All that frost and famine, lead and steel, could inflict, was then endured; all the crimes that reckless despair and ruthless cruelty could prompt were then perpetrated.” “And how,” I asked, “did you escape, when so many, doubtless as strong and courageous, and more inured to hardship, miserably perished?” “Under Providence, I owed my preservation to the trustiest and most faithful servant ever master had. Paul had been several years in the hussars—was an old soldier, in fact, although still a young man; and at a time when all discipline and subordination were at an end, when soldiers heeded not their officers, officers avoided their generals, and servants and masters were all alike and upon a level, Paul proved true as steel. As if cold and the Cossacks were not enough, hunger was added to our sufferings: there was no longer a commissariat or distribution of rations;—rations, forsooth!—dead horse was a luxury I have seen men fight for till death, lean meat though it was, for the poor brutes were as starved as their riders. What little there was to eat in the villages we passed through fell to the share of the first comers. Empty larders—often smoking ruins—were all that remained for those who came behind. Well, sir, when things were at the worst, and provender at the scarcest, Paul always had something for me in his haversack. One day it would be a bit of bread, on the morrow a handful of grain or some edible roots, now and then a slice of horse-beef—and how delicious that seemed, grilled over our smoky scanty fires! There was never enough to satisfy my hunger, but there was always a _something_—enough to keep body and soul together. Paul, as I afterwards discovered, husbanded his stores, for he well knew that if he gave me all at once I should leave nothing, and then I must have fasted for days, and perhaps have fallen from my horse for weakness. But think of the courage and affection of the poor fellow, himself half-starved, to carry food about him day after day, and refrain from devouring the share secretly set aside for me! There were not many men in the army, even of general’s rank, capable of such devotion to the dearest friend they had, for extreme misery had induced a ferocious selfishness, which made us more like hyenas than Christians.” “I should think the cold must have been even worse to endure than hunger,” said I, screwing up my chilly extremities, which the interest of the doctor’s conversation had almost made me forget. “It was, sir, harder and more fatal—at least a greater number died of it; although, to say the truth, frost and famine there worked hand in hand, and with such unity of action, that it was often hard to say which was the cause of death. But it was a shocking sight, of a morning, to see the poor fellows lying dead round the bivouac fires. Unable to resist fatigue and the drowsy influence of the cold, they yielded to slumber, and passed from sleep into death. For, there, sleep _was_ death.”