Evil in a Mask

Dennis Wheatley

Evil in a Mask

ARROW BOOKS

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First published by Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd 1969 Arrow edition 1971

© Dennis Wheatley Limited 1969

Made and printed in Great Britain

by The Anchor Press Ltd, Tiptree

Essex

ISBN o 09 004640 4

For

Wing-Commander Anthony Wellington, DSO, DFC, to whom I owe my knowledge of Brazil in that country's early days; and to his dear wife, with most grateful thanks for their many hospitalities during my visits to Rio.

D.W.

The Field of Eylau

Roger Brook had been lucky, very lucky.

On this night he was in his late thirties and, from the age of nineteen, he had spent at least half the intervening years on the Continent, acting as a secret agent for Britain's great Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. Yet only once had he been caught out, and then by a friend who shared his views on the future of Europe, so had refrained from having him shot as a spy. He had passed unscathed through the hell of the French Revolution, been present at the siege of Acre, at the Battles of the Nile and Jena and numerous other bloody con­flicts. Yet only once, at Marengo, had he been wounded.

But now, at last, his luck had run out.

Meeting Roger in a salon or ballroom, the sight of him would have made most women's hearts beat a little faster. He was just over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and slim hips. His brown hair swept back in a wave from his high forehead. Below it a straight, aggressive nose stood out between a pair of bright blue eyes. From years of living dangerously his mouth had become thin and a link hard, but the slight furrows on either side of it were evidence of his tendency to frequent laughter. His strong chin and jaw showed great determination; his long-fingered hands were beautifully modelled; and his calves, when displayed in silk stockings, gave his tall figure the last touch of elegance.

Even on that February morning of 1807 as he sat his fine charger, booted and spurred, his long, fur-lined cloak wrapped tightly round him against the bitter cold, a woman's eye would have singled him out from among the score or more of gallant figures that formed a group a little in the rear of the Emperor

Napoleon. But his state was very different now, and he had little hope of living through the night.

Fifteen months earlier, two great turning points had occur­red in the war that Britain and France had been waging— with only one short interval of uneasy peace in 1803—for the past fourteen years. In October 1805, Nelson's victory at Trafalgar had, at last, freed England from the threat of in­vasion. But in the same month Napoleon had dealt a shatter­ing blow at the Third Coalition which Pin, with dogged determination, had built up against him. At Ulm the Emperor had smashed the main Austrian army; and, in November, entered Vienna in triumph. A month later, at Austerlitz, he had inflicted another terrible defeat on both the Austrians and their Russian allies. Utterly crushed, the Austrians had sued for peace. By the Treaty of Pressburg he gave it to them. But it cost the Emperor Francis nearly three million subjects and one-sixth of his revenue. This loss of sovereignty over numerous territories led, in the following August, to Francis' resigning the greater Imperial dignity and becoming only Emperor of Austria. Thus ended the Holy Roman Empire after an existence of over one thousand years.

Meanwhile Napoleon, anxious to keep Prussia quiet while he dealt with Russia, entered into negotiations with King Frederick William III. As French troops were occupying the British territory of Hanover, the Emperor was able to offer it as a bribe; and the shifty, weak-willed King agreed to accept it as the price of an alliance signed at Schonbrunn. -

But neither party was being honest with the other. Napoleon was secretly putting out peace feelers to the British Govern­ment, which included an offer to return Hanover to Britain, while Frederick William was in secret negotiation with the Czar Alexander to double-cross the French. When the Em­peror and the King became aware of each other's treachery, both realised that war between them was inevitable. In Sep­tember the King, gambling on the traditional invincibility of the Prussian Army, had sent Napoleon an ultimatum. It proved a futile gesture, since the dynamic Emperor was already on the march, and he advanced with such speed that by mid-October the two armies clashed.

Prussia had for so long sat timidly on the fence that her army had lost all resemblance to the magnificent war machine created by Frederick the Great; whereas that of France was inspired by an unbroken succession of victories, and was su­perbly led. At Jena, by a swift concentration of the corps of Lannes, Soult, Augereau, Ney and the Guard, Napoleon over­whelmed one-half of Frederick William's army. At Auerstadt, Davoust, although outnumbered by two to one, destroyed the other.

Relentlessly pursued by Murat's cavalry, the surviving Prussians retreated to the east. At Erfurt sixteen thousand of them surrendered to him. Fortress after fortress fell, and on the 25th of the month, Davoust captured Berlin.

It was in November, while in the Prussian capital, that the Emperor had initiated his new policy designed to bring Britain to her knees. Known as the Continental System, it decreed that every port under the control of France and her Allies should be closed to British shipping. At that date England was the only country that had undergone the Industrial Re­volution. It was through her trade that she earned the great wealth which enabled her to subsidise the armies of her Allies on the Continent. So Napoleon hoped that by depriving her of her European markets he would not only render her in­capable of supplying such subsidies in future, but also bring about her financial ruin.

Meanwhile, his armies were pressing on into Prussian Poland and, on December 19th, he established his head­quarters in Warsaw. Soon after Jena, Frederick William had tentatively asked for peace terms, but Napoleon refused to negotiate unless his enemy would retire behind the Vistula, cede to him the whole of Western Prussia and become his ally in the war against Russia.

It was not until Christmas that the French went into winter quarters, and the respite the Emperor gave his troops was all too short. His restless mind had conceived a new plan for getting the better of the Czar. Until Poland had been elimin­ated as a sovereign State in the latter half of the last century, by the three partitions of her territories between Russia, Prussia and Austria, she had been a great Power; and her people were noted for their bravery. He would incite them to rebel against their Russian master, by offering to re-create an independent Poland under his protection. But Frederick William was getting together another army in East Prussia; and, if it were allowed to join up with the Russians, the French might be outnumbered; so Napoleon decided that he must move fast.

Even so, it was the Russians, being acclimatised to fighting in ice and snow, who moved first. The Czar's principal Com­mander, General Bagration, made a daring move westwards, in the hope of saving Danzig from the French. By ill luck he ran into Bernadotte's corps. Immediately Napoleon was in­formed of this, he directed his main army northward with the object of driving the Russians into the sea. Through a cap­tured despatch, Bagration learned of the Emperor's intention. Swiftly he retreated towards Konigsberg, but at Eylau he turned on his pursuers, and there ensued the bloodiest battle that had been fought in the past hundred years.

It was upon the field of Eylau, on the night of February 8th, that Roger lay stricken and despairing of his life.

The campaign had been the most ghastly that the Grande Armee had ever endured. Not yet recovered from its serious wastage at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, and its exertions during scores of melees while pursuing the Prussians, it was short of every sort of supply. The terrain over which it had been advancing was a vast, sparsely-populated area of plains deep in snow, and frozen lakes. At times there had been sud­den, partial thaws, so that the land became a sea of mud in which the men's boots were frequently sucked off and could be retrieved only with difficulty. The cold was excruciating and the rations meagre to semi-starvation point. The officers no longer attempted to prevent looting and atrocities. The soldiers, desperate for food and warmth, had treated the wretched peasants in every village they came upon with the utmost ferocity, seizing their food, torturing them to reveal hidden stores, pulling down their hovels to make camp-fires, then leaving them to die.

On the night of the 7th, after confused fighting, the Russians had been driven from the little town of Eylau and retired to a strong position formed by an irregular line of hills.

Dawn filtered through dark, heavily-laden clouds. The ar­tillery on both sides opened fire as the French columns began to advance. Davoust's men pushed back the Russian left and Napoleon ordered Augereau's corps to attack the enemy centre. Battling against driving snow, his leading troops succeeded in seizing a slight eminence that could give the French a valu­able advantage. But the Muscovites were strong in cannon. From their iron mouths there poured discharge after discharge of grapeshot, ploughing wide lanes of dead and dying through Augerau's infantry, until his corps was nearly annihil­ated. As it fell back, a horde of Cossacks came charging down on the survivors, completing its destruction. Davoust's corps fared little better, having been forced to retreat under the massed fire of the Russian batteries.

By midday the battle had degenerated into wild confusion. There were scores of small bodies of troops locked in bloody hand-to-hand conflict with, here and there, gallant but futile cavalry charges. Napoleon, now worried, but determined to be victorious, then launched eighty squadrons of cavalry against the Russian centre. With fanatical bravery, the Cuiras­siers charged the Muscovite infantry, hacked a way through them and, reaching the enemy's cannon, began to sabre the gunners. But Bagration had not yet used his reserves. The fire from his second line of infantry halted the French horse­men. Only moments later, fresh sotnias of Cossacks were launched against them, and they were driven back in dis­order.

Meanwhile a body of four thousand Russian Grenadiers had emerged from the tangled conflict and, with a fanaticism equalling that of the French, fought its way through their lines straight into the village of Eylau.

The Emperor and his staff were standing there, watching the battle from a cemetery that stood on high land. Berthier, his Chief of Staff, fearing that they would all be killed or captured, ordered up the horses. But Napoleon calmly stood his ground, while giving the signal for his grand reserve, the Imperial Guard, to go into action.

AH day these veterans of a hundred fights had sullenly re­mained idle. Now, fresh and vigorous, the finest troops in the Grande Armee, they rushed to the attack, fell upon the Rus­sian Grenadiers and massacred them.

As dusk drew on, the outcome of the battle still remained uncertain. The best hope for the French lay with Davoust. His troops had succeeded in clinging on to a village they had seized that morning. From it he threatened the enemy's flank; a determined drive against it could have brought victory. But it was not to be. At the urging of Scharnhorst, the Prussian' General Lestocq with a division of eight thousand men, had made a forced march from Konigsberg. They arrived just in time to check the attack that Davoust was about to make.

When the battle opened, Ney's corps had been many miles distant from the main army. At the sound of the guns he, too, had made a forced march in that direction. Only his coming up in time could save Davoust's near-exhausted men from des­truction by the newly-arrived Prussians.

The forces engaged had been approximately equal: some seventy-live thousand men on either side. Nightfall brought only semi-darkness, owing to the snow. Over a great area it had been churned up or trampled flat by batteries changing position, charging cavalry and struggling infantry. In innumer­able places it was stained with the blood of horses and men. Here and there the white carpet was broken by dark, tangled heaps of corpses several feet high. Others were scattered in pairs or singly where they had been shot or struck down. Fifty thousand men lay there in the snow; dead, dying or seriously disabled. Roger was one of them.

During that day he and his fellow aides-de-camp had gal­loped many miles carrying scrawled messages from the Em­peror to corps and divisional commanders. Several of them had not returned, others were bleeding from wounds received while carrying out their missions. Roger had remained un­scathed until the terrible battle was almost over. Night was falling when a galloper arrived from Davoust to report the Marshal's desperate situation. During the day Ney had sent several messages to say that he was on his way. The arrival of his corps was the only remaining hope of saving Davoust Napoleon cast a swift glance at the now much smaller group of officers behind him. Unless his messenger made a great detour, he would have to pass a wood soil held by the Rus­sians, and time was precious. His eye fell on Roger. As he was personally known to every senior Commander in the Grande Annee, in his case a written message was superfluous. Raising a hand, the Emperor shouted at him in the harsh Italian-accented French habitual to him:

'Breuc! To Ney! Tell him that I am counting on him. That without him the battle may yet be lost.'

Instantly Roger set spurs to his horse. He was no coward and was accounted one of the best swordsmen in France. He had fought numerous duels and was prepared to face any man in single combat with sword or pistol. But he loathed battles; for during them, without a chance to defend oneself, one might at any moment be killed or maimed by a shot from a musket or by a cannon ball. Nevertheless chance, and times deliber­ate fraud, resulting from his activities as a secret agent, had made him the hero of many exploits, with the result that he was known throughout the Army as 'le brave Breuc'. Napoleon undoubtedly believed him to be entirely fearless and that, he knew, was why he had been chosen for this dangerous mission. Much as he would have liked to take the detour behind the village of Eylau, he had no choice but to charge down the hill and across the front of the position still held by the Russians.

Crouching low over his mount he had followed a zigzag course, at times swerving to avoid wrecked guns and limbers, at others jumping his mare over heaps of dead and wounded. As he came level with the wood, his heart beat faster. Hating every moment, he urged his charger forward at racing speed. Along the edge of the wood muskets began to flash, bullets whistled overhead. One jerked his befeathered hat from his head. Sweating with fear, he pressed on. Suddenly the mare lurched. Knowing the animal to have been hit, he made to throw himself from the saddle. But he was a moment too late. Shot through the heart, she fell, bringing him down with one leg pinned beneath her belly. He felt an excruciating pain in his ankle and knew that it had been broken by the stirrup iron, caught between the weight of the mare and the ice-hard earth.

For a few minutes he had lain still, then endeavoured to free himself. Had his ankle not been broken, he might have succeeded in dragging his leg from beneath the mare's belly. But his pulling on it resulted in such agony that he fainted.

When he came to, the Russian fusillade aimed at him had ceased and he could hear only distant, sporadic firing. Again he attempted to wriggle his leg from under the dead mare₃ but with each effort stabs of pain streaked up to his heart, making him, in spite of the appalling cold, break out into a sweat. At length he was forced to resign himself to the fact that, without help, he must remain there a prisoner.

Whether Ney had arrived in time to save Davoust he had no idea; nor who had proved the victors in this most bloody battle. As far as he could judge, it had been a draw, so any claim to victory could be made only by the side that did not withdraw to a stronger position during the night. At least it seemed that in the Russians Napoleon had at last found his match, for they were most tenacious fighters. As he had him­self said of them. 'It is not enough to kill a Russian. You must then push him over before he will lie down.'

But Roger was no longer concerned with the issue of the war. It was not his quarrel, and he was now silently cursing himself for his folly in taking part in it. After Trafalgar, he could perfectly well have remained at home in England and settled down as a country gentleman. Although he was gener­ous by nature, he had inherited his Scottish mother's prudence about money; so he had saved a great part of his earnings and these, together with the money left him by his father, the Admiral, amounted to a respectable fortune. It was not even the call of duty that had caused him to go abroad again, but simply restlessness and discontent.

As he lay there in the snow, his head, in the fur hood of his cloak, muffled against the biting cold, he thought back on the events that had driven him to his decision. Georgina, he ad­mitted, could not really be blamed; yet it was a whim of that beautiful, self-willed, tempestuous lady that had led to his again having himself smuggled across to France.

He had been married twice and had had many mistresses; but Georgina, the now widowed Countess of St. Ermins, had been his first love and remained the great love of his life. To her indignation he often twitted her with having seduced him when they were in their teens; but that had been on a long-past afternoon just before he had run away from home to escape having to become a Midshipman. Four years had elapsed before he had returned from the Continent. By then she was married, but had taken him as her lover. In the years that followed, he had spent many long spells abroad, but always on his return they renewed their passionate attachment. There had even been a night when both of them had decided to marry again then, with wicked delight, had slept together. After both of them had been widowed for the second time, whenever he had returned from one of his missions, he had begged her to marry him. But she contended that it was not in his nature to settle down definitely and that, even if he did, their being together as man and wife for any considerable time must in­evitably take the edge off the wondrous joy they had in each other when, for only a month or two, they were reunited after a long interval.

At length he had accepted that; so, on their return to Eng­land after Trafalgar, he had not again pressed her. But he had expected to be a frequent warmly-welcomed visitor at her lovely home, Stillwaters, near Ripley, where they had so often known great happiness together.

Alas for his expectations. The unpredictable and impetu­ous Georgina had suddenly become serious. Just as at one time she had declared herself to be utterly weary of balls, routs and a score of beaux constantly begging her to sleep with them—and, overnight, had metamorphosed herself into a model wife interested only in country pursuits—so now she announced that everyone owed a debt to the Navy that had saved England from the horrors of invasion, and that she in­tended to pay hers.

Her plan was to buy a big house near Portsmouth and con­vert it into a convalescent home to accommodate from fifty to a hundred seamen. She would engage a doctor and a staff of nurses and herself become the matron. Under her super­vision relays of these poor, wounded heroes should be nursed back to health and strength and taught some trade that would later enable them to earn a wage in civil life sufficient to sup­port them.

Roger had heartily applauded her idea, for in those days Britain's treatment of men invalided from the Services on account of serious wounds was a scandal that cried to heaven. No sooner were they able to walk on crutches or, still half-blind, able to make their way about, than they were put out of the hospitals near-penniless, to fend for themselves. Thou­sands of them now roamed the streets of the cities, begging their bread.

Georgina's great wealth enabled her without delay to carry out her project. Roger helped her find a suitable mansion, assisted in furnishing it suitably and engaging staff. By Feb­ruary, the first inmates were installed and Georgina, relin­quishing the fortune in jewels, unadorned by which she was normally never to be seen abroad, and exchanging her gay furbelows for more sober attire, had entered enthusiastically on her new role as ministering angel.

So far, so good. But, as far as Roger was concerned, not for long. Gone were the happy days at Stillwaters when Georgina had entertained, big house parties and Roger had delighted in conversing with her other guests: statesmen, am­bassadors, painters and playwrights; the dinners for fifty with dancing or gambling afterwards until the small hours. Gone, too, were those halcyon midweeks that they had spent alone, dallying in her great bed until nearly midday, and later pic­nicking in a boat on the lovely lake.

At the convalescent home, life was earnest; the state of its inmates depressing. In vain Roger had endeavoured to recon­cile himself to the role of comforter and adviser as he listened patiently to the stories of the stricken seamen. And Georgina had thrown herself into her part so determinedly that often when night came she was too tired to make love.

To break the monotony of his wearisome round Roger had made several trips to London. But they, too, proved unsatis­factory. He was a member of White's, but he had lived for so long abroad that he had few friends. More and more he had begun to long for the companionship of those gay paladins with whom he had shared many dangers in Italy, Egypt and across the Rhine.

In England he was a nobody: just the son of the late Admiral Sir Christopher Brook. In France he was 'le brave Breuc', and A.D.C. to the Emperor, an intimate friend of the Empress Josephine and of all the members of the Bonaparte family. He was one of the very few Colonels to whom, for personal services, Napoleon had given the second rank in his new order of chivalry. Roger ranked as a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and, as a Knight in the new Napoleonic aristocracy, again ranked as le Chevalier de Breuc.

