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 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.
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