires time.  You must remain behind while your companions march on.  And Colonel D’Hubert had his scruples as to falling out.  They arose from a point of honour, and also a little from dread.  Once he stepped aside he could not be sure of ever rejoining his battalion.  And the enterprise demanded a physical effort from which his starved body shrank.  The ghastly intimacy of a wrestling match with the frozen dead opposing the unyielding rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant to the inborn delicacy of his feelings.

Luckily, one day grubbing in a mound of snow between the huts of a village in the hope of finding there a frozen potato or some vegetable garbage he could put between his long and shaky teeth, Colonel D’Hubert uncovered a couple of mats of the sort Russian peasants use to line the sides of their carts.  These, shaken free of frozen snow, bent about his person and fastened solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether garment, a sort of stiff petticoat, rendering Colonel D’Hubert a perfectly decent but a much more noticeable figure than before.