their vigorous vitality invested them both with the appearance of an heroic pair in the eyes of their comrades.  And they never exchanged more than a casual word or two, except one day, when skirmishing in front of the battalion against a worrying attack of cavalry, they found themselves cut off in the woods by a small party of Cossacks.  A score of fur-capped, hairy horsemen rode to and fro, brandishing their lances in ominous silence; but the two officers had no mind to lay down their arms, and Colonel Feraud suddenly spoke up in a hoarse, growling voice, bringing his firelock to the shoulder.  “You take the nearest brute, Colonel D’Hubert; I’ll settle the next one.  I am a better shot than you are.”

Colonel D’Hubert nodded over his levelled musket.  Their shoulders were pressed against the trunk of a large tree; on their front enormous snowdrifts protected them from a direct charge.  Two carefully aimed shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacks reeled in their saddles.  The rest, not thinking the game good enough, closed round their wounded comrades and galloped away out of range.  The two officers managed to rejoin their battalion halted for the night.  During that afternoon they had leaned upon each other more than once, and towards the end, Colonel D’Hubert, whose long legs gave him an advantage in walking through soft snow, peremptorily took the musket of Colonel Feraud from him and carried it on his shoulder, using his own as a staff.

On the outskirts of a village half buried in the snow an old wooden barn burned with a clear and an immense flame.  The sacred battalion of skeletons, muffled in rags, crowded greedily the windward side, stretching hundreds of numbed, bony hands to the blaze.  Nobody had noted their approach.  Before entering the circle of light playing on the sunken, glassy-eyed, starved faces, Colonel D’Hubert spoke in his turn: 

“Here’s your musket, Colonel Feraud.  I can walk better than you.”

Colonel Feraud nodded, and pushed on towards the warmth of the fierce flames.  Colonel D’Hubert was more deliberate, but not the less bent on getting a place in the front rank.  Those they shouldered aside tried to greet with a faint cheer the reappearance of the two indomitable companions in activity and endurance.  Those manly qualities had never perhaps received a higher tribute than this feeble acclamation.

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 the thick sprouting of a wiry beard, a frost-bitten hand wrapped up in filthy rags carried in a sling, he accused fate of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of Destiny.  Colonel D’Hubert, his long moustaches 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