Colonel D'Hubert had his scruples as to falling out. Once he
had stepped aside he could not be sure of ever rejoining his battalion;
and the ghastly intimacy of a wrestling match with the frozen dead
opposing the unyielding rigidity of iron to your violence was repugnant
to the delicacy of his feelings. Luckily, one day, grubbing in a mound
of snow between the huts of a village in the hope of finding there a
frozen potato or some vegetable garbage he could put between his long
and shaky teeth, Colonel D'Hubert uncovered a couple of mats of the
sort Russian peasants use to line the sides of their carts with. These,
beaten free of frozen snow, bent about his elegant person and fastened
solidly round his waist, made a bell-shaped nether garment, a sort of
stiff petticoat, which rendered Colonel D'Hubert a perfectly decent, but
a much more noticeable figure than before.
Thus accoutred, he continued to retreat, never doubting of his personal
escape, but full of other misgivings. The early buoyancy of his belief
in the future was destroyed.
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