US II

Death in a thousand motley forms;
Charred corpses hooking each other's arms
In the sleep that defies all war's alarms!

CHORUS

Pale cysts of souls in every stage,
Still bent to embraces of love or rage,--
Souls passed to where History pens no page.

The flames of the burning bridge go out as it consumes to the water's
edge, and darkness mantles all, nothing continuing but the purl of
the river and the clickings of floating ice.

SCENE XI

THE OPEN COUNTRY BETWEEN SMORGONI AND WILNA

[The winter is more merciless, and snow continues to fall upon a
deserted expanse of unenclosed land in Lithuania. Some scattered
birch bushes merge in a forest in the background.

It is growing dark, though nothing distinguishes where the sun
sets. There is no sound except that of a shuffling of feet in
the direction of a bivouac. Here are gathered tattered men like
skeletons. Their noses and ears are frost-bitten, and pus is
oozing from their eyes.

These stricken shades in a limbo of gloom are among the last
survivors of the French army. Few of them carry arms. One squad,
ploughing through snow above their knees, and with icicles dangling
from their hair that clink like glass-lustres as they walk, go
into the birch wood, and are heard chopping. They bring back
boughs, with which they make a screen on the windward side, and
contrive to light a fire. With their swords they cut rashers from
a dead horse, and grill them in the flames, using gunpowder for
salt to eat them with. Two others return from a search, with a
dead rat and some candle-ends. Their meal shared, some try to
repair their gaping shoes and to tie up their feet, that are
chilblained to the bone.

A straggler enters, who whispers to one or two soldiers of the
group. A shudder runs through them at his words.]

FIRST SOLDIER [dazed]

What--gone, do you say? Gone?

STRAGGLER

Yes, I say gone!
He left us at Smorgoni hours ago.
The Sacred Squadron even he has left behind.
By this time he's at Warsaw or beyond,
Full pace for Paris.

SECOND SOLDIER [jumping up wildly]

Gone? How did he go?
No, surely! He could not desert us so!

STRAGGLER

He started in a carriage, with Roustan
The Mameluke on the box: Caulaincourt, too,
Was insi