By May, acute boredom with Georgina's Home and a Lon­don that offered no advancement to him had decided him to return to France.

In 1800 Roger, sent by Talleyrand as Plenipotentiary Ex­traordinary to England with an offer of peace, had quarrelled bitterly with his master, Pitt, for refusing it. Thenceforth, he had no longer been employed by the British Government, although he had undertaken certain missions for the Prime Minister and aided Britain's cause whenever possible.

In May 1806 he would have at least gone to Pitt and en­quired if there was any special information about the plans of Britain's enemy that he might secure for him. But in Janu­ary of that year, broken-hearted by the news of Austerlitz and the collapse of the Third Coalition, the great and courage­ous man who, for over twenty years had been the mainstay of resistance to the terrorists of the French Revolution be­coming dominant over all Europe, had died.

His regime had been succeeded by a so-called 'Ministry of All the Talents'—a coalition led by Charles Fox. The great Whig was one of Georgina's friends, so Roger had often met him at Stillwaters, and found it difficult to resist his personal charm. But the fact remained that Fox had shown ardent sympathy with the French Revolution, and actively advocated England, too, becoming a Republic. For many years he had consistently thwarted and endeavoured to sabotage Pitt's plans for the defeat of Napoleon and, during the brief Peace of 1803, had received and lionised in France. Such treachery Roger could not forgive, and nothing would have induced him to serve under such a master.

In consequence, with no brief, but believing that he could do neither good nor harm to Britain in Napoleon's Continen­tal wars, Roger had reported back for duty, to be warmly received by the Emperor and his many friends in France.

Yet now, a prisoner beneath his horse, the cold steadily creeping upon him, he realised how stupid he had been to risk death in one of Napoleon's battles, instead of settling for a safe, if humdrum, life in England.

His chances of survival were very slender. It was just pos­sible that French stretcher-bearers might come upon him; but they were comparatively few and the casualties in the battle ran to many thousands. There was an equally slender chance that he might be picked up by the Russians; yet it was more probable than either that the vultures of the battlefield would find and kill him.

All armies in those days were dogged by swarms of camp-followers : women who made a precarious living as whores to the troops, and men who, after every engagement, went out by night to rob the wounded of all they possessed, and even stripped them of their clothes. The still greater likelihood was that he would remain lying there in the snow until he slowly froze to death.

He seemed to have been hunched beside his mare for many hours, yet it was only a little after midnight when, muffled by the fur hood over his head, he caught the sound of voices. Pushing away one side of the hood, he heard a gruff voice say in French:

'Here's another. From his fine mount and fur-edged cloak he must be an officer, so he should yield good pickings.'

In the money belt that he always wore about him Roger had over one hundred louis in gold. To offer it in exchange for his life he knew would be useless. These human vultures would only laugh, kill him and take the money from his dead body. Squirming over, he pulled a pistol from the upper holster of his horse.

As he moved, he heard the voice exclaim, 'Quick, Jean! This one is still alive. Bash him over the head with your iron bar and send him to join the others we have done well from.'

His heart beating madly in his chest, Roger turned over. Above him there loomed two tall figures, made grotesquely bulky by furs they had stolen from several dead men on the battlefield. Raising his pistol, he levelled it at the nearer. Offering up a prayer that the powder had not become damp, he pulled the trigger. There came a flash and a loud report that shattered the silence of the night. The man at whom he had aimed gave a choking gasp, sagged at the knees and fell dead in the snow.

With a furious curse, the other flung himself upon Roger. The pistol was single-barrelled, so he could not fire it again. In spite of his imprisoned leg, he still had the full use of his muscular arms and torso; so he grappled desperately with his attacker, pulling him down upon him.

The man was strong and ruthless. Seizing Roger by the throat, he endeavoured to strangle him. In such a situation Roger would normally have kneed him in the groin, but he was in no position to do so. Gasping for breath, he used his hands. Stiffening his fingers, he thrust them violently at his would-be murderer's face. One finger pierced his antagonist's left eye. With a howl of pain, he released his hold on Roger's neck and jerked himself up. Knowing that his life hung in the balance, Roger seized his momentary advantage. His hands fastened on the man's throat. There ensued a ghastly struggle. Thrashing at Roger's face with clenched fists, the human vul­ture strove to free himself. As in a nightmare, Roger knew that his eyes had been blacked, his mouth smashed so that his lips were swelling, and he could taste the salt blood run­ning down from his nose. But, ignoring the pain, he hung on.

Gradually, the blows he was receiving grew weaker, then ceased. In the dim light reflected from the snow, he could see his attacker's face becoming contused and blackened. His eyes bulged from his head, his tongue jutted out from between his uneven teeth. After what seemed an age, he collapsed, strangled, across Roger's body.

Groaning and exhausted, Roger feebly pushed his victim from him. Panting from his exertions, he lay there, still a prisoner of the horse that pinned down his leg. By a miracle he had fought off this brutal attempt to murder him. Tem­porarily the violent struggle had warmed him up, but it was as yet early in the night and, with the increasing cold, he had little hope of surviving until morning.

The Bill is Presented

One benefit at least that Roger derived from having been attacked by these human vultures was that both were clad in thick furs which they had evidently looted earlier from other casualties on the battlefield. Handicapped though he was by his trapped foot, he managed to wiggle a big, coarse, bear­skin coat off the man he had strangled. The one he had shot lay beyond his reach, but he was able to use the bearskin as extra cover for his body and free leg which, until his desperate fight for life, had gradually been becoming numb with cold.

After a while his thoughts turned again to Georgina. It was, no doubt, the gipsy blood she had inherited from her mother which enabled her to foretell the future with some accuracy, and form with Roger a strange psychic link which, for his part, he attributed to their complete understanding of each other's mind and mutual life-long devotion. There had been occasions when he had been in acute danger and she many hundred miles away, yet he had clearly heard her voice warn­ing him and telling him how to save himself; and once, when she was nearly drowning in the Caribbean he, in Paris, had fainted and fallen from his horse, later to learn that his spirit had gone to her and imbued her with the strength to swim ashore.

He wondered now if she was aware of his present desperate plight and would, in some way, aid him. But he did not see how she could, as he had left no means untried to free him­self; and no warning of the approach of human vultures was necessary as long as he could remain awake.

From Georgina his mind drifted to another lovely woman: the Countess Marie Walewska, Napoleon's latest mistress.

When Napoleon married Josephine, he had loved her most desperately, whereas she was indifferent to him, and only per­suaded to the match by her ex-lover, the then all-powerful Director, Barras. So indifferent to him was she that she had been flagrantly unfaithful to him with a handsome army con­tractor named Hippolyte Charles, during Napoleon's ab­sence on the Italian campaign. Her husband found out, but was still so much under her spell that he forgave her. No sooner had he set sail for Egypt than Josephine began openly to indulge in further amours. His family loathed her; so, on his return, provided him with chapter and verse about her infidelities, hoping that he would get rid of her. Having, while in Egypt, had a hectic affair with a most charming young woman known as La Bellelotte, he was inclined to do so; but Josephine's children by her first marriage, Eugene and Hor-tense Beauharnais, whom Napoleon loved as though they were his own children, interceded with tears for their mother so effectively that she was again forgiven.

But thenceforth Napoleon did not scruple to take any woman he desired, and Josephine's tragedy was that, all too late, her indifference to him had turned to love. At intervals, between dozens of the beauties from the Opera and the Comedie Francaise spending a night or two in his bed, there had been more lengthy affairs with Grassini, the Italian singer; Mile Georges, the Nell Gwyn of his seraglio, who truly loved him for himself and kept him in fits of laughter; a gold-digging tragedienne named Therese Bourgoin; the autocratic and in­veterate gambler Madame de Vaudey who was one of Joseph­ine's ladies-in-waiting; then Madame Duchatel, a ravishing blonde with cornflower-blue eyes, who was another of Joseph­ine's ladies.

By then, the knowledge of Napoleon's infidelities had been causing Josephine to have bouts of weeping and, half-mad with jealousy, she invaded the room where her husband and la Duchatel were disporting themselves. Furiously declaring that he was not as other men, and above petty marital con­ventions, he had driven Josephine from the room.

Yet he continued to regard her with great affection. He still frequently slept with her and, when he was worried, it was she who read him to sleep. During the Prussian campaign he had missed her dreadfully and frequently wrote to her in the warmest terms, urging her, for his sake, to face the rigours of the northern winter and join him.

But soon after his arrival in Warsaw the- tune of his letters to Josephine had altered; the gist of them being that the climate would prove too severe for her, so she must remain in Paris.

The reason for this sudden change of heart was known to all who were in frequent attendance on him. On January ist, when on his way to Warsaw, his coach had been surrounded by an excited crowd, cheering this legendary paladin who, rumour said, was about to restore Poland to her ancient glory. At an inn at which the coach had pulled up, two ladies had begged Duroc, Napoleon's A.D.C.-in-Chief and Marshal of his Camps and Palaces, to permit them to pay homage to the hero. Duroc had courteously agreed, and one of the ladies was the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, eighteen-year-old Countess Walewska.

Napoleon, much taken with her, instantly recognised her again when she appeared at a grand ball given in his honour a few nights after he had established himself in the ancient Palace of the Polish Kings. But, from shyness, the young girl had asked to be excused when he invited her to dance. No doubt this had made him more eager to pursue her, which for some days he did, with growing annoyance at her ignoring his letters and refusing him a rendezvous.

The fact was that Marie Walewska was, although married to a seventy-year-old nobleman, chaste, of a retiring disposi­tion and deeply religious. The thought of taking a lover was abhorrent to her and, although normally Napoleon never took 'No' for an answer, in this case help had to be called in.

Prince Poniatowski, the head of the movement for Polish liberation, pointed out to her how valuable she could be to her country's cause by becoming the all-powerful Emperor's mistress. Moved to tears as she was by this appeal to her known patriotism, she still refused to succumb.

The affair became the talk of the town; men and women, friends and relations all joined in to badger poor little Marie into giving way for the good of the cause. Driven half out of her wits, she at last agreed to allow Duroc to escort her to Napoleon's apartments. Duroc, who was one of Roger's closest friends, told him afterwards that, although the couple had been closeted together for three hours, Marie had been in tears the whole time and left the room as chaste as she had entered it.

Utterly exasperated, Napoleon played his last card and sent his brilliant Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, to talk to her. That elegant aristocrat, a bishop under the ancient regime. a Liberal leader during the first Revolution, an exile during the Terror, after Napoleon one of the two most powerful men in France for the past eight years, and not long since created by his master Prince de Benevento, was not only as subtle as a serpent in negotiating treaties, but also a past-master in the art of seducing women. Where all others had failed, he had per­suaded Marie that the gods had blessed her above all other women by enabling her to serve her country and, at the same time, endowing her with the love of the most powerful man on earth.

Napoleon was invariably kind and courteous to women, and extravagantly generous to his mistresses. His gentleness and charm soon won Marie's heart. Their happy association lasted for many years. She was one of the few women that he ever truly loved and, in due course, she gave him a son.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Perigord, a grandson of the Princess dc Chalais, debarred from succeeding his father as Marquis because an ill-cared-for broken ankle, causing him to be lame for life, had disqualified him for the Army, had played a key role in Roger's life.

At the age of nineteen, Roger had been knocked out and carried unconscious into Talleyrand's house. During his sub­sequent ravings, Talleyrand had learned that his guest was not, as he purported to be, a Frenchman born in Strasbourg who, on his mother's death, had been brought up by her sister in England; but was in fact the son of Lady Marie Brook and a British Admiral. He had kept Roger's secret and, for many years, believed that, as was quite common in those days, Roger was a foreigner who had decided to make his career in an­other country and was completely loyal to it.

At last Talleyrand had found out that Roger was still loyal to the country of his birth and that, ever since 1789, owing to the high connections he had made in France, he had acted as a master spy for Britain's Prime Minister. But on two counts Talleyrand had refrained from having him arrested. Firstly, it was Roger who during the Terror had procured for him the papers that had enabled him to escape from France. Secondly, from the very beginning of his diplomatic career, Talleyrand's secret aim had been to bring Britain and France together; his conviction being that there could be no lasting peace in Europe until her two most powerful nations per­manently buried the hatchet.

Talleyrand was unique among his contemporaries: an aris­tocrat by birth and breeding, he still dressed in silks and went to receptions with his hair powdered, yet he had succeeded in dominating the horde of strong-willed, self-made men who had emerged from the Revolution. Cynical, venal, immoral, he pursued his unruffled way through court and camp, al­though he detested having to follow Napoleon on his campaigns—on the way to Warsaw his coach had become stuck for a whole night in the snow. When in Paris he lived in the utmost luxury and, to meet his colossal expenditure, he ex­acted huge bribes from the foreign ambassadors; but only to listen to their desires, not necessarily to further them, and that had been customary with Ministers of Foreign Affairs in every country in Europe for centuries. That he was im­moral he would never have denied; the lovely women with whom, at one time or another, he had been to bed were legion. But he was a man of great vision, whose steadfast ambition was to bring lasting peace and prosperity to France.

Most men holding such views and serving a master to whom war was the breath of life, would long since have thrown in their hands. But not Talleyrand. Again and again, calm, im­perturbable, even showing apparent willingness, he had bowed before the storm and negotiated treaties made against his advice; yet always with the hope that if he remained at his post a time would come when he could stabilise the position of France within her own natural frontiers and bring the other nations of Europe to look on her as a friend.

As early as October 1805 Talleyrand had sent from Stras­bourg a well-reasoned paper to the Emperor. His argument was that the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire could do only harm to Europe. By remaining strong it could act both as a counterpoise to Prussia, and keep the barbarous hordes of Russia in check. After Napoleon had entered Vienna in triumph, Talleyrand had adhered to his policy, begging the Emperor to let the defeated Austrians off lightly and enter into an alliance with them; thus evading the danger that Hungary might break away and go over to the Czar.

Talleyrand's despatch had reached the Emperor just after Austerlitz, in which battle he had administered the coup de grace to Austria and also routed a Russian army. Elated by his double victory he had brushed aside the wise counsel of his Foreign Minister and imposed a brutally harsh fine on the Emperor Francis, taking from him his Venetian and Dal­matian territories, and other big areas of land, to reward the German Princes who had sent contingents of troops to fight beside the French.

That summer he had arbitrarily united sixteen of these Princes to form under his suzerainty the Confederation of the Rhine. Talleyrand had obediently brought them into line, while looking down his slightly retrousse nose. He, and his Austrian opposite number, Prince Metternich, knew well enough that such a hastily-assembled kettle of normally antag­onistic fish could prove no substitute for a strong Austrian Empire.

In that summer, too, Talleyrand had again endeavoured to bring about a peace with Britain. Charles Fox had all his life been so strong a Francophile that his then being in power favoured it; but negotiations had broken down over the future of Sicily.

The age had opened when Napoleon was to play ducks and drakes with the ancient thrones of Europe. He had re­cently made his elder brother, Joseph, King of Naples; his youngest brother, Louis, King of Holland; arid his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, Grand Duke of Berg. But Joseph was as yet in possession of only the land half of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Bourbon King Ferdinand had fled from Naples to the great island and, protected by the British Fleet, still held it. Such was Napoleon's loathing for Ferdinand's Queen, Caroline—the intriguing elder sister of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette—that he was determined to conquer the island at the first opportunity, and laid claim to it as part of Joseph's Kingdom. Pledged to continue to defend the Bour­bons, in honour bound Britain could not agree to abandon them. Then, in September, the grossly obese Fox had follow­ed his life-long opponent, Pitt, to the grave.

There had followed the whirlwind Prussian campaign. After the defeats of Jena and Austerlitz, Frederick William had asked for terms. Again Talleyrand had urged the Em­peror to show mercy to the defeated and bind them to him by an alliance. Napoleon would not hear of it. An alliance, yes; but not until Prussia had forfeited half her territories. In vain Talleyrand had pointed out that, with both Austria and Prussia broken, there would be no major Power left to help resist the Muscovite hordes overrunning Central Europe and invading France herself. But Napoleon, by then the arbiter of Europe from the tip of Italy to the Baltic, and from the Carpathian mountains to the North Sea, had become so overwhelmingly confident in his own power to deal with any and every situa­tion that he had refused to listen. The Prussians had sullenly withdrawn to the north, and were still giving the Czar such help as they could.

It had begun to snow again: large, heavy, silent flakes. As Roger drew his furs more closely round him, he wondered how it would all end. The French had taken a terrible ham­mering that day at Eylau, but no one could dispute Napoleon's genius as a General. Roger would have bet a year's pay that, before the year was out, by one of his fantastically swift con­centrations the Emperor would catch the Russians napping and inflict a terrible defeat upon them. But what then?

Britain alone would remain in arms defying the might of the Continent's overlord. But she was in a worse way than she had been at any time since the beginning of the struggle. The so-called 'Ministry of All the Talents' consisted almost entirely of weak, incompetent men who lacked a firm policy, and spent their time quarrelling amongst themselves.

If Napoleon's Continental System proved a really serious threat to Britain's trade, industrial interests might force the present futile gang to agree a humiliating peace. Again, should Napoleon succeed in defeating the Russians, he would have no enemy left but England; and would march the Grande Armee back to Boulogne. For the time being Trafalgar had rendered invasion out of the question; but, with every dock­yard in Europe at his disposal, the Emperor could, in a year or two, build a fleet strong enough to challenge again the British Navy. The great Nelson was dead. Would his successor succeed in defeating a French Armada; or, awful thought, would Lasalle's Hussars and Oudinot's Grenadiers yet ravage and burn the peaceful farmsteads of Kent and Sussex?

As the falling snow formed a blanket over Roger's hunched body, he knew that the issue was, for him, academic; but he tried to cheer himself by looking on the brighter side.

