anyone able to think of such things. Rosina offered a fine example of a nature frail in appearance but spirited and full of force all the same. The husband, a gentleman of the Piedmont, had a face made to express mocking camaraderie, if those two words may indeed be joined. Brave, educated, he seemed blissfully unaware of the liaison his wife and the colonel had kept up for some three years. I attributed this laxity to Italian mores or some private marital understanding, but there was in this man’s physiognomy one feature that had always inspired in me an involuntary unease. His thin, mobile lower lip drooped at the corners rather than turning up, betraying, I thought, a deep-seated cruelty in what seemed a phlegmatic and indolent character. As you may well imagine, the conversation I’d walked in on was none too brilliant. My weary comrades ate in silence, though naturally they had a number of questions for me, and we recounted our misfortunes, mingling them with reflections on the campaign, on the generals, on their failings, on the Russians, on the cold. A moment after my arrival, the colonel, having finished his meager repast, wipes his mustaches, wishes us all a good night, turns his dark gaze toward the Italian woman, and says, ‘Rosina?’ Then, not troubling to await a reply, he goes off to bed in the little storeroom. The sense of the colonel’s question was quite clear to us all, so clear that an indescribable gesture escaped the young woman, expressing at once her evident irritation at seeing her dependence so openly displayed, with no trace of respect for her autonomy, and the offense done to her womanly dignity or to her husband. But there was also, in her clenched features, in her darkened brow, a sort of foreboding: Perhaps she had foreseen her fate. Rosina sat silently at the table. A moment later, very likely after the colonel had lain down on his bed of hay or straw, he called out again: ‘Rosina?’ The tone of this second summons was even more brutally insistent than the first. The guttural r , the peculiar resonance the Italian tongue gives a word’s vowels and ending, all this eloquently expressed the man’s tyranny, his impatience, his willfulness. Rosina blanched, but she rose from the table and brushed past us to go and join the colonel. My tablemates sat in deep silence, but I, alas, looked around at them all and let out a laugh, and my laughter spread from one mouth to the next. ‘ Tu ridi ?’ asked the husband. ‘Oh, but my dear comrade,’ I answered, serious again, ‘I confess, I was wrong, I beg of you a thousand pardons, and if these apologies seem to you insufficient, I can only agree.’ ‘The fault lies with me, not with you!’ he answered, grimly. With this we all settled down for the night in the main room, and soon we were sound asleep. The next day we each set off anew without waking the others, without seeking a traveling companion, in whatever direction we thought best, concerned only with ourselves, displaying the egoism that made of our disorderly retreat one of the most terrible dramas of human nature, of sorrow, and of horror that was ever played out beneath the heavens. Nevertheless, some seven or eight hundred paces from our quarters for the night, we nearly all met up again, and we walked on together, like a flock of geese driven along by the blind despotism of a child. One single, common need urged us ever forward. Arriving at a small hill within sight of the farmhouse, we heard cries like lions roaring in the desert, like bellowing bulls; but no, that clamor cannot be likened to anything known to man. Nevertheless, amid that horrible howl, we heard the faint shriek of a woman. We turned around, struck by some unnamable dread; there was nothing to be seen of the house, only a towering pyre. The building was wholly engulfed in flames and every doorway barricaded. Billows of windblown smoke carried those strident sounds our way, along with an overpowering odor. The
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