coat looted with difficulty from the frozen corpse of a camp follower found in an abandoned cart, took a more thoughtful view of events.  His regularly handsome features, now reduced to mere bony lines and fleshless hollows, looked out of a woman’s black velvet hood, over which was rammed forcibly a cocked hat picked up under the wheels of an empty army fourgon, which must have contained at one time some general officer’s luggage.  The sheepskin coat being short for a man of his inches ended very high up, and the skin of his legs, blue with the cold, showed through the tatters of his nether garments.  This under the circumstances provoked neither jeers nor pity.  No one cared how the next man felt or looked.  Colonel D’Hubert himself, hardened to exposure, suffered mainly in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency of his costume.  A thoughtless person may think that with a whole host of inanimate bodies bestrewing the path of retreat there could not have been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency.  But to loot a pair of breeches from a frozen corpse is not so easy as it may appear to a mere theorist.  It requires time and labour.  You must remain behind while your companions march on.  Colonel D’Hubert had his scruples as to falling out.  Once he had stepped aside he could not be sure of ever rejoining his battalion; and the ghastly intimacy of a wrestling match with the frozen dead opposing the unyielding rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant to the delicacy of his feelings.  Luckily, one day, grubbing in a mound of snow between the huts of a village in the hope of finding there a frozen potato or some vegetable garbage he could put between his long and shaky teeth, Colonel D’Hubert uncovered a couple of mats of the sort Russian peasants use to line the sides of their carts with.  These, beaten free of frozen snow, bent about his elegant person and fastened solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether garment, a sort of stiff petticoat, which rendered Colonel D’Hubert a perfectly decent, but a much more noticeable figure than before.

Thus accoutred, he continued to retreat, never doubting of his personal escape, but full of other misgivings.  The early buoyancy of his belief in the future was destroyed.  If the road of glory led through such unforeseen passages, he asked himself—­for he was reflective—­whether the guide was altogether trustworthy.  It was a patriotic sadness, not unmingled with some personal concern, and quite unlike the unreasoning indignation against men and things nursed by Colonel Feraud.  Recruiting his strength in a little German town for three weeks, Colonel D’Hubert was surprised to discover within himself a love of repose.  His returning vigour was strangely pacific in its aspirations.  He meditated silently upon this bizarre change of mood.  No doubt many of his brother officers of field rank went through the same moral experience.  But these were not the times to talk of it.  In one of his letters home Colonel D’Hubert wrote, “All your plans, my dear Leonie, for marrying me to the charming girl you have discovered in your neighbourhood, seem farther off than ever.  Peace is not yet.  Europe wants another lesson.  It will be a hard task for us, but it shall be done, because the Emperor is invincible.”