Louis d’Arragon made a sudden effort and rose
to his feet, beneath which the snow squeaked.
“Come,” he said. “If we stay,
we shall fall asleep, and then—”
Barlasch roused himself and looked sleepily at his
companion. He had a patch of blue on either
cheek.
“Come!” shouted Louis, as if to a deaf
man. “Let us go on to Kowno, and find
out whether he is alive or dead.”
Our wills and fates
do so contrary run,
That our devices still
are overthrown.
Our thoughts are ours,
their ends none of our own.
Rapp found himself in a stronghold which was strong
in theory only. For the frozen river formed the
easiest possible approach, instead of an insuperable
barrier to the enemy. He had an army which was
a paper army only.
He had, according to official returns, thirty-five
thousand men. In reality a bare eight thousand
could be collected to show a face to the enemy.
The rest were sick and wounded. There was no
national spirit among these men; they hardly had a
language in common. For they were men from Africa
and Italy, from France, Germany, Poland, Spain, and
Holland. The majority of them were recruits,
raw and of poor physique. All were fugitives,
flying before those dread Cossacks whose “hurrah!
hurrah!”—the Arabic “kill! kill!”—haunted
their fitful sleep at night. They came to Dantzig
not to fight, but to lie down and rest. They
were the last of the great army—the reinforcements
dragged to the frontier which many of them had never
crossed. For those who had been to Moscow were
few and far between. The army of Moscow had perished
at Malo-Jaroslavetz, at the Beresina, in Smolensk
and Vilna.
These fugitives had fled to Dantzig for safety; and
Rapp in crossing the bridge had made a grimace, for
he saw that there was no safety here.
The fortifications had been merely sketched out.
The ditches were full of snow, the rivers were frozen.
All work was at a standstill. Dantzig lay at
the mercy of the first-comer.
In twenty-four hours every available smith was at
work, forging ice-axes and picks. Rapp was
going to cut the frozen Vistula and set the river
free. The Dantzigers laughed aloud.
“It will freeze again in a night,” they
said. And it did. So Rapp set the ice-cutters
to work again next day. He kept boats moving
day and night in the water, which ran sluggish and
thick, like porridge, with the desire to freeze and
be still.
He ordered the engineers to set to work on the abandoned
fortifications. But the ground was hard like
granite, and the picks sprang back in the worker’s
grip, jarring his bones, and making not so much as
a mark on the surface of the earth.
Again the Dantzigers laughed.
“It is frozen three feet down,” they said.
The thermometer marked between twenty and thirty degrees
of frost every night now. And it was only December—only
the beginning of the winter. The Russians were
at the Niemen, daily coming nearer. Dantzig was
full of sick and wounded. The available troops
were worn out, frost-bitten, desperate. There
were only a few doctors, who were without medical
stores; no meat, no vegetables, no spirits, no forage.
