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 fines 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 his elegant person, 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 the great majority
of these bodies lay buried under the falls of snow, others had been
already despoiled; and besides, 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. You must remain behind while your companions march on. And Colonel
D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. They arose from a point of
honour, and also a little from dread. Once he stepped aside he could not
be sure of ever rejoining his battalion. And the enterprise demanded a
physical effort from which his starved body shrank. The ghastly intimacy
of a wrestling match with the frozen dead opposing the unyielding
rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant to the inborn 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. These, shaken free of frozen snow, bent about his
person and fastened solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether
garment, a sort of stiff petticoat, rendering 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 o