I told him then how I had found them, and how we kept them to wash our clothes.
'Well, then,' he said to the sergeant-major and me, 'you might lend them to me for a few days to wash my shirts, as they are horribly dirty. I hope you will be friendly, and not refuse me this.'
He took the women away the same evening, and no doubt they washed all the officers' shirts, as they did not come back for seven days.
A strong detachment of the regiment was sent on October 1st to plunder a large country-house some leagues from Moscow. We found very little—only a cart loaded with hay. As we returned, we met some Russian cavalry, who began caracoling round us without meaning to attack us seriously. We marched, however, in such a way as to show them that the advantage would not be theirs, for, although far fewer in numbers than they were, we had disabled several of them. They followed us to within a quarter of a league of Moscow.
On the 2nd we heard that the Emperor had given orders to arm the Kremlin; thirty pieces of cannon and howitzers of various calibre were to be placed on all the towers round the outside wall. The men on extra duty of every regiment of the Guard were commanded on the 3rd to dig and carry away all the materials coming from the old walls round the Kremlin, which the sapper-engineers had demolished, and all foundations which had been undermined.
On the 4th I went in my turn with the extra-duty men of our company; the next day the Colonel of the Engineers was killed close to me, by a brick from a mine just exploded. On the same day I saw near a church several dead bodies with the legs or arms eaten away, probably by wolves or dogs.
On the days off duty we drank, smoked, and laughed, talking of France and the distance separating it from us, and the possibility of being sent still farther off. When evening came, we invited our Muscovite slaves to join us (or, rather, our two Marquises, as we called them since the night of the ball), and we sat drinking Jamaica rum-punch.
The remainder of our stay in the town was passed in reviews and parades, up to the day when a courier came to inform the Emperor, in the middle of a review, that the Russians had broken the armistice, and had taken Murat's cavalry by surprise. The order to leave was therefore given, and the whole army was in instant movement; but our regiment only knew in the evening that we had orders to leave the next day. We gave the Muscovite women and the two tailors their share of the booty which we could not carry away. They threw themselves on the ground to kiss our feet twenty times—never had they imagined such riches.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] I learned since that it was General Pernetty, commander of the gunners of the Imperial Guard.—Author's Note.