"Sapristi, it may be as you say," said Karl; "If so I am glad of it. Then we can allow her to go with minds more at rest."
However this may have been, Louise attended the conscript drill for a month with the rest, and assuredly Michel Prevost there acquitted himself as well as any recruit upon the ground. Accustomed to male attire, which she had worn for some seventeen out of the full tally of the years of her life, she betrayed no awkwardness, whether in plain clothes or in uniform. Accustomed no less to every athletic exercise which went towards the training of the young men of her day, she satisfied the drill sergeant as easily as the most active of her companions, not one of whom ever showed the slightest suspicion as to her sex.
At the end of the month the somewhat raw company of young soldiers, of whom Louise was one, marched through Paris and away; a month later on and they had joined the ranks of Napoleon's ill-fated army. This army consisted of 356,000 Frenchmen, and a heterogeneous collection of 322,000 foreign troops, consisting of Belgians, Dutch, Hanoverians, Italians, Spaniards, Austrians, Prussians, Bavarians, Hessians, men of Frankfort, of Wurtemberg and of Mecklenburg, Poles and others. It was called by the Russians "The Army of Twenty Nations".
Napoleon himself was at Kovno, with about 200,000 troops commanded by Marshals Davoust, Oudinot, Ney, Bessières and Murat. But the detachment of which the conscript Michel Prevost was a member did not join the mighty host until the river Niemen had been crossed, and the dogs of war set at the heels of Alexander and his men.
To oppose his great rival the Tsar had, at this moment, but 150,000 troops, under Generals Bagration and Barclay de Tolly, though 200,000 men were elsewhere disposed, to be called up when required. Besides these troops, the Tsar could count upon some 80,000 Cossacks already enrolled and equipped. Beyond and above all these, too, he could rely upon the nation to provide, in the moment of need, an almost unlimited supply of raw material, ready to fight and die with the best in defence of their beloved country.
Meanwhile Vera had returned, with the rest of the Embassy, to St. Petersburg, and here, within a very few days, she received a visit from Countess Maximof, Sasha's mother, a middle-aged dame of typical Russian appearance and manners: kindly, gushing, voluble in a mixture of Russian and French, used indiscriminately as the words happened to occur to her.
"But, my dear, you are charming, exquisite!" she exclaimed, standing before the girl in an attitude of rapt admiration. "We had heard that you had grown up very beautiful, but this! who would have believed it? And my Sasha absent and unable to see you!"
"Is Alexander Petrovitch away then?" asked Vera, embarrassed by the good lady's compliments and wishing the visit over almost before it was begun.
"Alas—he is gone to this cruel war, chérie, where else? All that is best and most precious of our manhood has gone, and Sasha with the rest. Oh, this Napoleon of yours—though indeed he is no more yours than ours—there is no good thing to be said of him; he is Beelzebub, the prince of the devils!"
"I do not defend him," said Vera. "Why should I? I am as good a Russian as the best."