Two carefully aimed
shots rang out in the frosty air, two Cossacks reeled in their saddles.
The rest, not thinking the game good enough, closed round their wounded
comrades and galloped away out of range. The two officers managed to
rejoin their battalion halted for the night. During that afternoon they
had leaned upon each other more than once, and towards the end, Colonel
D'Hubert, whose long legs gave him an advantage in walking through
soft snow, peremptorily took the musket of Colonel Feraud from him and
carried it on his shoulder, using his own as a staff.
On the outskirts of a village half buried in the snow an old wooden
barn burned with a clear and an immense flame. The sacred battalion
of skeletons, muffled in rags, crowded greedily the windward side,
stretching hundreds of numbed, bony hands to the blaze. Nobody had
noted their approach. Before entering the circle of light playing on the
sunken, glassy-eyed, starved faces, Colonel D'Hubert spoke in his turn:
"Here's your musket, Colonel Feraud.
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