“Work at it in twos! give us a lever here! that’s it. Where are you coming to?”
“Now, all together.… But wait, lads! … With a shout!” …
All were silent, and a low voice of velvety sweetness began singing a song. At the end of the third verse, as the last note died away, twenty voices roared out in chorus, “O-O-O-O-O! It’s coming! Pull away! Heave away, lads! …” but in spite of their united efforts the wall hardly moved, and in the silence that followed the men could be heard panting for breath.
“Hi, you there, of the sixth company! You devils, you! Lend us a hand … We’ll do you a good turn one day!”
Twenty men of the sixth company, who were passing, joined them, and the wattle wall, thirty-five feet in length, and seven feet in breadth, was dragged along the village street, falling over, and cutting the shoulders of the panting soldiers.
“Go on, do. … Heave away, you there.… What are you stopping for? Eh, there?” …
The merry shouts of unseemly abuse never ceased.
“What are you about?” cried a peremptory voice, as a sergeant ran up to the party. “There are gentry here; the general himself’s in the hut here, and you devils, you curs, you! I’ll teach you!” shouted the sergeant, and sent a swinging blow at the back of the first soldier he could come across. “Can’t you go quietly?”
The soldiers were quiet. The soldier who had received the blow began grumbling, as he rubbed his bleeding face, which had been scratched by his being knocked forward against the wattle.
“Ay, the devil; how he does hit a fellow! Why, he has set all my face bleeding,” he said in a timid whisper, as the sergeant walked away. “And you don’t enjoy it, eh?” said a laughing voice; and the soldiers, moderating their voices, moved on. As they got out of the village, they began talking as loudly again, interspersing their talk with the same meaningless oaths.
In the hut by which the soldiers had passed there were assembled the chief officers in command, and an eager conversation was going on over their tea about that day’s doings and the man?uvres proposed for the night. The plan was to execute a flank movement to the left, cut off and capture the viceroy.
By the time the soldiers had dragged the fence to its place they found blazing fires, cooking supper on all sides. The firewood was crackling, the snow was melting, and the black shadows of soldiers were flitting to and fro all over the space between trampled down in the snow.
Axes and cutlasses were at work on all sides. Everything was done without a word of command being given. Wood was piled up for a supply of fuel through the night, shanties were being rigged up for the officers, pots were being boiled, and arms and accoutrements set to rights.
The wattle wall was set up in a semicircle to give shelter from the north, propped up by stakes, and before it was built a camp-fire. They beat the tattoo-call, counted over their number, had supper, and settled themselves round the fires—some repairing their foot-gear, some smoking pipes, others stripped naked trying to steam the lice out of their clothes.
Chapter 8
ONE would naturally have expected that in the almost inconceivably wretched conditions in which the Russian soldiers were placed at that time—without thick boots, without fur coats, without a roof over their heads in the snow, with a frost of eighteen degrees, often without full rations—they must have presented a most melancholy and depressing spectacle.
It was quite the opposite. Never under the most favourable material conditions had the army worn a livelier and more cheerful aspect. This was due to the fact that every element that showed signs of depression or weakness was sifted every day out of the army. All the physically and morally weak had long ago been left behind. What was left was the pick of the army—in strength of body and of spirit.
The camp-fire of the eighth company, screened by their wattle fence, attracted a greater crowd than any. Two sergeants were sitting by it, and the fire was blazing more brightly than any of them. They insisted on logs being brought in return for the right of sitting under the screen.
“Hi, Makyev, hullo … are you lost, or have the wolves eaten you? Fetch some wood,” shouted a red-faced, red-haired soldier, screwing up his eyes, and blinking from the smoke, but not moving back from the fire.
“You run, Crow, and fetch some wood,” he cried, addressing another soldier. The red-headed man was not a non-commissioned officer, nor a corporal, but he was a sturdy fellow, and so he gave orders to those who were weaker than himself. A thin, little soldier, with a sharp nose, who was called the “Crow,” got up submissively, and was about to obey; but at that moment there stepped into the light of the fire the slender, hand-some figure of a young soldier, carrying a load of wood.
“Give it here. Well, that’s something like!”
They broke up the wood and threw it on, blew up the fire with their mouths, and fanned it with the skirts of their coats, and the flame began to hiss and crackle. The soldiers drew nearer the fire and lighted their pipes. The handsome young soldier who had brought in the wood put his arms akimbo, and began a smart and nimble shuffle with his frozen feet as he stood.
