ne.

"Bravo! Ha, ha, ha!" rose their rough, joyous laughter from all sides.

Morel, wrinkling up his face, laughed too.

"Well, go on, go on!"

"Qui eut le triple talent,
De boire, de battre,
Et d'etre un vert galant." *

* Who had a triple talent
For drinking, for fighting,
And for being a gallant old boy...

"It goes smoothly, too. Well, now, Zaletaev!"

"Ke..." Zaletaev, brought out with effort: "ke-e-e-e," he drawled,
laboriously pursing his lips, "le-trip-ta-la-de-bu-de-ba, e
de-tra-va-ga-la" he sang.

"Fine! Just like the Frenchie! Oh, ho ho! Do you want some more to eat?"

"Give him some porridge: it takes a long time to get filled up after
starving."

They gave him some more porridge and Morel with a laugh set to work on
his third bowl. All the young soldiers smiled gaily as they watched him.
The older men, who thought it undignified to amuse themselves with such
nonsense, continued to lie at the opposite side of the fire, but one
would occasionally raise himself on an elbow and glance at Morel with a
smile.

"They are men too," said one of them as he wrapped himself up in his
coat. "Even wormwood grows on its own root."

"O Lord, O Lord! How starry it is! Tremendous! That means a hard
frost...."

They all grew silent. The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking
at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring
up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something
gladsome and mysterious to one another.

CHAPTER X

The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical
progression; and that crossing of the Berezina about which so much has
been written was only one intermediate stage in its destruction, and
not at all the decisive episode of the campaign. If so much has been
and still is written about the Berezina, on the French side this is only
because at the broken bridge across that river the calamities their army
had been previously enduring were suddenly concentrated at one moment
into a tragic spectacle that remained in every memory, and on the
Russian side merely because in Petersburg--far from the seat of war--a
plan (again one of Pfuel's) had been devised to catch Napoleon in a
strategic trap at the Berezina River. Everyone assured himself that all
would happen according to plan, and therefore insisted that it was just
the crossing of the Berezina that destroyed the French army. In reality