Adieu - Honoré de Balzac (readict books .TXT) 📗

walk?"

"Take a brand from the fire and threaten them."

"Threaten the countess!"

"Good-bye," said the aide-de-camp, "I have scarcely time to get across that fatal river--and I MUST; I have a mother in France. What a night! These poor wretches prefer to lie here in the snow; half will allow themselves to perish in those flames rather than rise and move on. It is four o'clock, Philippe! In two hours the Russians will begin to move. I assure you you will again see the Beresina choked with corpses. Philippe! think of yourself! You have no horses, you cannot carry the countess in your arms. Come--come with me!" he said urgently, pulling de Sucy by the arm.

"My friend! abandon Stephanie!"

De Sucy seized the countess, made her stand upright, shook her with the roughness of a despairing man, and compelled her to wake up. She looked at him with fixed, dead eyes.

"You must walk, Stephanie, or we shall all die here."

For all answer the countess tried to drop again upon the snow and sleep. The aide-de-camp seized a brand from the fire and waved it in her face.

"We will save her in spite of herself!" cried Philippe, lifting the countess and placing her in the carriage.

He returned to implore the help of his friend. Together they lifted the old general, without knowing whether he were dead or alive, and put him beside his wife. The major then rolled over the men who were sleeping on his blankets, which he tossed into the carriage, together with some roasted fragments of his mare.

"What do you mean to do?" asked the aide-de-camp.

"Drag them."

"You are crazy."

"True," said Philippe, crossing his arms in despair.

Suddenly, he was seized by a last despairing thought.

"To you," he said, grasping the sound arm of his orderly, "I confide her for one hour. Remember that you must die sooner than let any one approach her."

The major then snatched up the countess's diamonds, held them in one hand, drew his sabre with the other, and began to strike with the flat of its blade such of the sleepers as he thought the most intrepid. He succeeded in awaking the colossal grenadier, and two other men whose rank it was impossible to tell.

"We are done for!" he said.

"I know it," said the grenadier, "but I don't care."

"Well, death for death, wouldn't you rather sell your life for a pretty woman, and take your chances of seeing France?"

"I'd rather sleep," said a man, rolling over on the snow, "and if you trouble me again, I'll stick my bayonet into your stomach."

"What is the business, my colonel?" said the grenadier. "That man is drunk; he's a Parisian; he likes his ease."

"That is yours, my brave grenadier," cried the major, offering him a string of diamonds, "if you will follow me and fight like a madman. The Russians are ten minutes' march from here; they have horses; we are going up to their first battery for a pair."

"But the sentinels?"

"One of us three--" he interrupted himself, and turned to the aide-de-camp. "You will come, Hippolyte, won't you?"

Hippolyte nodded.

"One of us," continued the major, "will take care of the sentinel. Besides, perhaps they are asleep too, those cursed Russians."

"Forward! major, you're a brave one! But you'll give me a lift on your carriage?" said the grenadier.

"Yes, if you don't leave your skin up there--If I fall, Hippolyte, and you, grenadier, promise me to do your utmost to save the countess."

"Agreed!" cried the grenadier.

They started for the Russian lines, toward one of the batteries which had so decimated the hapless wretches lying on the banks of the river. A few moments later, the gallop of two horses echoed over the snow, and the wakened artillery men poured out a volley which ranged above the heads of the sleeping men. The pace of the horses was so fleet that their steps resounded like the blows of a blacksmith on his anvil. The generous aide-de-camp was killed. The athletic grenadier was safe and sound. Philippe in defending Hippolyte had received a bayonet in his shoulder; but he clung to his horse's mane, and clasped him so tightly with his knees that the animal was held as in a vice.

"God be praised!" cried the major, finding his orderly untouched, and the carriage in its place.

"If you are just, my officer, you will get me the cross for this," said the man. "We've played a fine game of guns and sabres here, I can tell you."

"We have done nothing yet--Harness the horses. Take these ropes."

"They are not long enough."

"Grenadier, turn over those sleepers, and take their shawls and linen, to eke out."

"Tiens! that's one dead," said the grenadier, stripping the first man he came to. "Bless me! what a joke, they are all dead!"

"All?"

"Yes, all; seems as if horse-meat must be indigestible if eaten with snow."

The words made Philippe tremble. The cold was increasing.

"My God! to lose the woman I have saved a dozen times!"

The major shook the countess.

"Stephanie! Stephanie!"

The young woman opened her eyes.

"Madame! we are saved."

"Saved!" she repeated, sinking down again.