There was another possibility. During this past year the Emperor had succumbed to folie de grandeur. He had ab­solute confidence in his 'star' and considered himself a super­man whose decisions could never be wrong. Hence his abrupt dismissal of Talleyrand's far-sighted policies. But it is said that 'pride goeth before a fall'. It was not only the rulers and the armies of Austria and Prussia that had been humbled by defeat. The peoples of those countries, countless thousands of whom had casually been made citizens of foreign states, re­sented most bitterly the fate that Napoleon had brought upon them.

At least there was a chance that they might be seized with a patriotic fervour and rise in their wrath against this oppres­sor. Between '92 and '96 it had been the people of France who had not only overthrown the Monarchy, but defied and de­feated the trained armies of Austria, Prussia, Piedmont and Spain. If Napoleon had his back turned—for example being occupied with the invasion of England—might not the Germans and Austrians combine to massacre the French garrisons left in their cities, and regain their freedom?

The fanaticism that had imbued the early armies of the Republic with the courage to achieve their amazing victories turned Roger's thoughts to France as it was now, under the benign but iron hand of the Emperor. In '99, when he had become First Consul, the country had been in a state of an­archy. There was no justice in the land. Every Municipality was a law unto itself, flagrantly robbing such citizens of any means who had not escaped abroad, yet neglecting the roads in its district until they became almost impassable. The coun­try had swarmed with bands of deserters who pillaged and murdered at will. In the cities the Churches had been turned into gaming hells and brothels, half the houses had become rat-infested tenements, and the streets were half-choked with the accumulated filth of years.

Within a year, in one great spate of inexhaustible energy, overriding every obstacle, the First Consul had cleaned the country up. The venal Municipalities had been replaced by Prefects, answerable only to him. The roads were repaired, the diligences again ran on time, the inns were made habit­able and their staffs were no longer surly and offensive. The dries were cleansed, thousands of new schools opened, justice restored and the finances put in order. That one man could have achieved so much in so short a time was miraculous and, as an administrator, Napoleon had Roger's whole-hearted admiration. But a price had had to be paid for his services. The French people had lost their hard-won liberty. By a series of swift, crafty changes in the Constitution, Bonaparte had made himself a dictator whose will no man could question. Yet, because he had brought order out of chaos and again given them security, they had accepted this new bondage with­out a murmur.

As Roger recalled those days of hectic endeavour to re­trieve France from the appalling state of disorder into which she had fallen during the ten years of the Revolution and Directory, the image of another personality entered his mind.

This was Joseph Fouche. Equally, perhaps, with Talley­rand, after Napoleon, he had for many years been the most powerful man in France. He was, too, the only other who knew Roger to be in fact the son of an English Admiral.

Fouche was the antithesis of Talleyrand. He had started life as a lay teacher of the Oratorian Order, become a close friend of Robespierre and was the Deputy for Nantes in the Re­volutionary Convention. In '93 he had emerged as one of the most ruthless of the Terrorists. As Commissioner in Nevers he had looted the Cathedral and sent scores of bourgeoisie to the guillotine. In Lyons he had put down a Liberal revolt, had trenches dug outside the city, then had the captured rebels —men, women and children—lined up in front of them and mowed down with cannon firing grapeshot.

During the reaction that took place under the Directory, he had been lucky to escape with his life and, while in exile forty leagues from Paris, managed to sustain himself by breeding pigs. Somehow he had become an army contractor, made a small fortune, then suddenly emerged again as Chief of Police.

From Roger's first year in France right up to the autumn of '99, a bitter enmity had existed between him and Fouche. Each owed the other a long-harboured grudge and, on numer­ous occasions, they had pitted their wits against each other, with death as the forfeit. But at the time of Brumaire, when Napoleon had made his bid for power, their interests having become common they had buried the hatchet.

Roger had brought the aristocratic Talleyrand and the rabble-rouser Fouchc secretly together, because he knew that both believed Bonaparte to be the 'man with the sword' who could cleanse the Augean Stable that France had become. Talleyrand had stage-managed the coup d'etat out at St. Cloud while Fouche had closed the gates of Paris, thus pre­venting interference by troops still loyal to the Convention and the Revolution.

Confirmed in his office as Chief of Police by Bonaparte, Fouche had then worked wonders. His spy system was all-embracing, his files contained particulars of every important Frenchman in the country, and out of it. He worked eighteen hours a day and maintained a large staff of highly efficient subordinates. He was aware of every incipient conspiracy and every love affair that mattered. Although himself a Jaco­bin, he ruthlessly suppressed all his old colleagues who were anti-Bonaparte. He controlled a vast army of agents and his powers had increased to a point where his word became law from one end of France to the other. Meanwhile, he had amassed a vast fortune.

By the autumn of 1802 he had become so powerful that even Napoleon became afraid of him, so dismissed him and split his Ministry into two. But by the summer of 1804, the Emperor had reluctantly come to realise that, when he was away on his campaigns, Fouche was the only man capable of pre­venting trouble in France, so he had been reinstated as Minister of Police, and given special powers to deal with any emergency.

He was a tall, pale cadaverous man whose features resembled those of a living corpse. Habitually he never looked anyone straight in the face. His eyes were like those of a dead fish and, as he suffered from a perpetual cold, his nose was always running. Unlike Talleyrand, he was careless in his dress and his waistcoat was often stained with snuff. Unlike Talleyrand, too, no pretty woman ever graced his bed. He was completely faithful to a dreary wife who was as ill-favoured as himself. In 1804, when creating a new aristocracy to support his throne, Napoleon had made Fouche the Due d'Otranto.

Although Talleyrand and Fouche had combined to bring General Bonaparte to power as First Consul, their outlooks on life were as different as oil from water, and they loathed each other. But Roger, while having a deep affection for the former, also admired the latter for his extraordinary efficiency, and for a long time past had been on the best of terms with them both.

As the steadily-falling snow formed a thick layer over Roger's furs, his limbs gradually became numb. He felt a great desire to fall asleep, but knew that if he did that would be the end. He would never wake up. Vaguely he realised that he could not have been granted a less painful death. Even so, his instinct was to keep life in his body for as long as pos­sible. From time to time he rubbed his face and ears hard, flailed his arms out and in, beating his chest, and kicked about with his free leg. But gradually his movements became more infrequent, and his mind wandered from one disconnected episode to another:

His divine Georgina in bed with him, bidding him nibble her ears, which she adored; himself angrily telling Pitt who, in 1799, had refused the peace terms offered by Bonaparte, to keep the money due to him and instead give it to the charity for soldiers and sailors wounded in the war; the evening when, on an island in the lagoon of Venice, he had singlehanded defended Napoleon from a gang of conspirators come there to assassinate him; the Emperor's sister, the beautiful Princess Pauline, standing naked in his Paris lodging while she implored him to risk her brother's wrath by demanding her hand in marriage; his horror and fury on that dark night in India when he had come upon Clarissa dying of exposure as a result of a Satanic ceremony performed by the fiendish Malderini; the sunshine and flowers of the Caribbean, which he had so loved while married to his second wife, Amanda, and had, for a while, been Governor of Martinique, Georgina again, happily playing with her son, Charles, and his own dau­ghter, Susan, who shared the nursery of the little Earl. Then for a moment he was again a little boy himself, feeding a saucer of milk to a hedgehog in the garden of his home at Lymington. The pictures faded from his mind, and he slept.

He was awakened by being roughly shaken and gave a cry. A voice said something in a strange tongue. Roger had a flair for languages. He had learned to speak Russian from his first wife, that beautiful. tiger-cat Natalia Andreovna, whom Catherine the Great had forced him into marrying; and, dur­ing the past two months, he had picked up a little Polish. This was neither, but seemed like a bastard form of German. He sensed that the man had said:

'Here's one who is still alive.'

Three other men crowded round him. Between them they dragged the dead mare off his leg, then hauled him to his feet and ran their hands over his limbs, evidently to find out if he was wounded. As they released him, his weight came on his injured foot. It gave under him and, with a gasp of pain, he fell across the horse.

All his rescuers were muffled up to the eyes in furs. One towered above the others and must have been at least six foot five. Stooping, he thrust a flask into Roger's mouth and poured vodka down his throat. The fiery spirit made him choke, but his heart began to hammer wildly, restoring his circulation.

Straightening up, the giant spoke to the others in clear but heavily accented German, 'His ankle is broken. But he'll be all right. Get him to the wagon.'

Looking round, Roger realised that it had stopped snow­ing; but instead of the battlefield being dotted with the dark forms of fallen men and horses, it was now, as far as he could see in the dim light, an endless sheet of white. It was only as he was half carried, half dragged forward that mounds here and there showed the places where Frenchmen and Russians had breathed their last.

On the edge of the wood there stood a covered wagon. With callous indifference for his broken ankle, the men lifted and bundled him into it. Inside, it was pitch dark, but the sound of movement told him that he was not its only occu­pant. After a moment, a gruff voice said in French: 'Welcome to our hive, camarade. You're the third of us they've picked up. What's your rank and regiment?'

Cautious from long experience of dangerous situations, Roger did not immediately reply. Then he decided that noth­ing was to be gained by concealing his identity and that re­vealing it might even secure him better treatment; so he answered:

'Colonel de Breuc, aide-de-camp to the Emperor.'

'Ventre du diable!' exclaimed the other in an awed voice. 'Not le brave Breuc?'

Roger managed a half-hearted laugh. 'That's what they call me. Who are you?'

'Sergeant Jules Fournier, Sixth Battalion Imperial Guard.'

'I'm glad to have an old soldier with me. Who is our com­panion?'

Another, younger voice came feebly out of the darkness, speaking French but with a German accent. 'I'm Hans Hoff­man, Colonel, a Private in the 2nd Nassau Regiment of Foot.'

In the next few minutes Roger learned that the Sergeant had a shattered knee-cap and the Private a bullet wound in the thigh. Both were in considerable pain, but thought themselves lucky to have been saved from freezing to death. Roger did, too, and greatly as he disliked the idea of having become a prisoner of war, felt that he had been fortunate to be picked up by Prussians rather than Russians.

A few minutes later a fourth body was bundled into the wagon. He turned out to be a French Corporal of Chasseurs. In one of Murat's charges, he had had the big toe of his right foot shot away and been thrown from his horse. He, too, was in considerable pain, and had no sooner settled himself than he began to mutter an unending flow of curses on his ill-for­tune. His name, they learned, was Francois Vitu and he came from Marseilles.

Two of the bear-like figures who had rescued them clam­bered into the back of the wagon, then it set off. The journey seemed interminable and every jolt of the unwieldy vehicle caused the wounded men to give groans of pain.

At last the pale light of dawn enabled them vaguely to see one another and, half an hour later, die wagon came to a halt. The four prisoners were unceremoniously pulled out of it and promptly collapsed in the snow.

Looking round they saw that they were in a clearing of the forest, at one end of which there reared up a small, grim-looking castle. From both sides of it there ran out tall, thatched barns and stables. Roger was a little surprised not to find himself in the usual type of prisoner-of-war camp, but he supposed that the castle had been taken over for that purpose.

Pulled and pushed, the wounded men were dragged not to the castle, but to one of the barns. In the centre of its earth floor there was a circular depression in which large, red-hot stones were glowing. At cither end of the barn, cattle were stall-v. cd. Above one end there was a loft stacked with bales of hay.

At an order from the giant leader, one of his men threw an armful of branches on the glowing stones, and the new wood swiftly flared up. Grateful for the warmth it gave out, the four wounded men huddled round it.

Two women then appeared. One was a big, coarse-featured blonde, with huge, jutting breasts; the other a wrinkled har­ridan. With them they brought basins of water and a supply of coarse bandages. Between them they washed and bound up the wounds of Roger and his companions. The giant's men then carried them one after the other up to the loft, broke open some bales of sweet-smelling hay, and laid them on couches of it.

Roger was greatly puzzled. During the terrible battle, many others of Napoleon's troops must have been captured; but there were none here. And when, on entering the barn, the tall leader of their rescuers and his men had thrown open their voluminous furs, beneath them they wore no sort of uniform. Still wondering vaguely and with some apprehension about what the future held for him, he fell asleep.

He, and those with him, did not wake until late in the after­noon. They were aroused by the big man and the fair woman with the huge breasts coming up the ladder to the loft.

The man no longer wore furs, and was dressed in a kaftan. He was broad-shouldered as well as tall. His head was crowned by an unruly mop of flaxen hair, and he had a smooth, aggressive chin. Looking down on them, he gave a laugh, slapped the woman on the backside and said in his heavy German:

'I am Baron Herman von Znamensk, and this is my wife Freda. She will look to your wounds, so that in time you will be able men again. That may take a few weeks; but no matter. By then either your army will be deep in the heart of Russia, or the Czar will have driven it back in confusion. Either way, it will be too distant for there to be any chance of your being rescued by one of its columns.'

For a moment he paused, then, his steel-blue eyes flashing hatred, he snarled, 'You French swine and your self-styled Emperor have torn my country apart. Without cause or justi­fication you have descended like a swarm of locusts to devour our means of livelihood. Every head of cattle, every quintal of wheat has been stolen by you from my outlying farms. But the four of you shall pay me for that. Henceforth you are my serfs, and shall labour for the rest of your lives, under the whip of my overseer, making good the damage that your upstart Emperor has done me and mine.'

An Appalling Future

It was a sentence too terrible to contemplate. To have become a prisoner of war, however unfortunate, was one thing; to have become the chattel of this blond giant for an indefinite period quite another.

For a moment Roger remained silent. To show angry re­sentment would, he knew, prove futile; so, in a quiet voice he began:

'Herr Baron, I appreciate your feelings at the losses you have suffered during this campaign; but there is a better way to recoup them than by detaining us here to labour on your land. I am an officer, and...'

'You were,' sneered the woman. 'But now you are no bet­ter than any other man and, when your ankle is mended, you shall plough and hoe for us.'

'Gnadige Frau.' Roger forced a smile. 'I am not only an officer. I am an aide-de-camp, and the personal friend of the Emperor. I pray you, send word to him that I am here. I have no doubt at all that he will ransom me, and the three men you have taken prisoner with me, for a much greater sum than you could make from ten years of our labour.'

The Baron gave a harsh laugh. 'Send a message to your bloody-minded, war-mongering Emperor? And what then? A squadron of Hussars would arrive here overnight, rape the women, drive off the cattle, hang me and burn the castle to the ground. Is it likely? No, my fine cock sparrow, you are staying here and when your ankle is mended we'll measure out the amount of turnip soup you are given each night in proportion to the sweat you have exuded during the day.'

Obviously for the moment there was no more to be said.

While the Baron looked on, Freda of the wobbling breasts redressed their wounds. As she finished with the last of them, one of the Baron's men came up the ladder with a big basin of the vegetable soup. When he had ladled it out into tin pannikins, all four of the prisoners ate of it ravenously des­pite its indifferent flavour.

Looking on at them, the Baron smacked his man cheer­fully on the back and said with a smile, 'This is Kutzie, my overseer. You will obey him as you would myself, or it will be the worse for you.'

Kutzie was a small, thickset man. He had an oafish grin which displayed a gap in his front teeth where two of them had been knocked out in a brawl. In his belt he carried a knout with a long leather thong. Drawing it, he playfully flicked each of the prisoners in turn. Roger felt the sting of the lash on his calf and could hardly suppress a cry. The Ser­geant took it stoically. Young Hans Hoffman let out a groan, Corporal Vitu responded with a spate of curses.

The Baron and Baroness laughed heartily; then, accom­panied by Kutzie, they descended the ladder and made their way back to the castle.

German was Hoffman's native tongue and, during the cam­paign, Fournier and Vitu had picked up enough of it to have got the gist of what the Baron had said. When their captors had disappeared, the Sergeant rumbled, 'May all the devils in hell take them. What are we to do, Colonel?'

'Plan a way to escape,' replied Roger grimly.

'It's all very well for Your High and Mightiness to say that,' sneered Vitu. 'Hopelessly lamed by our wounds as we are, how can we?'

'Shut your trap!' bellowed the Sergeant. 'Or when we get back, I'll crime you for disrespect to an officer.'

Temporarily Roger ignored the Corporal's insolence and said, 'We shall have to be patient; wait until our wounds are healed. Meanwhile our best policy will be to give these people no trouble and allow them to believe that we are resigned to our fate. It is getting dark again, and the more sleep we get, the sooner we'll recover. We'll talk things over in the morn­ing.'

With no more said, but mostly gloomy thoughts, they wrig­gled down into the hay and made themselves as comfortable as they could for the night.

They all woke early. For the first time Roger took careful stock of his companions, and asked them about themselves.

Sergeant Fournier was a typical old soldier, with one ear shot away and a thick, drooping moustache. As a ragged sans calotte he had been with Kellermann at Valmay, that most extraordinary turning point in history, where the French, merely by standing fast and firing their cannon, had broken the Austrian attack, caused consternation in their aged com­mander and led him to abandon the attempt to invade France. Fournier had then served under Lannes in the glorious cam­paign in Italy in '96, been transferred to the Army of the Rhine, distinguished himself in General Moreau's great victory at Hohenlinden, later been promoted to the Consular—now the Imperial—Guard and had since been present at all Napoleon's battles. He was forty-two, but his lined face made him look much older. He had been wounded seven times and been decorated with the Legion d'Honneur. He was a Revolution­ary of the old school, yet regarded the Emperor as his God, and his own Commander of the Imperial Guard, young Mar­shal Bessieres, with admiring awe. Roger knew that in him at least he had one man he could rely on.

Hans Hoffman was a nonentity. He was one of the many thousands of teenagers from the Rhineland whom Napoleon had forced the minor sovereigns, who had perforce become his allies, to conscript and send to aid him in his campaign. Secretly Hoffman loathed the French and, given the oppor­tunity, would have deserted; but lacked the courage.

