My diminished squadron had at length become almost the only rear-guard. From a hundred and fifty as fine fellows as ever sat a charger, we were now reduced to a third. All its officers, youths of the first families of Prussia, had either been left behind dying in the villages, or had been laid in the graves by the road-side, and I was now the only commandant. Perhaps even this circumstance was the means of saving my life. My new responsibility compelled me to make some exertion; and I felt that, live or die, I might still earn an honourable name. Even in those darkest hours, the thought that Clotilde might ask where and how I finished my ill-fortuned career, and perhaps give a moment's sorrow to one who remembered her to the last, had its share in restoring me to a sense of the world. In that sort of fond frenzy, which seems so fantastic when it is past, but so natural, and is actually so irresistible while it is in the mind, I wrote down my feelings, wild as they were--my impossible hopes, and a promise never to forget her while I remained in this world, and, if there could be an intercourse between the living and the dead, in that world to which I felt myself hastening. I then bade her a solemn and heartfelt farewell. Placing the paper in my bosom, with a locket containing a ringlet of her beautiful hair, which Marianne had contrived to obtain for me, the only legacy I had to offer, I felt as if I had done my last duty among mankind. Still we wandered on, through a country which had the look of a boundless cemetery. Not a peasant was met; not a sound of human labour, joy or sorrow, reached the ear; not a smoke rose from mansion or cottage; all was still, except when the wind burst in bitter gusts over the plain, or the almost ceaseless rain swelled into sheets, and sent the rivers roaring down before us. If the land had never been inhabited, or had been swept of its inhabitants by an avenging Providence, it could not have been more solitary. I never conceived the idea of the wilderness before. It was the intensity of desolation.