Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/228

218 agony of the retreat from Moscow had yielded to their doom. Féron was dead—Rougeard was dead, as he believed—the dying face of many another comrade rose before him—and now, this child. How was he better than they?

Before he lay down to sleep he had prayed for himself and for Guido. The little one also had clasped his baby hands and lisped in his soft Italian a prayer that they might find his mother on the morrow. But beside that still, fair form—almost as white as the snow around it, and consecrated with the twofold beauty of childhood and of death—Henri breathed no prayer. Not then, nor for many days afterwards. It was no use, he said in his heart.

Still he wandered on—in cold, in hunger, in weariness. Hope was gone, memory had almost left him; nothing remained but that desperate clinging to life, which is scarcely more than the instinct of an animal. The path he had to follow was strewn with the dead bodies of his comrades; and upon these he sometimes found a little bread, or a small quantity of wine or spirits. On more than one occasion he warmed his freezing limbs by crouching beneath the corpse of a fellow-sufferer in whom the vital spark was only just extinct. He could not have survived at all but for the sugar and the chocolate that he had obtained for Guido. These, though he knew it not, afforded precisely the kind of nutriment best adapted to sustain life under intense cold.

He was seldom conscious of any sensations but those of the body. He was always cold, always hungry, always in pain; only sometimes this never-ceasing, never-ending sense of pain was lightened by a kind of dull satisfaction, as when he found food, or slept, or felt a little warmer than usual. Occasionally a comrade would hail him, and inquire his name and whither he was going. Henri hardly knew what he