Corporal Vitu was a very different type. The son of a law­yer who had been prominent in the early days of the Revolu­tion, he was a well-educated man in his late twenties; married and with one son. Even so, he had not been able to escape the call-up by which, now ahead of schedule, the Emperor was compelled to recruit fresh levies to make good the losses of his armies. Vitu had a thin, bitter mouth and a long nose. He was fluent, knowledgeable and aggressive; and Roger soon sized him up as a born trouble-maker.

When they talked over their situation, Vitu said, 'I'll take a chance and attempt to escape when the time is ripe. But I'll not return to the Army.'

'You will,' Fournier declared hotly. 'It's your duty, and I'll see to it that you do it.'

'Duty be damned,' the Corporal declared. 'If it were to defend France, I'd fight again, as you did at Jemappes and Wattignies. But here, in this outlandish place, why the hell should I?'

'Them Prussians would be across the Rhine again if we hadn't given them a licking at Jena; and the Russians with them. Only a fool would rather wait till he had to fight battles in his own country, instead of in the enemy's.'

'Nonsense! Neither of them would have attacked us. What had they to gain by going to war? Nothing! Not since '99 has France been in the least danger. We have been the victims of Bonaparte's crazy ambitions ever since. He's dragged us from our homes to march, starve and fight all over Europe, solely for his own glory, and I've had enough of it.'

Roger knew that the Corporal was expressing the views of a great part of the rank and file of the Army; but, as a senior officer, he could not let such remarks pass, so he said, 'That's quite enough, Corporal. Prussia and Russia are both mon­archies. They would impose a King on us again if they could. If we are to retain our liberties, they have got to be defeated.'

'Liberties!' sneered Vitu. 'You must have been asleep for the past ten years, Colonel. The days of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" are as far behind us as the Dark Ages. Every law the Convention made has been annulled or altered, and the new Constitution of the Year XII, that Bonaparte gave us soon after he crowned himself in Notre Dame, has turned us into a race of slaves. As for Equality, if the men who won it for us in '93 could sec things as they are now, they'd turn in their graves. The people's representative has made himself an Emperor and his brothers Kings. His hangers-on are grand dignitaries, Princes, Dukes and the like. They doll them­selves up in gold braid, jewels and feathers, cat off the fat of the land, and get themselves fortunes by looting every country they invade; while we poor devils are paid only a few francs a day and driven to risk our lives so that they can further en­rich themselves.'

'You've got something there,' the Sergeant acknowledged. 'Nevertheless, I'm for the Emperor body and soul. He knows what's best for France, and never lets his men down.'

'All the same,' young Hoffman put in, 'I don't think it's fair that he should force men from other countries to fight his battles. Where I come from we had no quarrel with any­one; neither had the Dutch, the Italians and the Bavarians, yet there are thousands of us here who have been marching and fighting for years, when we might have been working happily in our farms or vineyards, with a good wife and bring­ing up a family.'

'Yes, that's hard luck,' Roger agreed. 'But remember, France has liberated you from the old feudal system by which all but your nobility were virtually chattels of your hereditary Princes. France has paid dearly for that in the loss, for over fifteen years, of a great part of her young manpower. To make good these losses, the Emperor has no alternative but to draw upon his allies.'

'That was fair enough in the old days,' Vitu argued. 'Then we needed every man we could get to fight in Italy and on the Moselle. But that is so no longer. What has the Rhineland or the Netherlands to gain by helping to conquer Poland? And what a campaign it's been! Staggering about in the mud, our uniforms worn to tatters, losing our way in blizzards. It's all very well for you, Colonel, and the rest of the gilded staff. You billet yourselves in the best houses in the towns, keep for yourselves the pick of every convoy of food and wine that comes up from the rear, attend splendid balls, then play chase me round the bed-posts with all the prettiest women. But meantime we have to act like fiends to the wretched peasants to get enough food to stop our bellies from rumbling and sleep in barns so cold that it is not unusual to find that by morning some of our comrades have frozen to death.'

Roger knew all this to be true, but he also knew that his best hope of escape lay in having his three companions will­ingly accept his leadership; so he tactfully agreed that the Army had recently had a terribly hard time, although he maintained that was no fault of the Emperor's, but due to the exceptionally bleak and sparsely-populated country over which they were fighting.

During the days that followed, the unlovely Baroness Freda came regularly to dress their wounds, and Kutzie twice a day with a big bowl of stew, in which there were pieces of meat that, from its sweetish flavour, Roger guessed to be horse­flesh. As the intense cold would have prevented the dead animals from putrefying, he had little doubt that the peasants for miles round, and the survivors of whichever army had kept the field, were gorging themselves upon it.

On their third day in the loft, it was found that young Hoff­man's thigh wound had become gangrenous. No surgeon be­ing available, nothing could be done about it. For some hours he babbled deliriously in German and, on the fourth day, died.

For most of the time while their wounds were healing, they talked of the campaigns in which they had fought, and the Marshals under whom they had served. All of them admired Lannes, Ney and Augereau, who invariably led their troops into battle in full uniform, their chests blazing with stars and decorations.

Lannes was unquestionably the finest assault leader of the Army. He had been wounded a dozen times, yet, given a for­tress to capture, waving his sword he was still the first man up a scaling ladder on to the enemy ramparts.

The red-headed Ney was not only the most capable tac­tician, but had no ambition other than to win glory and, to achieve it, he led every major attack in person.

Augereau, the tall, unscrupulous gamin raised from the gut­ter by the Revolution, and a duellist whom no man any longer dared challenge, was a law unto himself, and led a corps that adored him. He and Lannes were still dyed-in-the-wood Re­volutionists. Their language was foul, they took scant pains to conceal their disapproval of Bonaparte's having made him­self as Emperor; yet, as leaders of troops, they were too valu­able for him to dispense with.

About the tall Gascon, Bernadotte, who refused to comply with the new fashion and still wore his dark hair long, opinion was divided. He was the only senior General who had refused to support Bonaparte at the time of the coup d'etat. And, from the days of the Italian campaign tbey had heartily disliked each other. In the present campaign he had several times been tardy in bringing his corps into action; but he was unquestion­ably a very able soldier, and he was greatly beloved by both his officers and men for the care he took of them.

For Davoust neither Fournier nor Vitu had a good word to say. He was a cold, hard man, and the harshest disciplin­arian in the Army. His one pleasure, when opportunity offered, was waltzing; for the rest of the time he employed himself hanging suspected spies and dealing out brutal punishments to anyone, particularly senior officers, who had in any way contravened his regulations.

For a short period Roger had suffered at Davoust's hands; so had personal cause to dislike him. Even so, he respected and admired this most unpopular of the Marshals. However competent and fanatically brave the others might be, Roger had come to the conclusion that the only advantage they had over the Austrian and Prussian Generals they had defeated was their youth and vigour. Davoust had proved an excep­tion. Not only was he utterly loyal to the Emperor, but he had made an exhaustive study of Napoleon's new methods of waging war, absorbed and applied them.

The Emperor, ever jealous of his subordinates' triumphs, had, in his despatch to Paris, written off Auersuldt as merely a flanking operation during the battle of Jena. But Roger knew the facts. Although completely isolated, Davoust, by brilliant handling of his corps, had defeated one half of the Prussian Army. And he had since further demonstrated his great abilities as an administrator and a soldier.

About the flamboyant Murat, Fournier and Vitu agreed. The uniforms that the recently created Grand Duke of Berg designed for himself might be outre in the extreme but, smoth­ered in gold braid and with tall plumes waving from his head, he never hesitated to lead his hordes of horsemen against either massed infantry or concentrated batteries of cannon. He had been wounded on several occasions, but never seriously enough not to press home charges that had led many times to Napol­eon's victories.

Roger knew him to be an empty-headed, conceited fool, whose only asset was fearless courage; and that politically he would have been a nobody had he not married Napoleon's clever and intensely ambitious sister, Caroline.

Vitu's idol was Massena. Perhaps the Corporal was a little influenced by the fact that the Marshal also came from the South of France; for Massena was a native of Nice. But there was no contesting the fact that he was one of the greatest sol­diers of the Napoleonic age. In '99, while Bonaparte was still absent in Egypt, Massena had held the bastion of Switzerland against great odds, defeated France's enemies and saved her from invasion. Then, in 1800, with Soult and Sourier as his lieutenants, besieged in Genoa, with a half-starved garrison, a hostile population, and harassed by a British fleet, he had hung on for many weeks; thus detaining outside the city a strong Austrian army and enabling Napoleon to win the de­cisive victory of Marengo.

Massena was still in Italy. The Emperor had made his own stepson, Eugene dc Beauharnais, Viceroy. But it was the Marshal who dominated the north, demanding of the cities great sums to maintain his troops, a big percentage of which went into his own pockets. Meanwhile, by charm and lavish presents of stolen jewels, he persuaded a constant succession of lovely Italian women to share his bed.

In central Italy, Marshal Macdonald dominated what had previously been the States of the Church. Down in the South, the foolish King Ferdinand and his forever intriguing Queen Caroline had most rashly welcomed to Naples an Anglo-Russian force of twenty thousand men, thereby breaking the convention by which the French had agreed to withdraw their troops.

Napoleon, himself the most perfidious of men, had screamed with rage at, for once, being treated with his own medicine, and had despatched the able Gouvien St. Cyr to drive the Bourbons from their throne; which he had promptly done, forcing them to take refuge in Sicily.

By that time Bonaparte had decided that to wear a crown himself was not enough to impress the ancient dynasties of the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs, or even the more recent dyna­sties of Hohenzollerns and the Anglo-German Guelphs. So he pushed his elder, clever, kindly, unambitious lawyer brother, Joseph, into becoming King of Naples.

How envious the French troops campaigning in frozen Poland, with its ice-covered lakes, poverty-stricken villages and awful blizzards, felt of their comrades quaffing the wine and enjoying the sunshine of Italy can well be imagined; but, wherever the Emperor's determination to become the Master of Europe caused him to go, they had no option but to accom­pany him. Roger and his two companions might bemoan their fate, but it had been forced upon them. At least they were lucky not to be dead and, as their wounds gradually healed, their hopes rose that they would find a way to outwit and escape from the flaxen-haired giant, Baron Znamensk, who held them prisoner.

The Baroness Freda knew little about surgery, but had enough knowledge to keep their wounds clean and bind up the Sergeant's shattered knee-cap and Roger's ankle in rough splints.

In consequence, after a fortnight they were able to hobble about. The base of Vitu's big toe had healed over, although it still pained him; and all three of them had an awkward limp. But Znamensk thought them sufficiently recovered to be made use of, so they were set to work sawing logs on the ground floor of the barn.

Kutzie stood by and, whenever their efforts flagged, de­rived obvious pleasure from using his knout to give one or other of them a swift cut across the shoulders. Fournier and Vitu cursed-and reviled him. Roger accepted his chastisement in silence. He was not vindictive by nature; but, as he sweated over the saw, he promised himself that, sooner or later, he would provide Kutzie with a most unpleasant death.

But how to bring that about, and the death of the Baron and his other henchmen was no small problem. Handicapped as they were by their wounds, to get clear away from the castle would be next to impossible as long as Znamensk and his men were able to set off in pursuit.

Night and day Roger wrestled with the question until he came to the conclusion that there was no hope at all of himself and his two lame companions overcoming the half-dozen Germans; but, that, if the Baron could be trapped, there was a fair chance that the others, being no more than brainless oafs, might be cozened or bullied into submission.

At last, early in March, an idea for setting a trap came to him. The saws they used for cutting the trunks of medium-sized pine and larch trees into logs could, in the hands of a fully able man, have become dangerous weapons; but not when wielded by partially-recovered invalids with dragging feet so, when work was over for the day, the saws were hung up on pegs in the wall on the ground floor of the barn.

Crippled as they were, they could not have got far without being overtaken, so no guard was placed over them at night; there was, therefore, nothing to prevent them from fetching the saws up to their loft. Roger's plan was that they should cut through a section of the floor of the loft, so that it formed a trap door secured in such a way that, when a strong catch was released, it would open downwards.

With such limited tools, the job was far from easy. More­over, to prevent the discovery of this oubliette, the cuts had to be dirtied over both above and below, and the trigger arrange­ment which would release the trap, together with a stout cord running from it beneath the floor, had to be skilfully camou­flaged.

It took them several hours during each of three nights to complete the task, and when they had, Roger was far from confident that his plan would work. He was counting on the fact that the Baron took a particular delight in gloating over his captives and making insulting remarks about their coun­try. Every few days, when they were having their midday or evening meal, Znamensk would come up the ladder to the loft and stand there for ten minutes or so, taunting them with the fact that they would never see their homes again, and sniggering while he made such sneers as that, French women being notoriously a race of whores, they could be certain those dear to them would by now be having a high old time with a succession of lovers.

The trap had been cut in the place where the Baron usually stood while, grinning from ear to car, and occasionally nod­ding his great mop of straight, flaxen hair, he delivered these provocative monologues. But the question was, what would happen when Roger pulled the cord that would cause the square of floor to drop?

Owing to the situation of the beams, they had been able to make it only two foot six wide and Znamensk was a big as well as a tall man. As he had no paunch, the odds were that he would not jam in the hole; but how seriously would he be injured by his fall on to the hard floor of the barn? Although it was a twelve-foot drop, it was too much to hope that he would break his neck, as it seemed certain that he would hit the floor feet first. But he might break a leg or, with luck, be temporarily sufficiently disabled for his captives, hurrying down from the loft, to get the better of him before his shouts brought help.

The day after they had completed the trap, the prisoners waited with almost unbearable suspense for Znamensk to come up and taunt them. But they were disappointed. Again the following day he did not appear while they were eating their midday stew, and they began to fear that he must have tired of baiting them. At last evening came and, with beating hearts, they heard his heavy tread coming up the ladder. Yet, even then, it seemed that some spirit malevolent to them must have warned him of his danger. Instead of taking his usual stance, feet spread wide and hands on hips, alternately grinning and scowling at them, he paced restlessly up and down, muttering only a few words now and then. It was evident that he had something on his mind and, after a few minutes, he disclosed it.

'Listen, you French dogs,' he snarled in his guttural Ger­man. 'If you hear horsemen riding up to the castle and the sound of many voices, don't imagine they are those of your own people and start shouting to be rescued. There are Cos­sacks in the neighbourhood, and that's who they will be. If they found you here, they'd take you off to a prison camp. But I'm not having that. You're going to work for me. Work till you drop. So I'm sending Kutzie along with a shot-gun. He'll spend the night up here. If the Cossacks do chance to turn up, the first one of you to holler will get a stomach full of lead.'

As he ceased speaking, he came to a halt squarely on the trap. Roger jerked hard on the end of the hidden cord he was holding, and the square of flooring went down with a swish.

The Baron's mouth opened wide, his eyes bulged and his mass of light, fair hair seemed to lift from his scalp as he shot downwards. But, by throwing wide his arms, he just succeeded in saving himself from disappearing through the hole.

The three prisoners had taken the precaution of secretly arming themselves with short lengths of roughly cut branches that would serve as clubs. Knowing that it was now or never, they simultaneously threw themselves upon Znamensk. The Sergeant got in the first blow, Roger the second. Either would have stunned most men, but the Teuton's skull seemed to be made of iron, and was protected by his thick thatch of hair. He only let out a yell, blinked and then, to save himself from a third blow aimed at him by Vitu, he abruptly ceased sup­porting himself by his elbows on the floorboards, and dropped from sight.

'After him!' shouted Roger and, followed by the others, he shinned down the ladder.

They found the Baron half kneeling on the ground. He was striving to get up, but had evidently broken a leg. Bellow­ing with rage and pain, his pale blue eyes glaring hatred, he pulled a big hunting knife from the belt of his kaftan. Clearly he was far from finished and any of them who went near enough to knock him out could not escape an upward thrust from the knife which would inflict a very ugly wound.

It was Corporal Vitu who produced the answer. Grabbing up a twelve-foot larch sapling, he used it as a spear and rushed upon the crouching Znamensk. The jagged point of the larch caught him in the throat. Choking, the blood gushing from his neck, he went over backwards. Fournier lurched in and bashed again and again with his club at their victim's skull, until he lay still.

At a limping run, Roger reached the door of the barn and peered cautiously out, fearful that the Baron's shouts would bring Kutzie or one of the other men on the scene. But no one was in sight.

'What now, Colonel?' gasped the Sergeant, still panting from his exertions.

'When Znamensk fails to return to the castle, someone will come to find out what has delayed him,' Roger replied quickly. 'Whoever it is, we ambush him and knock him out. The odds are it will be either Kutzie or the woman. By now the others will have settled down to their supper, then they'll go to sleep. With luck they won't learn till morning what has been going on. But Kutzie will come here for certain. He has been ordered by the Baron to spend the night here, keeping us in order with a gun.'

Semi-darkness had fallen and, listening tensely, they stood veiled by the heavy shadows, two on one side of the barn door and one on the other. The time of waiting seemed intermin­able, and all of them knew that there was still a big chance that their desperate gamble would not come off. Kutzie might bring one or two of the other men with him for companion­ship, and they could not hope to take more than one man completely by surprise. All the Baron's men carried knives and would not hesitate to use them. Three lame men armed only with cudgels stood little chance of winning out in a brawl of that kind. And, if they were overcome, they knew the price they would have to pay. For having killed her husband, it was certain that the lumpy Baroness would have them put to death, and the odds were that it would be a very painful one.

It seemed to them a good hour, but not more than fifteen minutes could have elapsed, when they caught the sound of approaching footsteps and whistling. They then knew for cer­tain that it was Kutzie who was coming towards the barn, be­cause his missing teeth gave his whistling a peculiar note. But was he alone? Everything depended on that. And they dared not peer out, for fear that he would glimpse whoever did, and realise that they had come down from the loft, intending to waylay him.

A beam of light flickered over the earth outside the barn. Next moment, all unsuspecting, Kutzie entered. Under his right arm he carried a shot-gun, from his left hand dangled a lantern. He had no chance even to cry out. The Sergeant's cudgel descended on his head from one side and the Corporal's from the other. Although he was wearing a fur cap, the blows felled him. His knees buckled, he dropped his gun and the lantern and fell to the earth, out cold.

