e the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert; I'll settle the next one.
I am a better shot than you are."

Colonel D'Hubert only nodded over his levelled musket. Their shoulders
were pressed against the trunk of a large tree; in front, deep
snowdrifts protected them from a direct charge.

[Illustration: 088.jpg "You take the nearest brute, Colonel D'Hubert"]

Two carefully aimed shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacks
reeled in their saddles. The rest, not thinking the game good enough,
closed round their wounded comrades and galloped away out of range. The
two officers managed to rejoin their battalion, halted for the night.
During that afternoon they had leaned upon each other more than once,
and towards the last Colonel D'Hubert, whose long legs gave him an
advantage in walking through soft snow, peremptorily took the musket
from Colonel Feraud and carried it on his shoulder, using his own as a
staff.

On the outskirts of a village, half-buried in the snow, an old wooden
barn burned with a clear and immense flame. The sacred battalion of
skeletons muffled in rags crowded greedily the windward side, stretching
hundreds of numbed, bony hands to the blaze. Nobody had noted their
approach. Before entering the circle of light playing on the multitude
of sunken, glassy-eyed, starved faces, Colonel D'Hubert spoke in his
turn:

"Here's your firelock, Colonel Feraud. I can walk better than you."

Colonel Feraud nodded, and pushed on towards the warmth of the fierce
flames. Colonel D'Hubert was more deliberate, but not the less bent
on getting a place in the front rank. Those they pushed aside tried
to greet with a faint cheer the reappearance of the two indomitable
companions in activity and endurance. Those manly qualities had never,
perhaps, received a higher tribute than this feeble acclamation.

This is the faithful record of speeches exchanged during the retreat
from Moscow by Colonels Feraud and D'Hubert. Colonel Feraud's
taciturnity was the outcome of concentrated rage. Short, hairy,
black-faced with layers of grime, and a thick sprouting of a wiry beard,
a frost-bitten hand, wrapped in filthy rags, carried in a sling, he
accused fate bitterly of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of
Destiny. Colonel D'Hubert, his long moustache pendent in icicles on each
side of his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed with the glare of
snows, the principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coat
looted