The Great White Army

by Max Pemberton

"We can have them here by dawn," said the fellow, and there being nothing else for it we dispatched half a dozen of them at full gallop to bring a field piece to the place. The gunners, we said, would come readily enough when the story of the loot was told to them. Never had I known one of the Grand Army turn from that, whatever the circumstance.

So the men rode off and left us upon the edge of the lake which bordered the eastern wall of the monastery.

Though the day had been warm enough, the night fell intolerably cold, and we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks, and having tethered the horses, fell to walking round the monastery as though it would yet reveal its secrets. Impossible to believe that a treasure of half a million francs and one of the most beautiful women in Russia were locked up in that gloomy place, and we, Vélites and hussars of the Grand Army, impotent to get one or the other. Yet such was a fact and such the cunning of the monks that neither light was shown to us nor a footstep to be heard in all the hours of our vigil.

Dawn had come before the hussars returned with half a battery from Ney's own rearguard. We heard the sound of the horses in the wood, and anon the heavy wheels of the guns crunching over the gravel of the precincts. Then also we heard for the first time a signal from the monastery, the great bell of which began to toll mournfully, as though holding a requiem for the dead. The sound inspired us and brought every man to his feet.

"The birds are caged after all," said I to Léon. "We will now see how they can fly."

VI

The bridge across the lake was not stout enough to carry a gun; but we quickly had three upon the brink of the water, and at the third discharge we brought down the great door of wood and iron and not a little of the masonry with it. Such a ragout of rusty iron and plaster saints did not disturb us at all; and running triumphantly across the bridge, we entered the monastery, swords drawn, to ferret out the monks.

Let me tell you in a word that we found no human being within the place. From room to room we ran, crying to each other in chapel and refectory and deserted cell, and hearing nothing but our own voices in reply. Such a mystery was beyond any I had known. The monks were here, we said, or else the devil himself had rung their bell. Nay, there were traces of their recent occupation—rude beds just disturbed; a faint fire in a primitive kitchen; the very candles lighted before the icons or images in their chapel. Yet not so much as the girdle of a monk in all the place, and as for the treasure, I do not believe the fiend himself could have found a sou.

Well, there we were, some eighty men gathered in the morning light and looking as foolish as school lads surprised in an orchard.

When our first rage had somewhat calmed, reason began to assert itself, and we said that there must be some passage beneath the lake by which the fathers had gone out. This caused a new quest of a highly diverting kind, for now it was every ferret to find a hole, and never did men work more willingly. To and fro they went like hounds in a thicket. Panels they tried and traps in cellars they lifted. Walls were pierced with our swords and doors were beat down, until the place looked as though it had stood the ravages of a siege. Yet the mockery of it all was that we might as well have hunted diamonds in the Place de la Revolution at Paris. Not a trace of any secret passage did we find, not a hole large enough to pass a dog; and when after hours of labour we came to the conclusion that the mystery was beyond us, a similar hunt in the woods yielded no more profit. Scattering wide about the monastery in enlarging circles, we must have ridden twenty leagues a man before we gathered at sunset to remind each other that the Cossacks might trap us and that we must rejoin the army at all costs. The graver peril guiding us, we rode off reluctantly, and soon the fateful monastery and even the woods about it were lost to our view.