'What'll we do with the swine?' asked the Sergeant. 'I've rarely come across so great a bastard. It would be a sin just to kill him where he lies. I've a dozen weals still smarting from that knout of his. I vote we let him come to, then thrash him to death.'

'I'm with you,' agreed Vitu. 'But, better still, let's put his feet on the red-hot stones of the fire until he passes out, then pitch him in and let him burn to death.'

'No,' Roger answered sharply. 'If we did either, his cries would bring his comrades running. Anyhow, we have no time to waste. Though I agree that the brute deserves to die.'

‘I have it!' Vitu exclaimed. 'We'll gag him, strip him, tie his ankles and his hands behind his back, then throw him to the pigs.'

Fournier laughed. 'That's a grand idea. Pigs like human flesh. I know of a child who fell into a sty and they made a meal off the poor brat before anyone realised that he was missing.' Without more ado, the two N.C.O.S began to tear the unconscious Kutzie's garments off him.

Roger was in half a mind to intervene; but he knew that his two companions would resent any mercy being shown to this Prussian brute who had delighted in flogging all three of them, and he decided that being bitten by pigs until one died from loss of blood would be a less painful death than being left to roast slowly; so he let the N.C.O.s have their way.

Kutzie, naked, gagged and unable even to murmur, was carried out from the barn and pitched on to a huddle of grunt­ing pigs. It was one of the most callous things that Roger had ever seen done; but he knew that his own prospects of sur­vival lay in the Sergeant's and Corporal's willing acceptance of his orders, and that, had he even been the Angel Gabriel, he could not have prevented them from making certain that the brutal Kutzie endured a prolonged and horrible death. As it was, with happy laughter, they showed their delight in this method of paying off old scores, and were obviously pre­pared to accept Roger's future orders without argument.

Having disposed of the Baron and Kutzie, they again spent a few minutes listening tensely. On the opposite side of the courtyard from their barn, but somewhat nearer the castle, there stood a building in which they knew that the serfs had their quarters. From it there now came faintly the sounds of sad, but melodious singing.

With a nod of satisfaction, Roger led the way to another bam, where he knew the horses to be stabled. In it there were seven animals. Selecting three, he had them given a good feed of oats then, with their muzzles bound to prevent them from neighing, he had them harnessed to a troika which had been dragged from a nearby coach house.

He had no idea where the French army was but, taking the stars for a guide, he intended to head south-west, feeling con­fident that, if they could avoid running into enemy patrols, by moving in that direction they would, sooner or later, come upon their compatriots.

Having wrenched off the bells that would have jingled from the inverted U-shaped arch over the neck of the central horse of the troika, they piled into the carriage. Roger took the reins and they set off.

A three-quarter moon had come up and its light reflected from the snow made the scene almost as bright as day. As the troika emerged at a fast trot from the trees surrounding the castle, in the far distance Roger saw a black patch moving rapidly across the white, frozen waste. Almost immediately he realised that it was a body of horsemen and they were com­ing towards him. With sudden consternation, it flashed upon him that they must be the Cossacks whom the Baron had feared might pay the castle a visit. At the same moment, Fournier cried:

'Them's Cossacks! You can tell by their little horses.'

Hauling hard on the near rein, Roger nearly turned the troika over, in his frantic haste to slew it round and make off in another direction before they came face to face with the Russians. He could only hope that, against the background of the dark trees, the trioka would not have been noticed. Urging his three horses into a gallop, he took a course parallel to the edge of the wood.

For a few moments all seemed well. Then, just behind him, Vitu cried, 'Mort Dieu! They've seen us. They've changed direction too.'

Roger threw a quick glance over his shoulder. From a trot, the Cossacks had spurred their mounts into a canter. There were about twenty of them and a tall officer some ten paces in front of the others was calling on the troika to halt.

For a moment Roger thought of pulling up and running off into the wood; but, lame as he and his companions were, they would be overtaken in no time—that is, if the Russians bothered to come after them. If they did not, without food or shelter and unable to walk either fast or for any great distance, the fugitives would freeze to death.

Realising that there was no escape, Roger lay back on the reins and brought his team to a standstill. With fury in his heart he watched, as the Cossacks, crouching low over their little steeds and giving vent to wild cries of elation, came charging up to the troika. With superb horsemanship they brought their shaggy, steaming ponies to an instant halt.

Leaning forward in his saddle, the officer asked Roger in Russian, 'Who are you? Why did you attempt to avoid us? Where are you off to?'

Roger's Russian was good enough for him to reply. 'To Vilna, may it please you, Sir.'

Stained and bedraggled as the uniforms were that he and his companions were wearing, they were still easily recognis­able as French.

Slapping his thigh, the officer gave a hearty laugh. 'What? On the way to your enemy's headquarters? Is it likely that I'd believe that? You are Frenchmen, and my prisoners.'

A Desperate Gamble

It was futile to argue. Even if Roger could have passed him­self off as a Lett or Ukranian who had taken a French uni­form from a corpse, he could not possibly explain away his companions.

As he gave a resigned shrug, the officer said, 'We were making for Baron Znamensk's castle, since it seemed as good a place as any in this neighbourhood to pass the night. Turn your troika and accompany us.'

Roger did as he was bade; but, as the little cavalcade headed for the entrance to the clearing he was suddenly struck by a thought that, during the emergency of the past ten minutes, had not crossed his mind. It so appalled him that for a mo­ment the blood drained from his face.

To have been cheated of his hopes of freedom at the eleventh hour and taken prisoner by the Russians was ill for­tune enough. But a return to the castle must inevitably lead to the discovery of the Baron's body, and nobody would have any doubts about who had murdered him. Freda of the huge bottom and breasts would be screaming for vengeance and Roger could see no reason whatever why the tall Cossack officer should not grant it to her by having Fournier, Vitu and himself promptly shot.

Ten minutes later, when they arrived within sight of the castle, Roger saw that his worst fears looked like being real­ised. Several of the barred ground floor windows of the squat ugly building were lit up and men with lanterns were moving about near the big barn.

As the cavalcade came to a halt in front of it Freda, her huge breasts wobbling and her long, fair hair streaming be­hind her, came running up to the Cossack officer, pouring out a spate of German. Following her came two men, bearing a rough stretcher, upon which reposed the dead body of the Baron. Pointing at it, then at Roger and his companions, she denounced them as her husband's murderers and demanded that they should be handed over to her for treatment suited to the heinous crime they had committed.

The greater part of this was lost upon the Russian, because he could not understand German; but the dead body and Freda's tirade against the three Frenchmen whom he had caught escaping left him in no doubt as to what had happened.

In this situation, where their guilt was so damningly obvi­ous, Roger had only one slender advantage. At least he could speak fairly fluent Russian, and so could communicate freely with the arbiter of their fate. When the Baroness had at last to pause for breath, he said calmly to the officer:

'Of course we killed this pig of a Prussian. And I make no pleas that we did so in self-defence. We deliberately trapped and slew him. Had you been in our situation, you would have done the same. Never have I met a monster who better de­served to die.'

The Russian gave him a puzzled look. 'So you admit to this murder? I suppose you realise that, unless you can pro­duce some quite extraordinary justification for your deed, I shall have you hanged ?'

'Officers,' Roger declared quietly, 'are not hanged, but shot.'

'True,' nodded the other. 'And, although your epaulettes and gold braid appear to have been torn from your uniform, by your manner and speech I should have realised that you are not a common soldier. But rank does not convey licence to murder. I am the Hetman Sergius Dutoff. Who are you?'

Roger made a low bow to hide the sudden glint of hope that had sparked in his eye on learning that he had to deal, not with an ordinary, country-bred Lieutenant of Cossacks, but a Hctman—an aristocrat with whom he might have acquaint­ances in common. For that might just sway the balance in saving him from a firing squad. As he lifted his head, he said proudly, 'I am Colonel le Chevalier de Breuc, a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and an aide-de-camp to the Em­peror Napoleon.'

'Indeed!' the Hetman exclaimed. 'Then you are a prisoner of considerable importance. Even so, this matter of Baron Znamensk's murder cannot be ignored.'

'I did not expect it to be.' Roger shrugged. 'With your per­mission I suggest that we go into the castle and there discuss it over a bottle of wine.'

'By St. Nicholas!' the Russian laughed. 'You are a cool customer. But your idea is sound. I could do with something to warm me up.'

The Baroness and her serfs had not understood one word of this conversation. Again she began to scream at Roger and pointed to her husband's dead body. Roger swung upon her and said sharply, 'Be silent, woman! This Russian lord de­mands food and wine for himself and his men. Afterwards he intends to investigate the way in which your husband met his death. And that will probably result in having me and my companions shot.'

Mollified by this, the Baroness led the way into the castle, and gave the requisite orders to her servants. Fournier and Vitu, both looking extremely worried, were detained by the Cossacks in the lofty, sparsely-furnished central hall that had for decoration on its tall walls, only a few moth-eaten stag, boar and lynx heads. The Hetman and Roger followed the Baroness into a dining room that led off it. The furniture was hideous pitchpine and the place stank of past meals, mingled with the urine of dogs.

An uncouth servitor brought a flagon of Franconian Steinwein. Then, with the Baroness as an onlooker, the two men settled down to talk. The Russian made it dear that he in­tended to mete out summary justice should Roger fail to con­vince him that he had had good grounds for taking the law into his own hands. Roger had never been more acutely aware that his life hung on his ready wits and tongue; and, that should he fail to convince the Hetman that he had executed rather than murdered Znamensk, he, Fournier and Vitu would be dead before morning.

To begin with, Roger deliberately delayed the actual in­quiry for as long as he could, by asking Dutoff when he had last seen Prince Peter Ivanovitch Bagration, the German-born Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army. Dutoff knew the General well; so, it emerged to his surprise, did Roger. He then enquired after other friends he had made during his last stay in St. Petersburg: Count Alexander Vorontzoff, die brother of the Russian Ambassador in London; Captain Musiavoff of the Semenourki Regiment of the Imperial Guard; the ex-Prime Minister Count Pahlen, in whose country house he had stayed for a month; and even the Czar Alexander himself, to whom he had been presented.

Dutoff could not fail to be impressed by learning that this haggard, down-at-heel Frenchman was persona grata with so many people of the first importance in his own country; and Roger then went on to describe the awful treatment that he and his companions had received at Znamensk's hands. But the Baroness, who had been sullenly watching with in­creasing anger as she saw the sympathy with which the Hetman was listening to Roger, suddenly broke in on their conversation with a spate of vitriolic German. Since she could not make herself understood in words, she pointed at Roger and significantly drew her finger across her throat.

The Russian nodded at her reassuringly, brushed up his fine moustache and said, 'Colonel, all you have been saying leaves me in no doubt that you have lived in St. Petersburg, enjoyed the friendship of many powerful nobles there, that you are both a member of the aristocracy and a very gallant soldier. Moreover, you have my deepest sympathy for the brutal ill usage to which you have been subjected. But the fact remains that only a few hours ago you and your fellow prison­ers trapped the owner of this castle and inflicted on him a most painful death. For such a crime, much as I may regret it personally, I see no alternative but to have you and the other two shot.'

Roger sighed and spread out his hands in a typically French gesture. 'Should you decide that to be your duty, I'll not com­plain. But I pray you, consider the circumstances. Firstly, are you prepared to avow that as a private individual the Baron had any legal right to hold me, Sergeant Fournier and Corporal Vitu prisoner?'

Dutoff shook his head. 'No, none whatever. He should have turned the three of you over to the nearest Prussian or Russian military headquarters.'

'Good. And you will also agree that we had the right to escape if we could?'

'Every prisoner, of war who has not given his parole has that right; but not to commit murder as a means of regaining his freedom.'

'But the circumstances were exceptional,' Roger argued. 'This monster and his men picked us up on the battlefield the night following that ghastly conflict at Eylau. He did not go there as a patriotic Prussian, seeking to secure as many French prisoners as he could for his country before they were found and rescued by their own countrymen. He went to collect men whose wounds would not incapacitate them permanently, with the intention of detaining them here all their lives as serfs to work on his land.'

Frowning, the Herman sat back, took another swig of wine, then said angrily, 'Such conduct is inexcusable. Clearly the Baron disgraced his order as a noble. But these Teutonic Knights are far more barbarous then we Russians are said to be.'

For a moment he was silent, then he added, 'All the same, Colonel, murder is murder. Your attempt to escape was fully justified; but not the snaring and killing of this man in cold blood. Whatever cause you had to hate and fear him, nothing can excuse your having taken his life. Although I can under­stand little of what the Baroness here says in her outbursts, it is obvious that she is demanding justice, and it is my duty to see that she receives it. Would you prefer to be granted a res­pite until dawn or have me order my Sergeant to get this unpleasant business over now?'

Roger had played his best cards; his social standing with highly-placed friends in St. Petersburg, his having been made a prisoner unlawfully, his descriptions of the floggings to which he had been subjected, as fair reasons for using violence against a man who had decreed life-long slavery for him. But all to no avail.

Now, he had one card only left up his sleeve and it was a most dangerous one. But, having been condemned to death, he felt that no worse could befall should he play it and it failed. Their glasses of wine being empty, he turned to the glowering Baroness and said, in German. 'The Russian in­tends to have me shot, but first I have something to say to him, so tell your man to open another bottlc of wine.'

Staggered by his impertinence and apparent indifference to his fate, she spoke to her man, who uncorked a second flagon and refilled their glasses. Turning to the Hetman, Roger said:

'Before you have me shot, I would like you to know what led up to our killing the Baron. He had a bailiff named Kutzie —a rough diamond but not a bad fellow. Although they searched us after they picked us up on the battlefield, I had some fifty Napoleons in gold in my money belt, and I man­aged to hide it from them. When our wounds were sufficiently healed, we began to consider plans for an escape. As the three of us were lame, we knew that we could not get far without being overtaken, unless we had horses. With my gold I suc­ceeded in bribing Kutzie to come to us after dark this evening, and help us to get away in the troika.'

For a moment Roger paused, then he went on. 'Somehow the Baron found out. You would hardly credit what he did to the unfortunate Kutzie. But come with me and I'll show you.'

Standing up, Roger led the way out. His heart was now beating violently, because he had not the least idea what had happened to Kutzie since he had been thrown naked into the pigsty; so he was taking a most desperate gamble.

Kutzie might have come to, broken free of his bonds and escaped, to be lurking somewhere in the shadows awaiting a chance to be avenged on the Frenchmen who had condemned him to such a ghasdy death. Should the pigs have ignored him, he would still be there, alive and kicking; and, as soon as the gag was removed he would, somehow, succeed in con­veying to the Hetman the truth about what had happened.

Should either prove the case, Roger had little doubt that he and his two fellow prisoners would shortly be blindfolded, put up against a brick wall and executed by a firing squad.

Despite the intense cold, as he led the way across the fore­court sweat broke out on his forehead. Although Dutoff had obviously taken a liking to him personally, he was clearly an officer who put duty before other considerations. With a cer­tainty upon which he would have wagered every penny he possessed, Roger accepted it that, if Kutzie were still alive, he, Fournier and Vitu were as good as dead.

From the sty there came a grunting, for which Roger thanked all his gods. That indicated at least that the pigs were awake, so Kutzie was unlikely to be lying among them un­molested. But was he still alive, and capable of blurting out the truth about how he came to be there? That was the all-important question.

Raising a lantern that he had brought from the house, Roger leaned in awful anxiety over the low wall of the sty. To his immense relief, he saw that Kutzie was far past uttering any sound. He was already almost unrecognisable: his body torn and bleeding as the swine, grunting round him, gorged themselves upon his flesh.

The Baroness, who had accompanied them, gave a scream, covered her eyes with her hands for a moment; then, lowering them, glared at Roger and cried, 'So this is more of your abominable night's work. You reveal it only because you are already condemned and evidently take pride in your ruthlessness.'

He shook his head, and replied in German, 'Nein, Gnadige Frau Baronin. This is your husband's doing. I bribed Kutzie to help us to escape, but the Baron found out, and this is the way he chose to punish his unfortunate servant.'

'It is a lie!' she screamed. 'Kutzie would never have be­trayed his master.'

In sick disgust at the horrible sight, Dutoff had turned away. Ignoring the Baroness, Roger said to him, 'Well, Het­man, what do you say now? Were we not justified in putting an end to that monster, after he had jeered at us about having ruined our plan to escape and told us of the awful vengeance he had taken on his wretched henchman?'

The Russian nodded. 'You have made your case, Colonel. It would not have been in human nature, given the chance, to have refrained from according the brute his just deserts. The three of you will, of course, remain my prisoners; but I will write a report in which I’ll say that, knowing we were likely to come here and deprive him of you, his hatred of the French was such that he decided to kill you; but you killed him in self-defence.'

Overwhelmingly relieved, Roger expressed his thanks. Sensing that she was to be deprived of her revenge, the Baron­ess again broke into violent denunciation; but Roger's para­mount advantage was that she could not understand what he said to Dutoff and the Russian could not understand what he said to her. So he silenced her by telling her that the Het-man intended to send his prisoners next day to headquarters, where they would be tried by a military tribunal, and had little hope of escaping a death sentence.

Then, changing over to Russian, he told Dutoff what he had said, and added, 'All the same, she is so filled with venom that, should I and the others sleep tonight in the castle, I think she is quite capable of endeavouring to make certain of our deaths by getting her people together and attempting to murder us. So, if you are agreeable, I'd prefer that we occu­pied our old quarters in the loft of the barn, and you set a guard on us; although, of course, I'll give you our parole that we will not try to escape.'

To this the Hetman agreed; so, twenty minutes later, Roger was rejoined by Sergeant Fournier and Corporal Vitu. For the past hour or more they had believed that there was no chance of their escaping the worst, and they could have hardly been less scared had they shared with Roger the awful gamble he had taken in leading Dutoff out to the pigsty. When he told them how he had fathered Kutzie's death on to the Baron and they had no more to fear than being taken to a prisoner­-of-war camp, the old Sergeant impulsively embraced Roger and kissed him on both cheeks; while Corporal Vitu gave way to tears of relief.