“Ah, mother dear, the dew is cold, but yet it is fine, and a musketeer!” … he began singing, with a sort of hiccup at each syllable of the song.
“Hey, his soles are flying off!” cried the red-haired man, noticing that the dancer’s soles were loose. “He’s a rare devil for dancing!”
The dancer stopped, tore off the loose leather, and flung it in the fire.
“You’re right there, brother,” said he, and sitting down he took out of his knapsack a strip of French blue cloth, and began binding it round his foot. “It’s the steam that warps them,” he added, stretching his feet out to the fire.
“They’ll soon serve us new ones. They say when we finish them off, we are all to have a double lot of stuff.”
“I say, that son of a bitch, Petrov, has sneaked off, it seems,” said a sergeant.
“It’s a long while since I’ve noticed him,” said the other.
“Oh, well, a poor sort of soldier …”
“And in the third company, they were saying, there were nine men missing at the roll-call yesterday.”
“Well, but after all, when one’s feet are frozen, how’s one to walk?”
“Oh, stuff and nonsense!” said the sergeant.
“Why, do you want to do the same?” said an old soldier; reproachfully addressing the man who had talked of frozen feet.
“Well, what do you think?” the sharp-nosed soldier, called “Crow,” said suddenly, in a squeaking and quavery voice, turning himself on one elbow behind the fire. “If a man’s sleek and fat, he just grows thin, but for a thin man it’s death. Look at me, now! I have no strength left,” he said, with sudden resolution, addressing a sergeant. “Say the word for me to be sent off to the hospital. I’m one ache with rheumatism, and one only gets left behind just the same …”
“There, that’s enough; that’s enough,” said the sergeant calmly.
The soldier was silent, and the conversation went on.
“There’s a rare lot of these Frenchies have been taken to-day; but not a pair of boots on one of them, one may say, worth having; no, not worth mentioning,” one of the soldiers began, starting a new subject.
“The Cossacks had stripped them of everything. We cleaned a hut for the colonel, and carried them out. It was pitiful to see them, lads,” said the dancer. “We overhauled them. One was alive, would you believe it, muttering something in their lingo.”
“They’re a clean people, lads,” said the first. “White—why, as white as a birch-tree, and brave they are, I must say, and gentlemen too.”
“Well, what would you expect? Soldiers are taken from all classes with them.”
“And yet they don’t understand a word we say,” said the dancer, with a wondering smile. “I says to him, ‘Of what kingdom are you?’ and he mutters away his lingo. A strange people!”
“I’ll tell you a wonderful thing, mates,” went on the man who had expressed surprise at their whiteness. “The peasants about Mozhaisk were telling how, when they went to take away the dead where the great battle was, why, their bodies had been lying there a good month. Well, they lay there, as white and clean as paper, and not a smell about them.”
“Why, from the cold, eh?” asked one.
“You’re a clever one! Cold, indeed! Why, it was hot weather. If it had been from the cold, our men, too, wouldn’t have rotted. But they say, go up to one of ours, and it would all be putrefied and maggoty. They tie handkerchiefs round their noses, and drag them off, turning their faces away, so they say. They can’t help it. But they’re white as paper; not a smell about them.”
There was a general silence.
“Must be from the feeding,” said the sergeant: “they are gorged like gentry.”
No one replied.
“That peasant at Mozhaisk, where the battle was, was saying that they were fetched from ten villages round, and at work there for twenty days, and couldn’t get all the dead away. A lot of those wolves, says he …”
“That was something like a battle,” said an old soldier. “The only one worth mentioning; everything since … it’s simply tormenting folks for nothing.”
“Oh, well, uncle, we did attack them the day before yesterday. But what’s one to do? They won’t let us get at them. They were so quick at laying down their arms, and on their knees. Pardon!—they say. And that’s only one example. They have said twice that Platov had taken Polion himself. He catches him, and lo! he turns into a bird in his hands and flies away and away. And as to killing him, no manner of means of doing it.”
“You’re a sturdy liar, Kiselov, by the look of you!”
“Liar, indeed! It’s the holy truth.”
“Well, if you ask me, I’d bury him in the earth, if I caught him. Yes, with a good aspen cudgel. The number of folk he has destroyed!”
“Any way, we shall soon make an end of him; he won’t come again,” said the old soldier, yawning.
The conversation died away; the soldiers began making themselves comfortable for the night.
“I say, what a lot of stars; how they shine! One would say the women had been laying out their linen!” said a soldier admiring the Milky Way.
“That’s a sign of a good harvest, lads!”
“We shall want a little more wood.”
