No wonder the Dantzigers laughed. Rapp, who had to rely on Southerners to obey his orders—Italians, Africans, a few Frenchmen, men little used to cold and the hardships of a Northern winter—Rapp let them laugh. He was a medium-sized man, with a bullet-head and a round chubby face, a small nose, round eyes, and, if you please, side-whiskers.
Never for a moment did he admit that things looked black. He lit enormous bonfires, melted the frozen earth, and built the fortifications that had been planned.
“I took counsel,” he said, long afterwards, “with two engineer officers whose devotion equalled their brilliancy—Colonel Richemont and General Campredon.”
Soldiers might for all time study with advantage the acts of such obscure and almost forgotten men as these. For, through them, Napoleon was now teaching the world that a fortified place might be made stronger than any had hitherto suspected. That he should turn round and teach, on the other hand, that a city usually considered impregnable could be taken without great loss of life, was only characteristic of his splendid genius, which, like a towering tree, grew and grew until it fell.
The days were very short now, and it was dark when the sappers—whose business it was to keep the ice moving in the river at that spot where the Government building-yard abuts the river front to-day—were roused from their meditations by a shout on the farther bank.
They pushed their clumsy boat through the ice, and soon perceived against the snowy distance the outline of a man wrapped, swaddled, disguised in the heaped-up clothing so familiar to Eastern Europe at this time. The joke of seeing a grave artilleryman clad in a lady's ermine cloak had long since lost its savour for those who dwelt near the Moscow road.
“Ah! comrade,” said one of the boatmen, an Italian who spoke French and had learnt his seamanship on the Mediterranean, by whose waters he would never idle again. “Ah! you are from Moscow?”
“And you, countryman?” replied the new-comer, with a non-committing readiness, as he stumbled over the gunwale.
“And you—an old man?” remarked the Italian, with the easy frankness of Piedmont.
By way of reply, the new-comer held out one hand roughly swathed in cloth, and shook it from side to side slowly, taking exception to such personal matters on a short acquaintance.