The following morning, Dutoff commandeered the best horse in the stable in order that Roger could ride with him. The Baroness was furious, but he shrugged aside her protests and insisted on her accepting a scrawled requisition order, on which he-had included the troika for the other two prisoners to ride in.

On leaving the castle, the sotnia of Cossacks did not head south, in the direction from which they had come, but took a track through the forest that led north. After they had pro­ceeded for a mile or so, the forest ended and they entered the sprawling township of Znamensk, from which the Baron had taken his inherited title. It was a poor place, consisting of not more than a hundred one-storey wooden houses. The few people they saw there looked half-starved, and were clad in tattered furs or sheepskins. From the doorways of their dark hovels, with sullen, resentful stares they watched the Cossacks pass through the main street that led down to the river Pregel. For the greater part of the year a large, wooden ferry attached to a stout rope was used to cross it; but the river was still frozen so hard that there was no danger of the ice cracking under the weight of a body of mounted men.

On the far side of the river they turned east along a road that followed its course and led, as Dutoff told Roger, to Insterburg. As the two officers rode along at the head of the small cavalcade, they conversed in the most friendly fashion, exchanging accounts of the engagements in which they had fought, and gossip about mutual acquaintances in St. Peters­burg.

Roger had last been there in 1801, but he had also spent some while in the Russian capital in the summer of 1788, when Catherine the Great was still on the throne. Dutoff, being several years younger than Roger, had never known that bold, beautiful, cultured, licentious woman, and was fas­cinated to hear Roger's description of the marvellous fetes, luxury, licence and gaiety of her Court; for he had known

only the grim, gloomy one of her son, the mad Czar Paul I, and the sedate, respectable one of his present sovereign, Alexander I.

Alternately trotting and walking their horses it took them a little over three hours to cover the twenty-odd miles between Znamensk and the much larger town of Insterburg, and they arrived a little before midday.

Halting at the prisoner-of-war camp for 'other ranks', that consisted of a group of hutments on the edge of the town, Dutoff handed over Fournier and Vitu to the officer on duty. Before parting with his companions in misfortune, Roger took down the names and addresses of their nearest relatives and promised that if he could find means to do so he would send the news that they were still alive, after sustaining only minor injuries.

When he rejoined Dutoff, the Hetman said, 'Colonel,, to my great regret, I cannot avoid taking you to the mansion in which officer prisoners of war are confined. But I see no reason why I should do so as yet. At least I can first offer you luncheon in my Mess.'

'You are most kind,' Roger replied, 'and I accept with pleasure.'

They then rode on to one of the better houses in the town, handed their horses over to orderlies and went in through a spacious hall to a lobby in which Roger was at least able to have a wash and attempt to comb out his tangled hair. Dutoff then took him along to a room in which a score or so of Cossack officers were drinking and chatting.

Roger's ablutions had done little to improve his appear­ance. On the morning of Eylau he had been wearing a brilli­ant uniform, but Znamensk had ripped from it all the gold lace and his A.D.C.'s scarf. One of his field boots had been cut off, so that his broken ankle could be bandaged up, and in its place he had been given only a felt sabot. The Baron had also robbed him of his fur cloak, and that morning noth­ing better could be found for him to travel in than a tattered bearskin. Working and sleeping for five weeks in his coat and breeches had further added to their dirty and dilapidated state

and, having had no opportunity or means to shave since the battle, he now sported an inch-long beard.

It was little wonder that the officers could not hide their surprise at Dutoff's having brought such a bedraggled and unsightly guest into their Mess. But no sooner had the Het­man introduced him and given a brief version of his mis­fortunes than they became most friendly.

His gift for readily getting on well with people swiftly en­abled Roger to gain the sympathy of his hosts and acceptance of him as an unusual personality. The fact that he was an aide-de-camp of the fabulous Corsican brigand who had made Catherine, and of another night when he and the giant Grand to make them regard him with awe. Most of these Cossack officers came from the distant Steppes and had never visited St. Petersburg. Over luncheon Roger enthralled them with an account of how, when he was scarcely out of his teens,¹ he had one night been bidden to dine tete-a-tete with the great Catherine, and of another night when he and the giant Grand Admiral, Alexis Orloff, one of Catherine's many lovers, had got drunk together.

After Eylau, both armies were so weakened that there was no prospect of either taking the offensive for some time; so the Cossacks were acting only as a cavalry screen and made occasional forays to secure supplies. In consequence, they sat over lunch until past five o'clock, and the party broke up only as dusk was approaching.

Roger had been generously plied with a variety of liquors but, having in mind one very important matter that he hoped to arrange before passing out of Dutoff's custody, he had managed to keep sober. As they left the table, he drew the Russian aside, and said:

'Hetman, I have a request to make. You will agree, I am sure, that no soldier wishes to remain a prisoner of war for longer than he is compelled to. I am in the happy position of having known the Emperor Napoleon ever since he won his first laurels as a down-at-heels Artillery officer at the siege of Toulon. If he is informed that I am not dead, but a prisoner, I am confident that he will arrange for my exchange with an officer of equivalent rank. Will you' be good enough to inform General Bagration that I am here at Insterburg, and request him to send that information to French headquarters under the next flag of truce?'

'Indeed I will,' Dutoff replied, 'and most willingly. I sin­cerely hope that an exchange for you will be arranged.'

Going out into the courtyard, he called for their horses. Having mounted, they rode three-quarters of a mile to a man­sion on the far side of the town. It was surrounded by a gar­den and orchard enclosed by a wall, outside which sentries were lazily patrolling. At the main gate there was a lodge which had been converted into a reception office. There Dutoff handed over his prisoner, full particulars of whom were taken down; then they bade one another a friendly farewell.

Greatly curious to see what his new accommodation would be like, Roger, escorted by a Lieutenant who spoke a little French, crossed the garden and entered the big house. In the inner hall a dozen depressed-looking officers were either drow­sing on old sofas, talking without animation or playing cards. They favoured Roger with only an idle glance as the Lieuten­ant took him straight upstairs and threw open the door of a bedroom furnished with only die bare necessities. Then he said:

'Monsieur, you are fortunate, as at the moment we have not many officer prisoners. In consequence, as you are a Colonel, you have been allotted a room to yourself. One of the soldier-servants will bring you things for your toilette and perhaps be able to find you some better clothes. The evening meal will be served in about an hour. When you feel like it come downstairs and make yourself known to the others.'

As Roger had no luggage to unpack, he sat down on the edge of the bed and, thinking things over, decided that, had the room not been so cold, it seemed that he would not have much to complain about.

Some ten minutes later, the soldier-servant arrived, bring­ing with him soap, a razor and a very small towel. Having deposited them on a wooden table, he conveyed by signs that the wash-room was at the end of the corridor.

To his surprise Roger thanked him in Russian and raised the question of his securing for him some extra blankets and a pair of comfortable boots.

The man responded pleasantly. He thought he could find a bearskin rug to go on the bed and tomorrow would go to the hospital. Now and then French officers who had been badly wounded when captured, died there, then their clothes were at the disposal of others who might need them.

Alone once more, Roger regarded himself in a small mirror that, with the exception of a crucifix, was the only thing on the bare walls. He was shocked by his reflection. Due to mal­nutrition his cheeks had fallen in; his hair, despite the comb­ing he had given it before lunch, looked like a bird's nest, and the lower part of his face was covered with an inch-long stubble of brown hair.

Picking up the shaving things, he was about to go to the wash-room and remove his beard. But, on second thoughts, he decided against it. There had been times when he had worn a beard and, given certain circumstances, to have one now might stand him in good stead. At such times he had posed under a second alias that he used on a few occasions.

He happened to have, on his mother's side, a cousin of nearly the same age as himself, who later became the Earl of Kildonan. His mother's people had been Jacobites and had been furious when she ran away to marry his father, the Ad­miral, a staunch supporter of the Hanoverian line. They had disowned her and, after Prince Charles Edward's abortive attempt to regain the throne for his father in 1745, they had gone into exile, attending the Court of the Stuart Pretender in Rome. In consequence, Roger's cousin being so remote from France and England, Roger had now and then used his identity.

Having done his best to tidy his hair, he went downstairs. Again the depressed-looking scattering of officers in the big, echoing hall took scant notice of him, apart from a few of them nodding a greeting; as they imagined him to be of no particular interest and fust another unfortunate condemned to share their dreary existence. But one young man stood up, smiled and said:

'Monsieur, there are few grounds for welcoming you here, but at least it is pleasant to see a new face in our unhappy company. I am Captain Pierre d'Esperbes of the Hussars of Conflans, at your service.'

Roger returned his smile. 'Indeed, then you must be a brave fellow, since you hold that rank under such a dashing com­mander as Brigadier Gerard. I am happy to make your ac­quaintance. My name is Breuc, and I have the honour to be a member of His Imperial Majesty's personal staff.'

There was a sudden tension perceptible among the other officers. Those who were napping sat up. The four at the card table ceased playing and one of them exclaimed, 'Not "le brave Breuc", the hero of a hundred exploits and the man who saved the Emperor from assassination when we were in Venice?'

'I am called that, although quite unworthy of the soubri­quet,' Roger replied modestly. 'I am sure that I have done nothing that any of you might not have done had you been in my place at the time.'

They all came to their feet and crowded round him, plying him with questions. 'How long have you been a prisoner?' 'How did you come to be captured?' 'Your limp implies that you were wounded in the leg; have you just come from the hospital?' 'Have you any news of how the campaign is going?' 'How comes it that your uniform has been so stripped of all signs of your rank so that we took you for a junior officer of little account?'

For the next twenty minutes, Roger gave his new compan­ions an account of what had befallen him. Then they were summoned to their evening meal. In a long, dimly-lit room they partook of it. The food was plentiful, but uninteresting. There was no wine which, being a life-long accompaniment of every meal, these Frenchmen bitterly resented; but each of them was provided with a good ration of vodka.

During the meal and after, when they had adjourned to the hall, Roger was plied with questions about the Emperor. In the now huge French Army, very few junior officers had ever been spoken to by him or met any member of the Bona­parte family; and they were eager to hear what the great man and his horde of relatives were really like.

Roger spoke with great admiration of his master as an administrator as well as a general. Then when he came to the family, he was careful that his criticisms should not sound too malicious.

Napoleon's mother, Letizia, he said, was a woman of im­mense determination, but narrow mind. Left a widow, she had overcome every sort of difficulty to bring her large family up to be honest and God-fearing. A typical Corsican, she had once remarked that, if faced with a vendetta, she could count on two hundred kinsmen to take up their weapons on her behalf. Her native language was an Italian patois, and she could still talk French only with difficulty. She had flatly re­fused to play any part in Napoleon's self-aggrandisement so, perforce, he had had to content himself with styling her simply as 'Madame Mere'. When her other children were in trouble, she always took the side of the weakest. She strongly dis­approved of the splendour with which Napoleon, as Emperor, now surrounded himself; could not be convinced that his in­credible rise to power would be lasting and hoarded the greater part of the huge income he insisted on giving her, so that, in the event of disaster overwhelming him and the Kings, Princes and Princesses into which he had made her other children, she would have enough money to support them all. She was religious, austere and, on occasion, could even brow­beat her greatest son into giving way to her wishes.

The only person from whom Madame Mere would take advice was her half-brother, Joseph Fesch, a little abbe who, during Napoleon's first glorious campaign in Italy, had tem­porarily abandoned the Church to become an army contractor, and made a small fortune out of selling his 'nephew' equip­ment of dubious quality. He had then returned to his religious duties and, when Napoleon had made his Concordat with the Pope, included in the deal had been the elevation of 'Uncle' Fesch to Cardinal Archbishop of Lyons. Still able and avaricious where money was concerned, he now owned vast properties and was extremely rich.

Joseph, the eldest of Letizia's sons, had been trained as a lawyer, and was a very able man. Fat, good-natured and honest, he gave Napoleon less trouble than his younger brothers. But he was no diplomat, a worse soldier and a poor administrator. The Emperor had, a few months earlier, actu­ally had to push him into becoming King of Naples, as he would have much preferred a quiet life without responsibili­ties.

Luden, a tall, awkward fellow with gangling limbs, was the enfant terrible of the family. From his teens, he had been a red-hot Revolutionary; even changing his name to Brutus. A Deputy of the Convention, chance had elevated him to be its President during the month of the coup d'etat and he had made a major contribution to Napoleon's becoming First Consul. But he had done everything possible to obstruct his brother's ambitious measures to make himself a dictator. Al­though he declared himself to be a true representative of the people, he had not scrupled, as Minister of the Interior, to divert millions of francs from the Treasury into his own pocket, and to use his power to advance the fortunes of a score of ambitious men as the price of their wives becoming temporarily his mistresses; for he was a born lecher. At length, glutted with enough gold to make him independent of his brother for life, he had quarrelled violently with him, and had taken himself off as a private citizen to Italy. Roger declared roundly that he despised and loathed him.

Napoleon, when a poor student at the Ecole de la Guerre, had sent for his brother, Louis, to Paris to share his cheap lodg­ing, and had, himself, educated the boy. For years the Emperor had been under the delusion that Louis had the makings of a military genius. But Louis detested soldiering, and proved a great disappointment. Josephine, in the hope of getting a foot into the camp of her husband's family, who loathed her, had pushed her daughter, Hortense dc Beauharnais, into marry­ing Louis. As they disliked each other intensely, the marriage was far from being a success. Louis had become a neurotic, jealous, hypochondriac. Adamantly determined on the aggran­disement of his family, Napoleon had made him King of Holland; but he was disliked by all who came in contact with him and, with gross ingratitude, did everything he could to cause trouble for his illustrious brother.

Jerome, the youngest son, had proved equally troublesome. He had been put into the Navy. In 1803, during a courtesy visit by his ship to the United States, he had gone ashore at Baltimore, and there had been so feted as 'the brother of the already legendary First Consul, General Bonaparte, that he had stayed on without leave, fallen in love with a Miss Eliza­beth Paterson, the daughter of a merchant, and married her. Napoleon, having already conceived the ambition of marry­ing off his brothers and sisters to Princesses and Princes, was furious. In vain he had endeavoured to persuade the Pope to annul the marriage; then, not to be thwarted, when he became Emperor, he had dissolved it by an Imperial decree. Greatly disgruntled, Jerome had returned to France and, in the previous autumn, had sullenly obeyed his all-powerful brother's order to marry the Princess Catherine of Wurttemberg.

Napoleon had, too, been unlucky in the matter of an alli­ance for his eldest sister, Eliza. In 1797, while he was in Italy, behind his back his mother had married her off to a Corsican landowner named Bacciocchi, a moron of a fellow who had taken sixteen years to rise from Second Lieutenant to Cap­tain in the Army. Realising that no possible use could be made of him, Napoleon had given Bacciocchi a profitable adminis­trative sinecure in Corsica, and sent them back there. Dumpy and plain, although physically less highly sexed than others of her family, Eliza's mind seized avidly upon everything to do with eroticism. A born blue-stocking, her great ambition was to become a famous patroness of the arts and letters. Having badgered Napoleon to allow her to return to Paris, she had started a salon. It failed to attract any but second-rate men of talent, and she made herself a laughing stock by designing an absurd uniform to be worn by all the members of a literary society she had formed. In due course, as Em­peror and King of Italy Napoleon, much as he disliked her, had given her the Principalities of Piombino and Lucca; but she ruled them with such ability that he later said of her that she was his best Minister.

About Pauline, by far the loveliest of the sisters, and con­sidered to be the most beautiful woman in Paris, Roger was somewhat reticent, refraining from disclosing that her beauty was equalled only by her lechery. In her teens, Napoleon had approved her marriage to General Leclerc, because he was an aristocrat. But Leclerc had died of yellow fever in Domin­ica. She had then become Roger's mistress but, during his enforced absence from Paris, married again, this time Prince Borghese—not because she loved him, but so that she might wear his fabulous family emeralds, and on account of his vast wealth. Borghese had proved a poor bed companion but, even had he not been, that could not have prevented pretty Pauline from enjoying her favourite pastime with a score of handsome young men, both before and after her second mar­riage. Napoleon had given her the Principality of Guestalla in her own right, but she was fated to derive little pleasure from it, as she loathed having to give up the magnificent palace in Paris on which she had spent a fortune in decorat­ing with admirable taste; and she had since become the victim of chronic ill health.

The youngest sister, Caroline, had, apart from Napoleon, a better brain than any other Bonaparte. She also shared his ruthlessness and inordinate ambition, but not his generosity and loyalty to friends. When very young she had fallen in love with the flamboyant Murat, doggedly resisted all Napo­leon's efforts to persuade her to accept other suitors that would have better served his own plans and, on leaving school, mar­ried the great cavalry leader.

On becoming Emperor, Napoleon had created Joseph's wife, Julie, and Louis' wife, Hortense, Imperial Highness; but he had not bestowed that rank on his three sisters. At a family celebration dinner at which he had announced these honours, Pauline was absent in Italy. The other two had been hardly able to contain their rage at his neglect of them, so had gone to the Tuileries next day. All the Bonapartes had extremely violent tempers and habitually threw the most ap­palling scenes whenever they suffered a disappointment. The two women had screamed abuse at their brother until he had agreed to make them, and Pauline, also Imperial Highnesses.

During 1806, the Emperor had entirely remade the map of Germany; first welding numerous small Principalities into the Confederation of the Rhine. He had then deprived various states of portions of their territories, to create the Grand Duchy of Berg-Cleves, and made the Murats its sovereigns. Caroline had since been busily dissipating its revenues but, her ambitions still unsatisfied, had packed her stupid, gallant husband off to Poland, in the hope that the Emperor would make him king of that country.

