The Great White Army

by Max Pemberton

Night had fallen for the second time now, and we had entered a land of great spaces. But more than that, we were traversing an enemy's country, and anon we espied a large body of Cossacks—three thousand as we judged—who plainly had observed us and immediately sat down to the pursuit. This was a turn that we might have looked for, but, in our imprudence, had risked. It was now each for himself and the devil take the laggards. We should be sabred to a man if these assassins rode us down, and, with a cry of "En avant!" we set spurs to our jaded horses and rode wildly across the plain. God alone could tell whether we should find the army or lose it.

It was a race for life with night and the mystery of night all about us.

How to tell you, of that memorable gallop I hardly know. No race at Chantilly ever found horses so tired or riders at such a tension. On we thundered, and on and on. Now we would cry that we were saved; again that all was lost. The dust enveloped us in clouds; the moon magnified the great plain we must cross to the woods beyond. Let us gain them and we might find the army after all. I had said as much when a figure pressed out of the hurly-burly and I knew it for that of a Cossack. He slashed at me with a great scimitar, and slashed again. Then I heard a pistol shot, and seeing the fellow reeling in his saddle, I cut him through the skull to the very marrow. He was but the first of twenty, and so we went riding and slashing and halloaing for a league or more until we had bested their leaders and were alone on the great plain once more. Alas! how brief a respite! We had thousands still to deal with, and they rode after us like devils. No sailors lost upon a black and stormy sea went more blindly than we upon that fateful night. The army had vanished; we believed no longer that we should find it.

Meanwhile, there were always the green devils behind us. I should give no true picture of this affair if I denied that there was another side to it. Some of our men fell and were hacked to pieces where they lay. Others were overtaken and cut down by the ruthless swords of the Cossacks. We could not lift a finger to save them—ten would have perished for one who fell had we done so. Our one hope lay in the swiftness of our horses. "En avant!" we cried, and again "En avant!" We must find the army or perish. Ah, what a vain hope and how Fate played with us! For my part I believed that all was over when I first saw the fire in the wood and heard my comrades cry out. The Russians were then but a hundred paces from us—the light that we saw might be anything. God knows, we raced for it—and to discover what? A priest and a woman—Zayde and the shorn monk, who I never doubted was a Cossack all the time.

There they were—hobnobbing by a fire of logs and greatly startled when they heard the sound of hoofs. Immediately they ran off into the thicket, but not before we had recognised them—my nephew and I. They were hardly gone when a louder cry arose from every Frenchman in the wood; for now, as the very light of heaven itself, the glow of a dozen bivouac fires burst upon our aching eyes, and with one voice we cried: "Vive l'Empereur!" and swore that the army should avenge us.

VII

War teaches us many lessons, but none more useful than that of its accidents. You will have said already that we had found the army and that nothing remained but to ride up to the outposts and raise an alarm.

Let me answer that nothing was farther from the truth. We had neither found the army nor were any of our comrades there to avenge us. When I told this story in the year 1813 in Paris I well remember the laughter it excited. A squadron of hussars saved by a flight of monks! Thus the newspapers referred to it, and such was the naked truth. The monks saved us—the monks from the monastery we had sacked.

Never have I forgotten that moment when this ridiculous turn first became apparent to us. The Cossacks, I say, were at our heels, hope gone from us, all thought of the army abandoned, when we saw the bivouac fires and rode madly up to them. "Vive l'Empereur!" was our cry. Then we learned the truth.

There were a hundred or more monks in the woods: they had kindled the fires which cheered us. The Cossacks, perceiving the fires, and being deceived as we were, waited for no verification of a fact which seemed self-evident. The French army lay encamped in that place—who else would be there in these days of war and of a mighty host upon the march? Do you wonder that the mad devils stopped as though they heard already the roar of our guns, that they wheeled about and were gone as foxes whom the moon has discovered? They would have been madmen to have done anything else. The race had been run and we were the victors. So at least they thought, and so did Fortune smile upon us in that fateful hour.