But at the moment she heard how the sexton and his ringer clattered at the trap-doors of the steeple, and the great bell gave forth its first stroke.
She knitted her brow and went into the mill, saying: “I’ve no meal to grind, but if he lets his bell sound, though he has had no son in the war, my mill shall play, too.”
Creaking, the dust-white axle-beam began to move and purr, and while the peasant army marched singing by, the empty mill kept turning its great wings faster and faster.
THE FORTIFIED HOUSE
SURPRISED by the winter cold, the Swedes in crowded confusion had taken up their quarters behind the walls of Hadjash. Soon there was not a house to be found that was not filled with the frost-bitten and the dying. Cries of distress were heard out in the street, and here and there beside the steps lay amputated fingers, feet, and legs. Vehicles stood fastened to each other so tightly packed from the city gate to the market-place that the chilly-pale soldiers who streamed in from all sides had to crawl between the wheels and runners. Fastened in their harness and turned away from the wind, the horses, their loins white with frost, had already stood many days without food. No one took care of them, and several of the drivers sat frozen to death with hands stuck into their sleeves. Some wagons were like oblong boxes or coffins, where from the chink of the flat lid stared out mournful faces, which read in a prayer-book or gazed longingly with feverish delirium at the sheltering houses. A thousand unfortunates, in muffled tones or silently, cried to God for mercy. Under the sheltered side of the city wall dead soldiers stood in lines, many with red Cossack coats buttoned over their ragged Swedish uniforms and with sheepskins around their naked feet. Wood-doves and sparrows, which were so stiff with frost that they could be caught with the hand, had fallen on the hats and shoulders of the standing corpses and fluttered their wings when the chaplains went by to give a Last Communion in brandy.
Up at the market-place among burnt areas stood an unusually large house, from which could be heard raised voices. A soldier delivered a fagot to an ensign who stood in the doorway, and when the soldier went back into the street, he shrugged his shoulders and said to whomsoever cared to hear him: “It’s only the gentlemen quarreling in the chancellery.”
The ensign at the door had lately arrived with Lewenhaupt’s forces. He carried the fagot into the room and threw it down by the fireplace. The voices within ceased immediately, but as soon as he had closed the door they began with renewed heat.
It was His Excellency Piper who stood in the middle of the floor, his countenance wrinkled and furrowed, with glowing cheeks and trembling nostrils.
“I say that the whole affair is madness,” he burst out, “madness, madness!”
Hermelin with his pointed nose was constantly twitching his eyes and his hands, while he sprang back and forth in the room like a tame rat; but Field Marshall Rehnskiöld, who with his handsome, stately figure was standing by the fireplace, only whistled and hummed. If he had not whistled and hummed, the quarrel would have been finished by this time, because for once they were all fully agreed; but the fact that he whistled and hummed instead of being silent or at least speaking, that could be endured no longer. Lewenhaupt at the window took snuff and snapped shut his snuff-box. His pepper-brown eyes protruded from his head, and it looked as if his comical peruke became ever bigger and bigger. If Rehnskiöld had not continued to whistle and hum, he would have controlled himself today as yesterday and on all other occasions, but now wrath rose to his brow.