There remained the Emperor's stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. Napoleon had always had a great fondness for him and, while still a boy, had taken him on his campaigns as an A.D.C. Eugene, although not brilliant, was honest, capable and devoted to his stepfather. In 1805, Napoleon had made him Viceroy of Italy and, in the following year, -formed an­other valuable alliance by marrying him off to the Princess Augusta of Bavaria.

Most of this was already known to Roger's audience, but they delighted in his personal descriptions of the Bonaparte family, their idiosyncrasies and the way in which they had battened upon their illustrious brother; costing the nation hun­dred of millions of francs, spent mostly in vulgar ostentation with the vain idea that they could impress the ancient sovereign families of Europe and be regarded by them as real royalties.

An elderly Major remarked, 'The "Little Corporal" has done so much to restore the greatness of France, that one can't grudge him the pleasure of showering benefits on his relations; but what does stick in my gills is the licence he allows his Marshals.'

'They, too, have some claim on France,' Roger replied,

'for many of them have made notable contributions to the Emperor's victories.'

'True enough. Ney at Ulm, Davoust at Auerstadt, and in the early days Augereau at Castiglione and Lannes at Areola. But so, for that matter, have we all. Yet the Marshals are given vast provinces to loot at will. Out of our wars they are making great fortunes, but not a fraction of it ever reaches us. We have to soldier on for nothing but our pay; and that is often in arrears.'

'I wouldn't object to that so much,' said a youngish Cap­tain of Dragoons, 'if only the fighting would come to an end, and we could get home.'

At that there was a chorus of assent, and Roger knew that it now voiced a feeling general in the Army. Some of the older men had been campaigning in, or garrisoning, distant lands for ten years or more. Only by luck had their regiments now and then been brought back to France, thus enabling them to get leave to spend a short spell with their families.

Roger sympathised, but felt that in his position he was called on at least to make a show of upholding morale; so he said, 'It's hard on you gentlemen, I know. But the Emperor dare not make peace until he has smashed the Prussians and Russians for good and all. If he did, within a year or two we'd find ourselves back with the colours, having to prevent our enemies from invading France, instead of fighting them in their own country.'

'And what if we did?' retorted a Lieutenant of Engineers. 'France's natural frontier is the Rhine, and we could hold it without difficulty. If fight one must, at least let it be there where, between battles, we'd have the benefit of comfortable billets, ample food, good wine and women for the asking. Whereas, in this God-forsaken country, we are frozen, starved and hardly better off then the lice-ridden peasants who in­habit it.'

'Things will be better in the spring, and that's not far off now,' Roger said, in an endeavour to cheer them up. 'When the campaign reopens, it needs only one more victory by the

Emperor and the enemy will be forced to make terms which will include all prisoners of war regaining their freedom.'

'And what then?' put in the Captain of Dragoons. 'That would be all very well for you, Colonel. You and the rest of the gilded staff would go riding gaily back to Paris with the Emperor. But most of us would be left here to garrison the cities and fortresses we've taken.'

The elderly Major took him up. 'That's it, and "gilded staff" is right. In the old days they had all risen from the ranks, and were tough, courageous men who cheerfully shared hardships with the rest of us. But since Bonaparte put a crown on his head in Notre-Dame, he's changed all that. He's wel­comed back the emigres and surrounded himself with young popinjays: ci-devant nobles, who are better at making a play for pretty women in ballrooms than risking their skins on a battlefield.'

Roger frowned, sat forward and asked sharply, 'Are you implying... ?'

'No, no!' the Major interrupted him quickly. 'I meant no offence to you, Colonel. All the Army knows the exploits of Le brave Breuc. And gentle birth is no crime. But old soldiers of the Republic, like myself, take it ill to receive their orders from ex-aristos who were living in idleness in England or Coblenz while we were fighting on the Rhine, in Italy and Egypt.'

With a shrug, Roger let the matter pass, for he knew that there was much in what the Major had said. From those earl­ier campaigns many thousands of France's best fighting men had never returned and, although the Army still had a leaven of them as junior officers and N.C.O.s, its ranks were now composed mainly of young and often unwilling conscripts; while Napoleon's policy of marrying the new France with the old had led to his giving staff appointments to considerable numbers of inexperienced youths of noble families, many of whom lacked the daring and elan of the men with whom he had earlier surrounded himself. In numbers the Army was greater then it had ever been; but its quality had sadly deter­iorated.

Next morning, the Russian soldier-servant produced for Roger a pair of field boots a little too large for him, but com­fortable enough, and the tunic and busby of a Hussar officer who had recently died in the local hospital. Somewhat more presentable in this false plumage, he spent the next six days with his gloomy companions, alternately taking exercise in the walled garden, drowsing in an armchair with broken springs and talking with them about past campaigns. Mean­while, with the best patience he could muster, he waited for some indication that the Hctman Dutoff had carried out his promise to request General Bagration to arrange for his ex­change.

On the seventh day his hopes were realised. The officer in charge of the prisoners informed him that an order had come for his transfer to Tilsit, where the Commander-in-Chief had his headquarters. That midday he said good-bye to his fellow prisoners, without disclosing the reason for his transfer then, with an infantry subaltern as escort, he set off in a well-equipped sleigh for the headquarters of the Russian Army.

Tilsit was on the Niemen and some thirty-odd miles from Insterburg, so it proved a long, cold drive across the still frozen plains, ameliorated only by the fact that Roger had been pro­vided with furs and that the young officer responsible for him had taken the precaution to bring half a dozen large brodchen stuffed with caviare, a similar number of apfel-strudel with rich, flaky pastry, and a bottle of captured French cognac.

By evening they reached the larger city and, somewhat to Roger's disquiet, instead of being taken to the Palace occupied by General Bagration, he was checked in at another, larger prisoner-of-war camp.

This camp consisted of several score of hutments. In it there were confined a thousand or more French soldiers and, fenced off in a separate enclosure, quarters that housed some seventy officers. Among the latter were three with whom Roger was acquainted. They welcomed him gladly as a comrade in mis­fortune, but were as depressed as those he had left behind at Insterburg. They were, in fact, even more gloomy about their prospects, as they had learned the results of the battle of Eylau.

For the first time the Emperor had there met his match in the Russians. That bloody battle had proved no victory for the French, although Napoleon had claimed it as one. But he had been enabled to do so only owing to the fact that he had retained the ground he held, whereas the more cautious Bagration, against the advice of his Generals, had withdrawn during the night. Actually, the appalling slaughter had re­sulted only in a draw.

Again, for fear of causing his companions unhappy envy, Roger did not disclose his hopes of shortly ending his cap­tivity by being exchanged. But he now felt confident that on the next day he would be sent for to the General's head­quarters and, anyway, informed that negotiations with regard to him were in progress.

He was disappointed in that and several days followed, during which he had to listen to the complaints of his fellow prisoners at having had to participate in this ghastly cam­paign, in which blizzards and lack of decent food, near-mutinous conscripts and shortage of equipment had proved a far greater tax on their morale than having to engage the enemy. Nostalgically, they longed to be back in their native France, or in the sunshine of Italy, or even in Egypt—two thousand miles from their own country and cut off from it by the British Fleet—but there at least Bonaparte's untiring activities had convened Cairo into a semblance of Paris on the Nile.

Roger had been in Tilsit for four days when the Camp Commandant assembled the officer prisoners and addressed them:

'Messieurs,' he said. 'The spring will shortly be upon us. Already the ice shows signs of breaking up. Your Emperor is not given to letting the grass grow beneath his feet; so we must anticipate that soon he will reopen the campaign. Natur­ally, my Imperial master has good hopes of defeating him. But the fortunes of war can never be foretold. General Prince Bagration has therefore decided that it would be wise to send all the prisoners in this camp—officers and men—into central Russia. We shall do our best to ensure that you do not suffer undue hardship, but we have no transport to spare so you will be marched to your new destination in easy stages. Please prepare yourselves to start tomorrow.'

His announcement was received in unhappy silence. Every­one present knew that to protest was useless. After a moment, Roger stepped forward and said in Russian, 'Sir, may I have a word with you in private?'

Nodding, the Commandant beckoned him outside and asked, 'Now, what have you to say?'

Swiftly, Roger told him that at the request of Hetman Dutoff, General Bagration was arranging an exchange for him; then asked him to see the General and secure a permit for him to remain in Tilsit until the exchange had been arranged.

The Commandant shook his head. T regret, Colonel, but I cannot oblige you. I have been told nothing about this pro­posed exchange; and today General Bagration is away, in­specting troops far to the south of Tilsit. My orders are explicit. I can make no exceptions and tomorrow, when your fellow prisoners begin their march to the north, you must march with them.'

Fickle Fortune

Roger stared at the Commandant aghast. That an officer in his position should know nothing about such matters as exchanges of prisoners being arranged at headquarters was not surprising. But this order for the removal of the prisoners when General Bagration happened to be absent from Tilsit, making it im­possible to get in touch with him, was a most evil stroke of fortune.

It meant that Roger's hopes of shortly regaining his free­dom were completely shattered. Communications in Russia were so poor that, except between the larger cities, letters often took months to reach their destination, and the odds were that the prisoners were being sent to some place deep in the country. Having been brought from Insterburg to Tilsit seemed a certain indication that Dutoff had carried out his promise to request the General to communicate with French head­quarters on Roger's behalf, and his transfer ordered in antici­pation that an exchange would be agreed. But such matters could not be arranged overnight and it might be some days yet before a reply came through.

One of Napoleon's virtues was his loyalty to old friends. In fact, he was so generous in that way that he had frequently declined to punish officers who had served with him in his early campaigns, even when Fouche's secret police had pro­duced irrefutable evidence that they were conspiring against him. At worst, he had sent them off to some distant command, as a precaution against their creating trouble for him in Paris. In consequence, Roger had no doubt whatever that, when the Emperor learned that he was alive, he would at once take steps to ensure that 'le brave Breuc" did not languish for a day longer than could be helped as a prisoner of the Russians.

But General Bagration had many other things to think about besides the exchange of prisoners; and, when he was told that Roger was no longer in Tilsit, he might quite possibly forget to do anything about him. Napoleon, too, had other things to think about and, once the spring campaign opened, he would be so fully occupied that it might be months before the thought of Roger again entered his mind. Even if Bagration did send an order for Roger's return, how long was it going to take to reach a prison camp in the depths of Russia?

These devastating imponderables having chased one an­other through his agitated mind, it suddenly occurred to him that, although General Bagration was absent from Tilsit, some member of his staff might know about the proposed exchange and intervene on his behalf. Promptly, he begged the Com­mandant to visit the headquarters and make enquiries. The Commandant, a pleasant, elderly man, at once agreed to do so.

That afternoon the officers' quarters became a scene of gloomy activity. They were all issued with haversacks, flasks of vodka, and stout boots and warmer clothes for those who needed them. While they packed their few belongings, they commiserated with one another upon this harsh blow of fate. Had they been allowed to remain at Tilsit and the Emperor achieved the defeat of the Russians, as they had all been pray­ing that he would, that would have assured their speedy re­lease; but if they were then hundreds of miles away in the Ukraine or perhaps up in Estonia, their situation would be very different.

The French had no means of knowing if any of them were still alive or had died on the field of Eylau; so, should the Emperor achieve a decisive victory, it would not be possible for him to require their individual release. Therefore, should the Czar have thoughts of renewing the war when he had had time to gather a new army together, he might decide, in order to weaken his enemy, to release only a limited number of the prisoners he had taken and, unless those now at Tilsit were among the lucky ones, that could mean indefinite captivity for them.

Roger spent agonising hours waiting to hear from the Com­mandant. If headquarters were already negotiating for his exchange, he could count himself as good as free; but if they were not, he feared that within the week he might be dead. The Commandant had said that the march would be made in easy stages and measures taken to see that the prisoners suffered no undue hardship. That was all very well, but since winter set in, Roger had frequently seen French troops on the march, and the grim evidence of their passing—a trail like a paper chase but, instead of paper, the bodies of men not fully recovered from recent wounds, or youngsters of poor physique weakened by semi-starvation who, exhausted, had dropped out. As there was no transport available to pick them up, they had been left to die in the gently-falling snow.

The Commandant had seemed a decent old fellow; but the officer in charge of die contingent of prisoners might prove a very different type. Roger's vivid imagination conjured up visions of Cossacks using their knouts to drive flagging strag­glers on to the last gasp until they dropped. The officers might escape such brutal treatment, but his ill-mended broken ankle had left him lame and still pained him if he put his full weight on it. He greatly doubted if he could manage to walk more than three miles without collapsing. And what then? The Russians had no cause to love the French, and a Frenchman abandoned here and there along the road, to die, would not cause them the loss of one wink of sleep.

He knew, too, the son of country they would have to march through; for he had traversed it once in the opposite derection; not actually through Tilsit, but from St. Petersburg by way of Paskov, Dvinsk, Vilna, Grodno, Warsaw and Breslau right down to Dresden—eight hundred miles of plains as flat as an ocean until one reached the Saxon capital. He had then been travelling day and night at the utmost speed that a private coach and relays of the best horses available could carry him; and, after a further five hundred miles to Paris, he had arrived half-dead from exhaustion. But at least he had been sheltered from the weather by the coach, and able to keep himself warm under a pile of furs; whereas plodding along those intermin­able roads, he and his companions would be exposed to icy winds and driving blizzards.

At last dusk fell; but still he waited in vain for the Com­mandant either to return or send for him. As usual, at eight o'clock, an N.C.O. came to lock them in for the night. In desperation, Roger asked to be taken to the Commandant's office, but the man told him that the Commandant always slept out at his own datcha a mile or more away, so would not be available until the next morning.

During the years, Roger had been in many tight corners and had spent many anxious nights, but he could not recall one in which he had not at least managed to doze for an hour or two. Strive as he might to make his mind a blank, he could not sleep a wink. To fall asleep from gradually creeping cold was said to be one of the easiest deaths, and it was not fear of that which kept him tossing and turning. It was intense resent­ment at the injustice of his having escaped such a fate on the field of Eylau, and the still worse one of being shot at Znamensk, only now, when all had seemed set fair for him, to be condemned by his lameness as one of the many who must inevitably fall by the wayside on the terrible march to the north.

When morning came, the bugle call roused the prisoners at the usual hour. Having freshened themselves up as well as they could and been given a hot meal, they got their things together expecting shortly to be ordered out to the parade ground; but they were kept uneasily hanging about until past ten o'clock.

At length the order came, and they lined up outside, to answer the daily roll call. The Commandant than appeared and walked straight towards Roger. More haggard than ever from his sleepless night, Roger took a pace forward and salu­ted, then held his breath, hope surging up in him that at this eleventh hour he was to be reprieved. Brushing up his fine moustache, the elderly officer said:

'I thought there was a chance that by this morning General Bagration might have returned from his tour of inspection, so I did not go to his headquarters until half an hour ago. I am sorry to tell you that he is not yet back, and the principal officers of his staff went with him. So no one knows anything of this proposed exchange you told me about; and I have no alternative but to send you north with the others.'

With an effort Roger rallied himself from this final dashing of his hopes, to thank the Commandant for the trouble he had taken; then fell back in line with his companions.

Led and flanked by a mounted guard of Cossacks, the long column of prisoners left by the main gate of the cantonment, the seventy-odd officers leading. Marching erect and in step to demonstrate their good discipline, they were taken through the principal street of the city, watched by a curious crowd. As they approached the central square, they realised why their departure had been delayed until mid-morning. A clus­ter of officers in brilliant uniforms were sitting their horses there, to watch them pass. Evidently the General command­ing in Bagration's absence had decided to inspect them at that hour.

As the head of the, column came level with the group of mounted officers, a command rang out, 'Eyes right.' Roger automatically obeyed the order. Suddenly his lacklustre glance became alive with astonishment. Two yards in front of the main group, sitting a fine bay horse, was a man who looked to be about thirty, wearing a plain uniform with a single star on his chest. It was the Czar Alexander.

For a moment Roger was completely nonplussed. He had been presented to the Czar in 1801. But that was six years ago. Could a monarch be expected to remember one of the many hundred people whom he had received at his Court? Was it even possible to get to and speak to him without being killed by one of the Cossacks riding alongside the column? But death lay waiting on the frozen road to the north.

As one of the senior prisoners, Roger was in the leading rank of the march past. The eyes of both his companions and the Cossacks were turned away from him, as they rigidly carried out the salute. Thrusting aside the officer next to him, he dived under the neck of the nearest Cossack's mount and hurled himself across the dozen yards that separated him from the Czar.

Aware that the Russian sovereigns were accustomed to a god-like veneration from their people, he seized the Czar's boot with both hands and kissed its toe. Stooping to do so saved his life. The nearest Cossack had swerved his pony and stab­bed downwards with his lance. Instead of driving right through Roger's body, it only grazed the skin of his left shoulder. Be­fore the Cossack could drag it free for another stroke, Roger yelled: 'Imperial Majesty, hear me I beg! I was among those who cried "Alexander Pavlovich, live for ever" on the morning of March 12th, 1801. I was a friend of Count Pahlen and came to your Court with diplomatic credentials. Lame as I am, the march to the north is certain to bring about my death. I entreat you to have mercy on me.'

Raising his hand in a swift gesture, the Czar checked the Cossack, who was about to drive his lance through Roger's back. Looking down at him, he said, 'Your face is vaguely familiar to me, but not with that beard. Who are you?'

The question put Roger in a quandary he had had no time even to consider when he had been seized by the impulse to risk his life on the chance of saving it. After only a moment's hesitation he replied, 'May it please Your Imperial Majesty. I have enjoyed the confidence of both Monsieur de Talley­rand and the late Mr. Pitt. Be so gracious as to afford me a brief private audience, and I vow that you will find me cap­able of rendering you more valuable service than could an­other battalion of Grenadiers.'

Alexander gave a chilly smile. 'Then I'll give you a chance to see if you can make good your boast.' Turning in his saddle, he signed to one of his aides-de-camp and added, 'Take this gentleman to the Palace. See to it that he is provided with the means to make himself presentable and given decent clothes, then guard him until you receive my further orders.'

