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It was 48 hours since Schehl had eaten the last of the six pieces of bread, and he was so tortured by hunger that he lost all courage, when at 10 o'clock in the forenoon a Russian officer entered and in German ordered the prisoners to get ready within an hour for roll call in the court yard, because the interimistic commanding officer of Moscow, Colonel Orlowski, was to review them.
Far down in the valley, where the dust raised by thousands of feet hung in the air like a mist, a faint sound like the roar of falling water could be heard. It was the word "Moscow!" sweeping back to the rearmost ranks of these starving men who had marched for two months beneath the glaring sun, parched with dust, through a country that seemed to them a Sahara.
It was not till then that he ceased to doubt the entire evacuation of Moscow, and gave up all the hopes that he had built upon it. He shrugged his shoulders, and with that contemptuous look with which he met everything that crossed his wishes, he exclaimed, "Ah! the Russians do not know yet the effect which the taking of their capital will produce upon them!"
How often had he heard his grandfather, shaking his head, say, "Yes, now newspaper writers have little to tell since Napoleon is quiet." And then he had related to him of the hero at Arcole and among the Pyramids, of the great campaign against Europe, of the conflagration at Moscow, and the return from Elba. Who has not written a play in his childhood?
They had obtained such great power, and such prodigious rank, that at their entry into Moscow the Czar held their stirrups, and, on foot, led their horse by the bridle: Since the grandfather of Peter, there had been no patriarch at Moscow.
What a plain! Pit-heads, superb vegetation, and ruined villages tragic villages illustrating the glories and the transcendent common-sense of war and invasion. That place over there is Souchez familiar in all mouths from Arkansas to Moscow for six months past. What an object! Look at St. Eloi! Look at Angres! Look at Neuville St. Vaast! And look at Ablain St. Nazaire, the nearest of all!
Here's some one we can eat! They buzzed and stuck to him. And it was clear to him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society, the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such a mosquito, or pheasant, or deer, as those that were now living all around him.
Circumstances might any day justify Russia's occupation of the entire peninsula. She could afford to wait. And while she waited she was not idle. The post-road across Asia was no longer adequate for the larger plans developing in the East; so the construction of a railway was planned to span the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok.
"No, what for?" "Why, because that member of the society, the inspector, has stopped at Moscow and I told some of them here that possibly the inspector may turn up to-night; and they'll think that you are the inspector. And as you've been here three weeks already, they'll be still more surprised." "Stage tricks. You haven't got an inspector in Moscow."
``The Frenchmen had caught some unhappy peasants in Moscow, whom they thought to force to serve in their ranks, and in order that they should not be able to escape they branded their hands as one brands horses in the stud. One of them asked what this mark meant; he was told it signified that he was a French soldier. `What! I am a soldier of the Emperor of the French! he said.
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