Rapp alone seemed to look about him with the air of
one who knew his whereabouts. In the straggling
trail of men behind him, not one in a hundred looked
for a friendly face. Some stared in front of
them with lifeless eyes, while others, with a little
spirit plucked up at the end of a weary march, glanced
up at the gabled houses with the interest called forth
by the first sight of a new city.
It was not until long afterwards that the world, piecing
together information purposely delayed and details
carefully falsified, knew that of the four hundred
thousand men who marched triumphantly to the Niemen,
only twenty thousand recrossed that river six months
later, and of these two-thirds had never seen Moscow.
Rapp, whose bloodshot eyes searched the crowd of faces
turned towards him, recognized a number of people.
To Mathilde he bowed gravely, and with a kindlier
glance turned in his saddle to bow again to Desiree.
They hardly heeded him, but with colourless faces
turned towards the staff riding behind him.
Most of the faces were strange: others were
so altered that the features had to be sought for
as in the face of a mummy. Neither Charles nor
de Casimir was among the horsemen. One or two
of them bowed, as their leader had done, to the two
girls.
“That is Captain de Villars,” said Mathilde,
“and the other I do not know. Nor that
tall man who is bowing now. Who are they?”
Desiree did not answer. None of these men was
Charles. Unconsciously holding her two mittened
hands at her throat, she searched each face.
They were well placed to see even those who followed
on foot. Many of them were not French.
It would have been easy to distinguish Charles or
de Casimir among the dark-visaged southerners.
Desiree was not conscious of the crowd around her.
She heard none of the muttered remarks. All
her soul was in her eyes.
“Is that all?” she said at length—as
the others had said at the entrance to the town.
She found she was standing hand-in-hand with Mathilde,
whose face was like marble.
At last, when even the crowd had passed away beneath
the Grunes Thor, they turned and walked home in silence.
Distinct
with footprints yet
Of many a mighty marcher
gone that way.
There are many who overlook the fact that in Northern
lands, more especially in such plains as Lithuania,
Courland, and Poland, travel in winter is easier than
at any other time of year. The rivers, which
run sluggishly in their ditch-like beds, are frozen
so completely that the bridges are no longer required.
The roads, in summer almost impassable—mere
ruts across the plain—are for the time
ignored, and the traveller strikes a bee-line from
place to place across a level of frozen snow.
Louis d’Arragon had worked out a route across
the plain, as he had been taught to shape a course
across a chart.
