“Mademoiselle, permit me to conduct you to a place of comfort—I will not say safety, for all is safe here; the walls are nine feet thick and our friends, the Russians, have nothing but musketry.”
Francezka’s face grew very pale, but her eyes did not falter. Her courage was in truth greater than Madame Riano’s, for madame loved battle; Francezka did not love it, neither did she fear it.
She accepted Count Saxe’s hand, and he led her across the courtyard and up the stairway, where she disappeared within the door, first making a curtsy to us all as well as to Count Saxe.
My master came down the stairway three steps at a time.
“The Russians are but poor tacticians,” he said, “or they would never have freed us from Peggy Kirkpatrick. As it is, we must not be captured with this fair girl among us. Fancy what story of it would go forth to the world. No; we must save her or die with her.”
“Yes,” repeated Gaston Cheverny, standing near us, “we must save her or die with her.”
For, in spite of Count Saxe’s reassuring words to Mademoiselle Capello, that was really the sum of it. The Russians had begun a heavy fusillade which, in truth, was no more than hail against our nine feet of 90 stone walls. Could we but exist without ammunition and food, and could we do without sleep, we twenty men could laugh at the eight hundred Russians. But, unluckily, men must eat and sleep. I was turning this over in my mind while our men were replying briskly out of the loopholes—and with effect, for soon cries went up to the heavens; our bullets had found their billets. At the first sight of blood the Russians howled like hungry wolves. I believe they would have torn us limb from limb could they have caught us. There is nothing on earth more horrible, or more terrifying, than a great and loud cry for blood.
I, Babache, a soldier from my fourteenth year, trembled behind nine feet of stone, at this yell from the beast in man. Nor is it without its effect on the most seasoned soldiers. They, the common men, laugh at it at first, but it soon penetrates to the marrow of their bones, and they perform miracles of valor under the spur of fear—for it is as often fear as courage that drives a storming party into the breach. I have read in the essays of Monsieur Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, of Périgord, that he feared nothing but fear—and it is a wise saying of that Périgord gentleman. So it was in the schloss at Mitau that August night—we were afraid of nothing but fear, for we were certainly not afraid to meet death in any shape. There was plenty for all of us to do, Count Saxe himself shouldering a musket, and firing through the slits of windows; but I knew that he was not the man to be trapped like a rat in a hole, and I made sure he had some scheme in his head by which we were to be saved from hoisting a handkerchief on a ramrod—and waited for him to tell us what it was.
Meanwhile, the demoniac yelling kept up, together with the volleys of musketry. The Russians had not then learned to transport light guns on wheels, the King of Prussia having to teach them that trick near twenty years later; so that we knew, what men do not often know in our circumstances, exactly what we had to contend against. After an hour of this volleying and yelling on the part of the Russians to which we replied by putting leaden bullets in them, Count Saxe came up to me. It was then after one o’clock—in those latitudes a time that is neither day nor night, nor morning, nor evening, but a ghostlike hour, in which all shapes, all things, the very sky and earth, are strange to human beings. I saw by the faint half-light a smile on my master’s face; he was ever the handsomest man alive, and when he had the light of battle in his eye, he was more beautiful than Apollo, lord of the unerring bow. He was still in his court costume, but there was a great rent in his velvet coat made by the musket he had occasionally used, his gem-embroidered waistcoat was soiled with powder, and his lace cravat and ruffles were in rags.