cavalry even. 

 Baiting their horses, and getting a welcome meal at the inn—the town itself had as yet suffered nothing from the ravages of the Cossacks, being too strong for raiding parties—and refusing to answer questions, and paying no attention to wondering looks of the inhabitants, they rode out again. Their way through the marshes of St. Gond was dreadful. If only the weather would change, the ground would freeze, how welcome would be the altered conditions. But the half snow, the half rain, still beat down upon them. Their poor beasts were almost exhausted. They broke the ice of the Grand Morin river to get water for the horses and themselves, and, not daring to kindle a fire, for they were approaching the country occupied by Blücher, they made a scanty meal from their haversacks. 

 They had found the farmhouses and châteaux deserted, evidences of hasty flight and plunder on every side. The Cossacks had swept through the land beyond the town. The people who could had fled to Sézanne, or had gone westward hurriedly, to escape the raiders. In the ruined villages and farms they came across many dead bodies of old women, old men and children, with here and there a younger woman whose awful fate filled the old soldier and the young alike with grim and passionate rage. 

 "Yonder," said Marteau, gloomily pointing westward through the darkness, "lies Aumenier and my father's house." 

 "And mine," added Bullet-Stopper. 

 There was no need to express the thought further, to dilate upon it. It had been the Emperor's maxim that war should support war. His armies had lived off the country. The enemy had taken a leaf out of his own book. Even the stupid could not fight forever against Napoleon without learning something. The allies ate up the land, ravaged it, turned it into a desert—lex talionis! 

 Marteau's father still lived, with his younger sister. Old Bullet-Stopper was alone in the world but for his friends. What had happened in that little village yonder? What was going on in the great château, so long closed, now finally abandoned by the proud royalist family which had owned it and had owned Marteau and old Bullet-Stopper, and all the rest of the villagers, for that matter, for eight hundred years, or until the revolution had set them free? 

 Plunged in those gloomy thoughts the young officer involuntarily took a step in the direction of that village. 

 "On the Emperor's service," said the 

 Prev. P 27/217 next