The horses were harnessed as best they could. The major, holding his sabre in his well hand, with his pistols in his belt, gathered up the reins with the other hand and mounted one horse while the grenadier mounted the other. The orderly, whose feet were frozen, was thrown inside the carriage, across the general and the countess. Excited by pricks from a sabre, the horses drew the carriage rapidly, with a sort of fury, to the plain, where innumerable obstacles awaited it. It was impossible to force a way without danger of crushing the sleeping men, women, and even children, who refused to move when the grenadier awoke them. In vain did Monsieur de Sucy endeavor to find the swathe cut by the rear-guard through the mass of human beings; it was already obliterated, like the wake of a vessel through the sea. They could only creep along, being often stopped by soldiers who threatened to kill their horses.

"Do you want to reach the bridge?" said the grenadier.

"At the cost of my life--at the cost of the whole world!"

"Then forward, march! you can't make omelets without breaking eggs."

And the grenadier of the guard urged the horses over men and bivouacs with bloody wheels and a double line of corpses on either side of them. We must do him the justice to say that he never spared his breath in shouting in stentorian tones,--

"Look out there, carrion!"

"Poor wretches!" cried the major.

"Pooh! that or the cold, that or the cannon," said the grenadier, prodding the horses, and urging them on.

A catastrophe, which might well have happened to them much sooner, put a stop to their advance. The carriage was overturned.

"I expected it," cried the imperturbable grenadier. "Ho! ho! your man is dead."

"Poor Laurent!" said the major.

"Laurent? Was he in the 5th chasseurs?"

"Yes."

"Then he was my cousin. Oh, well, this dog's life isn't happy enough to waste any joy in grieving for him."

The carriage could not be raised; the horses were taken out with serious and, as it proved, irreparable loss of time. The shock of the overturn was so violent that the young countess, roused from her lethargy, threw off her coverings and rose.

"Philippe, where are we?" she cried in a gentle voice, looking about her.

"Only five hundred feet from the bridge. We are now going to cross the Beresina, Stephanie, and once across I will not torment you any more; you shall sleep; we shall be in safety, and can reach Wilna easily.--God grant that she may never know what her life has cost!" he thought.

"Philippe! you are wounded!"

"That is nothing."

Too late! the fatal hour had come. The Russian cannon sounded the reveille. Masters of Studzianka, they could sweep the plain, and by daylight the major could see two of their columns moving and forming on the heights. A cry of alarm arose from the multitude, who started to their feet in an instant. Every man now understood his danger instinctively, and the whole mass rushed to gain the bridge with the motion of a wave.

The Russians came down with the rapidity of a conflagration. Men, women, children, horses,--all rushed tumultuously to the bridge. Fortunately the major, who was carrying the countess, was still some distance from it. General Eble had just set fire to the supports on the other bank. In spite of the warnings shouted to those who were rushing upon the bridge, not a soul went back. Not only did the bridge go down crowded with human beings, but the impetuosity of that flood of men toward the fatal bank was so furious that a mass of humanity poured itself violently into the river like an avalanche. Not a cry was heard; the only sound was like the dropping of monstrous stones into the water. Then the Beresina was a mass of floating corpses.

The retrograde movement of those who now fell back into the plain to escape the death before them was so violent, and their concussion against those who were advancing from the rear so terrible, that numbers were smothered or trampled to death. The Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to their carriage, behind which Philippe forced them, using it as a breastwork. As for the major and the grenadier, they found their safety in their strength. They killed to escape being killed.

This hurricane of human beings, the flux and reflux of living bodies, had the effect of leaving for a few short moments the whole bank of the Beresina deserted. The multitude were surging to the plain. If a few men rushed to the river, it was less in the hope of reaching the other bank, which to them was France, than to rush from the horrors of Siberia. Despair proved an aegis to some bold hearts. One officer sprang from ice-cake to ice-cake, and reached the opposite shore. A soldier clambered miraculously over mounds of dead bodies and heaps of ice. The multitude finally comprehended that the Russians would not put to death a body of twenty thousand men, without arms, torpid, stupid, unable to defend themselves; and each man awaited his fate with horrible resignation. Then the major and the grenadier, the general and his wife, remained almost alone on the river bank, a few steps from the spot where the bridge had been. They stood there, with dry eyes, silent, surrounded by heaps of dead. A few sound soldiers, a few officers to whom the emergency had restored their natural energy, were near them. This group consisted of some fifty men in all. The major noticed at a distance of some two hundred yards the remains of another bridge intended for carriages and destroyed the day before.

"Let us make a raft!" he cried.

He had hardly uttered the words before the whole group rushed to the ruins, and began to pick up iron bolts, and screws, and pieces of wood and ropes, whatever materials they could find that were suitable for the construction of a raft. A score of soldiers and officers, who were armed, formed a guard, commanded by the major, to protect the workers against the desperate attacks which might be