“One warms one’s back, and one’s belly freezes. That’s queer.”
“O Lord!”
“What are you shoving for—is the fire only for you, eh? See … there he sprawls.”
In the silence that reigned snoring could be heard from a few who had gone to sleep. The rest turned themselves to get warm by the fire, exchanging occasional remarks. From a fire a hundred paces away came a chorus of merry laughter.
“They are guffawing in the fifth company,” said a soldier. “And what a lot of them there!”
A soldier got up and went off to the fifth company.
“There’s a bit of fun!” he said, coming back. “Two Frenchies have come. One’s quite frozen, but the other’s a fine plucky fellow! He’s singing songs.”
“O-O! must go and look …” Several soldiers went across to the fifth company.
Chapter 9
THE FIFTH COMPANY was bivouacking close up to the birch copse. An immense camp-fire was blazing brightly in the middle of the snow, lighting up the rime-covered boughs of the trees.
In the middle of the night the soldiers had heard footsteps and the cracking of branches in the copse.
“A bear, lads,” said one soldier.
All raised their heads and listened; and out of the copse there stepped into the bright light of the fire two strangely garbed human figures clinging to one another. These were two Frenchmen, who had been hiding in the wood. Hoarsely articulating something in a tongue incomprehensible to the soldiers, they approached the fire. One, wearing an officer’s hat, was rather the taller, and seemed utterly spent. He tried to sit down by the fire, but sank on to the ground. The other, a little, stumpy man, with a kerchief bound round his cheeks, was stronger. He held his companion up, and said something pointing to his mouth. The soldiers surrounded the Frenchmen, laid a coat under the sick man, and brought both of them porridge and vodka. The exhausted French officer was Ramballe; the little man bandaged up in the kerchief was his servant, Morel.
When Morel had drunk some vodka and eaten a bowl of porridge, he suddenly passed into a state of morbid hilarity, and kept up an incessant babble with the soldiers, who could not understand him. Ramballe refused food, and leaning on one elbow by the fire, gazed dumbly with red, vacant eyes at the Russian soldiers. At intervals he uttered a prolonged groan and then was mute again. Morel, pointing to his shoulders, gave the soldiers to understand that this was an officer, and that he needed warmth. A Russian officer, who had come up to the fire, sent to ask the colonel whether he would take a French officer into his warm cottage. When they came back and said that the colonel bade them bring the officer, they told Ramballe to go to him. He got up and tried to walk, but staggered, and would have fallen had not a soldier standing near caught him.
“What? You don’t want to, eh?” said a soldier addressing Ramballe with a jocose wink.
“Eh, you fool! It’s no time for your fooling. A peasant, a real peasant,” voices were heard on all sides blaming the jocose soldier. The others surrounded Ramballe. Two of them held him up under the arms and carried him to the cottage. Ramballe put his arms round the soldiers’ necks, and as they lifted him he began wailing plaintively.
“O you good fellows! O my kind, kind friends. These are men! O my brave, kind friends”; and like a child he put his head down on the soldier’s shoulder.
Meanwhile Morel was sitting in the best place surrounded by the soldiers.
Morel, a little, thickset Frenchman, with swollen, streaming eyes, was dressed in a woman’s jacket and had a woman’s kerchief tied over his forage cap. He was evidently tipsy, and with one arm thrown round the soldier sitting next him, he was singing a French song in a husky, broken voice. The soldiers simply held their sides as they looked at him.
“Now then, now then, teach it me; how does it go? I’ll catch it in no time. How was it?” said the soldier Morel was hugging, who was one of the singers and fond of a joke.
“Vive Henri Quatre! Vive ce roi vaillant! …” sang Morel, winking. “Ce diable à quatre …”
“Vi-va-ri-ka! Viff-se-ru-va-ru! Si-dya-blya-ka!…” repeated the soldier, waving his hand and catching the tune correctly.
“Bravo! Ho-ho-ho-ho!” a hoarse guffaw of delight rose on all sides. Morel, wrinkling up his face, laughed too.
“Come, strike up, more, more!”
“Qui eut le triple talent de boire, de battre, et d’être un vert galant.”
“That sounds well too. Now, Zaletaev!…”
“Kyu,” Zaletaev articulated with effort. “Kyu-yu-yu …” he sang, puckering up his lips elaborately; “le-trip-ta-la-de-boo-de-ba-ce-detra-va-ga-la.”
“That’s fine! That’s a fine Frenchman, to be sure! oy … ho-ho-ho. Well, do you want some more to eat?”
