The hostess came forward to tell Desiree that her room was ready,
kindly suggesting that the "gnadiges Fraulein" must need sleep and
rest. Desiree knew that Louis would go on to Konigsberg at once.
She wondered whether she should ever see him again--long afterwards,
perhaps, when all this would seem like a dream. Barlasch, breathing
noisily on his frost-bitten fingers, was watching them. Desiree
shook hands with Louis in an odd silence, and, turning on her heel,
followed the woman out of the room without looking back.
CHAPTER XXIII. AGAINST THE STREAM.
Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten.
In the mean time the last of the Great Army had reached the Niemen,
that narrow winding river in its ditch-like bed sunk below the level
of the tableland, to which six months earlier the greatest captain
this world has ever seen rode alone, and, coming back to his
officers, said--
"Here we cross."
Four hundred thousand men had crossed--a bare eighty thousand lived
to pass the bridge again. Twelve hundred cannons had been left
behind, nearly a thousand in the hands of the enemy, and the
remainder buried or thrown into those dull rivers whose slow waters
flow over them to this day. One hundred and twenty-five thousand
officers and men had been killed in battle, another hundred thousand
had perished by cold and disaster at the Beresina or other rivers
where panic seized the fugitives.
Forty-eight generals had been captured by the Russians, three
thousand officers, one hundred and ninety thousand men, swallowed by
the silent white Empire of the North and no more seen.
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