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"How now, gentles," cried Taras to the remaining kurens: "is there still powder in your flasks? Are your swords blunted? Are the Cossack forces wearied? Have the Cossacks given way?" "There is still an abundance of powder; our swords are still sharp; the Cossack forces are not wearied, and the Cossacks have not yet yielded."
You make remonstrances; is this a time, when the stranger invades our provinces, and 200,000 Cossacks are ready to overflow our country? There may have been petty abuses; I never connived at them. You, M. Raynouard, you said that. Prince Massena robbed a man at Marseilles of his house. You lie! The General took possession of a vacant house, and my Minister shall indemnify the proprietor.
This had happened before and was no joke, and many people would not leave their homes that day. Those who did had to walk; there was no other way of getting about. Few people, on the whole, were on the street that morning aside from the soldiers and Cossacks who were guarding the bridges and keeping an eye out for disturbances.
He was one of those characters which could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century, and in that half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of Southern Russia, deserted by its princes, was laid waste and burned to the quick by pitiless troops of Mongolian robbers; when men deprived of house and home grew brave there; when, amid conflagrations, threatening neighbours, and eternal terrors, they settled down, and growing accustomed to looking these things straight in the face, trained themselves not to know that there was such a thing as fear in the world; when the old, peacable Slav spirit was fired with warlike flame, and the Cossack state was instituted a free, wild outbreak of Russian nature and when all the river-banks, fords, and like suitable places were peopled by Cossacks, whose number no man knew.
Hervey, who piqued himself upon being able always to suit his conversation to his companions, distinguished himself at dinner by an account of the Chinese fishing-bird, from which he passed to the various ingenious methods of fishing practised by the Russian Cossacks.
Thanks to him, we managed to regain the town, which our invalids had put more or less in a state of defence, but it was pitiful to see it. We were the last to return he and I. A body of Cossacks appeared in our way, and on this we rode in hot haste.
It is even said that the Cossacks got mixed among them without being observed; that for some minutes, French and Tartars were confounded in the same greediness; forgetting they were at war, and pillaging together the same treasure-wagons. Two millions of gold and silver then disappeared. But amid all these horrors there were noble acts of devotion.
But to me the present was a dim dream, and what was real were my eight hundred dead Hussars and the Etienne of long ago. Enough a brave man can face age and fate as he faced Cossacks and Uhlans. But there are times when Montrachet is better than the wine of Bordeaux. It is to Russia that they go, and so I will tell you a story of Russia. Ah, what an evil dream of the night it seems! Blood and ice.
The second squadron that had been in the front line followed them across and the last Cossacks quitted the farther side of the river. The two Pavlograd squadrons, having crossed the bridge, retired up the hill one after the other.
The Tartars, the Circassians, and Moldavians are the bulwarks of our Empire, let us join to them the Cossacks also, and not wait until they all become the bulwarks of our northern foe instead, and he will lead them all against us. When he built the fortress of Azov he showed us plainly what he meant by it.
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