"Did His Majesty leave alone?" I asked.
"No," said the fellow, and here he smiled; "there was a woman with him."
Pah, my friends, what a coward I had been, and how I cursed the weary hours I had spent alone in that hole of a church!
CHAPTER V
THE CAMP BY THE RIVER
I
There were two days of cold, clear weather after we left Slawkowo. It was upon the second of these days that the adventure of which I shall now speak befell me.
The sufferings which the army endured had not by any means abated at this time. We found but scant supplies in the town, and there had not been that distribution of rations we had expected. It is true that the first-comers pillaged brandy from the cellars of Slawkowo, but this was poor sustenance for men whose greatest necessity was bread, and in this respect we quitted the town as poor as we entered it. Our one consolation was that the north winds no longer nipped us and the snow had ceased to fall. Just as heretofore, men devoured the horses that fell by the way and drank their blood greedily. Nay, we were in no way surprised when we heard that the Croats were devouring each other, and the cruel tales of our comrades' sufferings which were told at every bivouac could readily be believed. Naturally, only the bravest kept their courage through such an ordeal. The cunning we had with us, and they went stoutly enough because of their cunning. There will always be men who are able to get food while others starve, and in such the Grand Army was not deficient. These happy fellows kept their secrets for the most part, and would often pretend to take pot-luck with us, while we knew all the time that they had hidden stores in which we did not share. The fact led to bitterness sometimes, and such men were shunned by their fellows as unworthy of the spirit of comradeship which animated the Guard.
I met more than one of these cormorants after we left Slawkowo, but none whose conduct so much mystified me as that of Captain Payard of the dragoons. In converse he was the best of good fellows—a merry, curly-haired gentleman, whose eyes were as blue as a woman's and whose smile was medicine for every ill. Payard pretended to eat horse with us, and yet we knew that this could not be his staple diet, for he was as fat as a Normandy lamb and as gay. Many tried to guess his secret, but none discovered it, and he would have carried it back to Paris with him but for a bottle of brandy I hoarded at my saddle-bow, and opened on the night we left Slawkowo. So deeply did he drink of this that he became quite tipsy, and, crouching by my side over the bivouac fire in the wood, he told me his story without shame.