his feet on the frozen snow to keep them warm. He was scarce five
hundred paces away before he saw a great fire blazing on the spot
where he had left his carriage that morning with an old soldier to
guard it. A dreadful misgiving seized upon him. Many a man under the
influence of a powerful feeling during the Retreat summoned up energy
for his friend's sake when he would not have exerted himself to save
his own life; so it was with Philip. He soon neared a hollow, where he
had left a carriage sheltered from the cannonade, a carriage that held
a young woman, his playmate in childhood, dearer to him than any one
else on earth.

Some thirty stragglers were sitting round a tremendous blaze, which
they kept up with logs of wood, planks wrenched from the floors of the
caissons, and wheels, and panels from carriage bodies. These had been,
doubtless, among the last to join the sea of fires, huts, and human
faces that filled the great furrow in the land between Studzianka and
the fatal river, a restless living sea of almost imperceptibly moving
figures, that sent up a smothered hum of sound blended with frightful
shrieks. It seemed that hunger and despair had driven these forlorn
creatures to take forcible possession of the carriage, for the old
General and his young wife, whom they had found warmly wrapped in
pelisses and traveling cloaks, were now crouching on the earth beside
the fire, and one of the carriage doors was broken.

As soon as the group of stragglers round the fire heard the footfall
of the Major's horse, a frenzied yell of hunger went up from them. "A
horse!" they cried. "A horse!"

All the voices went up as one voice.