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 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 lines 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, 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 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 and labour. You must remain behind while your companions
march on. Colonel D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. Once he
had stepped aside he could not be sure of ever rejoining his battalion;
and the ghastly intimacy of a wrestling match with the frozen dead
opposing the unyielding rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant
to the 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 with. These,
beaten free of frozen snow, bent about his elegant person and fastened
solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether garment, a sort of
stiff petticoat, which rendered Colonel D'Hubert a perfectly decent, but
a much more noticeable figure than before.
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