The Great White Army

by Max Pemberton

These were fine fellows, clad, as he, in the splendid white and gold uniform of the Tsar's cuirassiers. They welcomed a brother officer with professed cordiality, and the prince commanding that supper should be served, they turned with one accord to the table and began to fall upon the viands as though ravenous with hunger. Will you be surprised to hear that Léon did not imitate them in this? I shall tell you why in a word: he had seen a dead body in the straw upon the platform, and, looking at it a second time, he perceived that it was a trunk without a head.

You may imagine what this discovery meant—even to a man of Léon's disposition. At first he would have it that the whole thing was one of Nicholas's jokes—the draping of the room, the straw upon the mock scaffold, and the ghastly figure which the rushes tried to hide. Then he remembered the prince's evil reputation and the stories of his savagery, which had been told at many a bivouac. Here was one of those fanatics who believed that Moscow was the holy city, and that we, the French, were so many barbarians who had profaned the sacred shrine of Russia. No trick was too treacherous to be employed against us, no trap was not justified which had Frenchmen for its object. Again and again, as we had marched across Russia, the throats of our fellows had been cut in many a lonely farmhouse, and many a courtesan had lured honest men to their destruction.

So Léon sat there with his eyes fixed upon the body and the secret words of warning drumming in his ears. What hope had he of escape from such a place? He remembered the moat and the drawbridge, the lonely wood and the dark groves about it, and despair fell upon him. It remained but to die as the Guards know how; and, believing that his death was imminent, he refused no longer the goblets of wine which were offered to him, and affected a merriment as loud as that of the noble assassins who had entrapped him.

A remarkable feast, truly, as you shall: judge by his own account of it. The meats! were served on dishes of solid gold; the goblets were of the same precious metal. They drank champagne from our own kingdom of France; the rich red wines of Italy, while the joyous fruits of the Rhineland vineyards were not lacking. The food itself had an Eastern flavour, and many of the dishes were highly spiced and Eastern. For music there were fiddles in a gallery above, and even the distant voices of women singing a light chanson at the back of the stage.

Léon raised his eyes to the musicians' gallery from time to time, and fell to wondering if Valerie were among the singers. Surely she had never written the letter which brought him to this house—she, a Frenchwoman! He could not believe it; and yet the note had been in a woman's handwriting. Possibly the writer was one of those who now sang disreputable songs behind the curtains of the gallery. Léon pitied rather than condemned the poor wretch who had been the prince's instrument. When he remembered that Valerie loved this man he could have taken a knife from the table and killed him where he sat.

His Highness may have guessed what was in the young man's mind, but if he did so, a courtly art concealed it. Never was there a gayer companion. He told stories of all the cities to which peace or war had carried him—of our own Paris and gloomy Petersburg, of gay Vienna and that monstrously dull town of London, of which the English boast. Nearly all concerned the women of these places and the successes he had had among them.

His companions meanwhile listened with a deference which so high a personage commanded. Their jokes were often sotto voce, and when the prince laughed they laughed in sycophantine imitation. With all this Léon plainly perceived that the feast was but a preparation for some greater scene to come. His eyes went often now to the curtain above the gallery, as though he would read a secret there. I do not think he was astonished when for one brief instant the same curtain trembled and was drawn a little way back, to disclose the face of Valerie. She was in the house, then, after all! He began to believe that she had written the letter, and for that he would have strangled her willingly. Then he heard the prince speaking to him, and, the curtain being dropped back, he turned to listen to a disquisition upon French politics.

"Your Revolution," said his Highness, "was the greatest event in history. I have just been telling my friend, Count Rafalovitch here, that my father was in Paris in the year 1794, and that his dearest friend, the Chevalier Constantini, was executed by the miscreants on the Place de la Grève. He brought with him to Russia a model of the guillotine, by which so many of your great men perished. I have it here in this house, if you are curious to see it. It was made by the great Dr. Guillotin himself, one of the first to fall by his own invention, as you know. Shall we have it built up on yonder platform, M. le Capitaine? It will help us to pass the time until the musicians have refreshed themselves."

Now, all this was said pleasantly enough, as though it were the merriest of jests, and yet to Léon it was not without significance. The cat-like manner of the speaker; the sudden lust of blood which came into his eyes as he leaned over the table and addressed my nephew; the restless movements of the others round about; all betrayed a design so dastardly that no pretence could conceal it. Instantly it dawned upon Léon that the man whose body lay in the rushes had been murdered by that very instrument. Death no Guardsman fears, but the humiliation of such a death as this might have appalled the stoutest heart; and Léon believed now that they meant to kill him. He drained the heavy goblet of its wine to hide his face from those who watched him so curiously, and when he had set the goblet down there was a smile upon his lips.

"I should like to see it, by all means," he said to the prince. "It is odd that I, a Frenchman, am so ignorant, but, upon my word of honour, I have never met 'Dr. Guillotine' in all my life."