The commotion caused by Roger's having broken ranks had brought the column to only a momentary halt. As he now saw it marching on, pity for his recent companions was mingled with elation that his daring bid to save himself had succeeded. The fact that when he had last seen the Czar it had been as Mr. Roger Brook, the secretly-accredited plenipotentiary of Britain's Prime Minister, and for some time past he had been a prisoner of the Russians as Colonel le Chevalier dc Breuc, was going to require some far from easy explaining. But at least he no longer had to fear being left to freeze to death in the snow. With a considerably more buoyant limp, he accom­panied the A.D.C., into whose charge he had been given, the short distance to the Palace.

There he enjoyed the luxury of a bath, a valet attended to the slight wound in his shoulder, deloused his hair and dressed it in accordance with the prevailing fashion; then he was given a shirt and cravat of good quality, stockings, a pair of buckled shoes and a suit of blue cloth which was almost as good as new. Where these clothes came from he did not enquire, but as he was-much of a height with the Czar, he thought they were probably some of the Sovereign's cast-offs, as it was quite usual for royalties to travel with upwards of two hundred suits and, having been intimate with the lovely Pauline, now Princess Borghese, he knew her to have owned the best part of a thousand pairs of shoes.

Late in the afternoon, having fared ill for many weeks he did full justice to an excellent dinner in a private apartment, with the A.D.C. whose name was Count Anton Chcrnicheff, a handsome young man of no great brain, but pleasant man­ners. Over the meal they discussed the campaign and other matters of mutual interest. That night, although decidedly worried that in his desperate urge to gain the protection of the Czar he had impulsively promised services that he might not be able to perform, for the first time since he had left Warsaw he was able to relax and sleep in a comfortable bed. Before he dropped off, he thanked all his gods that he was not lying in straw on the hard floor of a bam or in the stink­ing hut of some wretched peasant, which must be the lot of his recent companions on their march into Russia.

But soon after dawn he woke and his mind became a prey to renewed anxieties. When he had been known to the Czar in St. Petersburg, it had been as an English gentleman. Nor­mally it was against the principles of gentlemen to act as spies. Even if lack of money, or a fervent patriotism so strong as to override convention had induced him to become a secret agent, would it be considered plausible that he had, within a few years, established himself so convincingly with the French that he had been appointed one of Napoleon's aides-de-camp, and so achieved a position in which he would be entrusted with many of the Emperor's secret intentions?

Eventually he decided that his best hope lay in telling the truth and shaming the devil—or at least keeping near enough to the truth to make his story credible. But a further eighteen hours elapsed before he was called on to face this interview on which his future, and possibly his life, depended.

He had spent a pleasant day beside a roaring porcelain stove, alternately chatting with Chernicheff and browsing through some Russian and German news-sheets that the A.D.C. had brought him; then, at ten o'clock, gone to bed. Two hours later, Chcraicheff roused him, to say that his Im­perial master was at that moment supping and, when he had finished, required Roger to present himself.

Recalling that it was a curious custom of the Russians fre­quently to transact business in the middle of the night, Roger hastily dressed, then accompanied the A.D.C. through a series of passages to a small, empty library. They waited there for some twenty minutes, then the Czar walked in.

Alexander was a good-looking man, with fairish, curly hair, side-whiskers, a straight nose and well-modelled mouth. He was again wearing a plain uniform, but a four-inch-deep gold embroidered collar came at the sides right up to his ears and beneath it, rather like a bandage, a thick silk scarf sup­ported his chin.

Apart from Napoleon, Alexander possessed a more inter­esting and original character than any other monarch of his day. He had been brought up at the liberal Court of his grand­mother, the great Catherine, and as a tutor she had given him a Swiss named Laharpe. From him Alexander had im­bibed the fundamental principle of the French Revolution— that all men had rights—and, had not the united opposition of his nobles been too strong for him to overcome, he would, on ascending the throne, have freed from bondage the mil­lions of serfs who constituted the greater part of his subjects.

Catherine had so hated and despised her son Paul that she had decided to make the youthful Alexander her heir; but had died before signing the new will she had had drawn up. She had, however, secured for him as a wife, the charming Princess Maria Luisa of Baden, and the young couple had fallen in love at first sight, with the result that their Court was the most respectable in Europe.

Paul, previously an eccentric who, during his mother's reign, took pleasure only in drilling and harshly disciplining a bri­gade of troops allotted to him to keep him out of mischief, after coming to the throne had developed increasing signs of madness. Seized with uncontrollable rages, without the least justification he exiled scores of his nobles to Siberia; and, becoming obsessed with the idea that his assassination was being plotted, he was considering doing away with his principal Ministers and even his wife and son, although both the latter were completely loyal to him. But his Ministers were not; and their fears for themselves had led to his murder.

Considering those eight years of Paul's reign, during which his heir had been under constant apprehension that he might be thrown into a dungeon from which he would never emerge, it was remarkable that Alexander should not at length have mounted the throne a suspicious and vengeful tyrant. On the contrary, he had remained a man with high ideals and while, for some time, he had retained his father's Ministers, he had gathered about him a group of friends: Victor Kochubey, Nicolai Novasiltsov, Paul Strogonov and Adam Czartoryski, who were eager to introduce sweeping reforms for the better­ment of the lot of the Russian people. Yet, despite his lean­ings towards democracy, Alexander continued to think of himself as an autocrat whose opinion was final and not to be contested.

With a brief nod, he acknowledged the deep bows made by Chernicheff and Roger, then dismissed the A.D.C. Sitting down behind a beautiful Louis Quinze desk, he studied Roger for a full minute before speaking.

Roger stood at attention. He thought it probable that any­one being so regarded by an autocratic sovereign would be expected to have his eyes cast down. But he had always found that boldness paid; so he kept his eyes fixed on those of the Czar, while assuming an expression which he hoped would be taken for fascinated admiration.

At length, Alexander said stonily, 'I have had particulars regarding you looked into. It appears that you are a Colonel, a Commander of the Legion d'Honneur, and a member of the Emperor Napoleon's personal staff. Now that you have shaved off your beard, I recognise you without doubt as an Englishman who was in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1801, and involved in my father's death. Such a contrast in person­alities is beyond all reason. Explain it if you can.'

Roger knew that Alexander had had no hand in his father's assassination, had wept when he had been told of it and, only reluctantly, been dissuaded from having the assassins executed; so the first fence he had to clear was having been one of them.

'Sire,' he said earnestly. 'You will recall that Your Imperial Majesty's father had, out of hatred for your illustrious grand­mother, reversed all her policies. Whereas she had been about to join the Powers of the First Coalition to assist in destroying the murderous gang of terrorists who were then all-powerful in France, the Czar Paul had entered into a pact with them. This was so serious a menace to British interests that I was sent by Prime Minister Pitt to encourage the Czar's Ministers, and others who feared to be deprived of their positions and fortunes, to take action against him. Not, I swear, to assassin­ate him, but to force him to abdicate or, at least, make you Regent—as we, in England, had made our Prince of Wales, when our own King, George III, became afflicted with mad­ness. It is true that I was among the half hundred other con­spirators who met at Count Pahlen's mansion on that fateful night; that I later entered the Palace with General Bennigsen and the Zuboff brothers; but neither the General nor I had any hand in your father's murder. It took place in complete darkness, unknown to us, after Your Imperial Majesty's father had refused to sign the deed of abdication.'

Alexander nodded. 'That I accept, as I did in the case of General Bennigsen. But it does not explain why you, accredited only a few years ago as the secret emissary of Britain's Prime Minister, should now emerge as a member of the Emperor Napoleon's staff.'

With a shrug, Roger spread out his hands and replied, 'May it please Your Imperial Majesty, I have been the plaything of unusual circumstances. I am, in fact, an Englishman, the son of Admiral Sir Christopher Brook, but my mother's sister had married a gentleman of Strasbourg and they had a son of about my age. In my teens I became bewitched by the new ideals of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity", which had at that time brought about the first, liberal, revolution in France. I ran away from home to my aunt in Strasbourg and, with her family, learned to speak fluent French. I longed to be in Paris and do what little I could to help bring about the original objects of the revolution. It so happened that my cousin was killed in an accident, and by then Britain was at war with France; so I went to the capital as a Frenchman, changed my name to Breuc and assumed his identity.'

As Roger paused, the Czar nodded. 'This is most interest­ing. Continue.'

Roger bowed. 'I lived there through the Terror, and real­ised that the revolution had become a murderous anarchy. Disillusioned and disgusted by what I had seen, I returned to England. My father sent me to the Prime Minister, so that I could give him an eyewitness account of what was happening in Paris. Mr. Pitt then proposed to me that I should return as his agent and keep him informed about events in France.'

The Czar's brows knitted. Sitting back, he asked with severe disapproval, 'Do you mean that you, a gentleman, agreed to become a spy?'

'Sire,' Roger shrugged. 'I admit it. I was persuaded that it was the most valuable service I could render my country. And I am not ashamed of the part I have played during these past sixteen years. I had the good fortune to become acquain­ted with General Bonaparte when he was an unknown Artillery officer at the siege of Toulon. I have since executed many missions either in my real identity as Roger Brook, or as the ci-devant Chevalier de Breuc, which have enabled Britain to thwart Napoleon's designs. Not least the part I played in helping to bring about your succession, which resulted in Russia breaking with France and becoming the ally of England. That from time to time I must betray the Emperor, who counts me his friend and has through the years bestowed rank and honour upon me, is often against my inclination, since in many ways I have a great admiration for him. But my duty to my country comes first, and I can only ask your Imperial Majesty's understanding of the strange fate that brings me before you as a French prisoner who has in fact served Britain for many years as a secret agent.'

Alexander's stern features relaxed into a slow smile, as he said, 'Mr. Brook, while your ethics remain highly questionable, I cannot withhold my admiration from a man who must on many occasions have risked his life to provide his country with valuable information. Are you, or rather were you in communication with the British Government before you be­came a prisoner?'

Roger shook his head. 'No, Sire, Mr. Pitt being dead I had no inclination to serve his inept successors. I returned to the Continent only because I became bored with leading an idle life in England and, having for so long been a man of some note in the French Army with more friends in it than I had in my own country, I decided to rejoin the Emperor's staff. Trafalgar made Britain safe from invasion, so she now stands on the side line of this great conflict. I have never had any love for the Prussians, so had no objection to serving against them, simply for the enjoyment I derive from being actively employed. But, should Britain again be menaced, I would, of course, do anything I could to aid her cause.'

After a moment the Czar said, 'Mr. Brook, it seems to me that you have failed to face up to realities. I am England's ally. Should my armies be defeated, which St. Nicholas for­fend, Bonaparte will enjoy a clear field to inflict grievous harm upon your country. Although he may no longer be in a position to invade England, he has always had ambitions to become another Alexander the Great in the East. He might well direct his legions against Turkey and Persia, then throw the British out of India and so deprive your country of one of her great sources of wealth. Are you, as you implied the day before yesterday when you broke ranks and cast yourself at my feet, willing to serve me as you served Mr. Pitt, by giving me your help to defeat the French?'

Again Roger bowed. 'I take your Imperial Majesty's point, and, if you will arrange to have me exchanged for a Russian officer of equivalent rank, I will do my utmost to be of service to you.'

'Good,' the Czar nodded. 'Then tomorrow we will talk again.' Picking up a silver hand-bell from his desk, he rang it. Chernicheff, who had been waiting outside, came in and escorted Roger back to the rooms that had been assigned to him. By then it was getting on for one o'clock in the morning. Well satisfied with the way things had gone, Roger got out of his clothes and tumbled into bed.

The following day was Sunday and, after attending service in the big, onion-domed Orthodox Cathedral, the Czar again sent for Roger. This time Alexander had with him Prince Adam Czartoryski and a secretary sitting at a small table, ready to take notes. Prince Adam, although a Pole, was the Czar's principal Minister and closest friend. He had travelled widely, twice made prolonged visits to England, and spoke English fluently.

Alexander was no fool and had evidently decided to make certain that Roger really was an Englishman and not an Eng­lish-speaking Frenchman who, in fact, was devoted to Napo­leon; so the interview opened by Czartoryski's asking him a series of questions about London's leading hostesses and clubs.

Somewhat amused, Roger, as a member of White's, was readily able to convince the Prince that he was well known in London society, and it soon transpired that they had numer­ous acquaintances in common, including Roger's closest friend,

Lord Edward Fitz-Deveril, known to his intimates as 'Droopy Ned'.

Fully satisfied, Alexander invited him to sit down and join them in a glass of wine, then began to question him about the French Army. Roger said that, to the best of his belief, it had numbered some seventy-five thousand men, only about half of whom were French; but the day-long conflict at Eylau had been so fierce that he thought it possible that dead, wounded and prisoners might well have reduced its effectives by a third or more.

At that the Czar smiled. 'We, too, suffered very heavily, but my domains are greater than those of France, Austria and Prussia put together. It takes many weeks for contingents mobilised in distant parts to reach the battle-front; but they are arriving daily. Moreover, I am shortly about to leave for Memel to confer with the King of Prussia, and I have good hopes that between us we will be able to put into the field an army considerably superior to that of the French.'

Roger shook his head. 'I would not count on it, Sire. Bona­parte's greatest assets are his organising ability and the speed with which he carries out his intentions. You may be certain that, within twelve hours of his having been checked at Eylau, his Chief of Staff was sending scores of couriers to every country now under French control—Poland, Hanover, the Confederation of the Rhine, Holland, Piedmont, Vcnetia, Dalmatia and Italy, as well as France—demanding the im­mediate despatch of reinforcements. It would not surprise me if he had not doubled his numbers by the time you engage him in another pitched battle.'

'Perhaps,' remarked Czartoryski. 'But most of his troops will be newly-conscripted, and of poor quality. From the con­duct of certain regiments at Eylau and the prisoners we took there, it became evident to us that the Grande Armee is no longer the formidable force it was at Ulm and Austerlitz.'

'True, Prince,' Roger agreed. 'The foreign elements natur­ally resent having to go to war for the aggrandisement of France, and the French no longer display the elan that they did, except when under the eye of the Emperor or there is easy loot to be had. Most of them long to be done with cam­paigning, and return to their homes. That applies even to many of the Marshals. They would be only too glad to cease having to risk their lives and, instead, spend their remaining years enjoying their wealth and honours.'

The Czar took a pinch of snuff. 'They must be a most un­usual body of men, and one cannot know too much about the personalities of enemy Generals. Tell me what you know of them.'

Roger smiled. 'The only thing they have in common, Sire, is their comparative youth, combined with long experience of war. Of those on the active list, if one excepts Berthier, the Emperor's Chief of Staff, and the dull Moncey, who is Chief of the Gendarmerie, their average age is a little over forty. They are a self-opinionated, quarrelsome lot and so bitterly jealous of one another that no lesser man than Napoleon could keep them in order. Massena is probably the most skilful of them; but when they were created Marshals in 1804 and a friend congratulated him, he exclaimed in disgust, "I see nothing to be pleased about—just one of fourteen." ' 'I thought he created eighteen,' interjected the Prince. 'There are, but four of them—Kellermann, Lefebvre, Perignon and Serurier—are only honorary Marshals, given the rank for their services in the Revolutionary wars. The Emperor's policy, as you may know, has been to overcome the antagonism of the most influential Jacobins who resented his making himself a monarch, by elevating them, too. Lannes, Augereau, Jourdan and Bernadotte were all red-hot Repub­licans, but have since come to heel. The last, although his worst enemy, he made Prince of Ponte Corvo, whereas most of the others he made only Dukes.'

'Whom would you say was the bravest of them?' asked the Czar.

'Ney, Lannes and Murat must share that honour, Sire. As a cavalry leader, Murat is incomparable. He leads every major charge himself, in uniforms he has designed, smothered in gold and jewels, and wearing a busby from which sprout white ostrich feathers a foot high.'

'And the most able?'

'Massena, Soult, Mortier and Davoust. When they were created, all the others sneered at Davoust's being included among them; but he has since more than justified it. At Auerstadt, without aid or direction from the Emperor, he won a great victory over an army more than twice the size of his corps, and since, so I have been told, he saved the French from defeat at Eylau. Perhaps I should include Berthier: not as a General, but in his own highly-specialised work. That big head of his is a living card index. He could tell you at any moment where every unit in the Army is, and how long it would take to move it from one place to another. As a Chief of Staff, he is incomparable.'

'You have not mentioned Bessieres or Brune.'

'Bessieres' promotion was also resented by the others, Sire, on account of his youth. But, as Commander of the Imperial Guard, with no disrespect to your own Household troops, he has made his corps probably the most formidable fighting force in Europe. As for Brune, he is a nonentity, and received his baton only because he defeated the English when they sent an expeditionary force to Holland, shortly before Napo­leon got back from Egypt. But any bonehead could have out-generalled a man as stupid as our Duke of York.'

'What of those who were passed over?' enquired the Prince. 'From what I have heard, Marmont, Macdonald, Suchet, Victor and Junot seem to have proved just as able as several of the others.'

Roger laughed. 'The rage they displayed for weeks had to be seen to be believed. Mortier was made virtual Viceroy in Dalmatia, and why he did not get his baton I cannot think. Macdonald, Suchet and Victor also deserved theirs for their fine performances in Italy. But Junot, no. Napoleon realised that he would be hopeless as a corps commander; but he never forgets his old friends, and Junot practically kept him years ago when he had very little money, so he consoled him by making him Military Governor of Paris.'

They talked on for another hour about Napoleon's mili­tary campaigns and his ability as an administrator. At length, the Czar said, 'Upstart though he may be, I cannot but admire the man for the way in which he has restored France from a state of anarchy to good order, and in his new code of law he has embodied many benefits that I should like to grant to my own people. For obvious reasons, Mr. Brook, I must con­tinue to treat you as a prisoner; but as soon as I can, I will arrange an exchange for you, and I have good hopes that in the months to come you will find means to convey to me in­formation about Napoleon's intentions, that will prove of value.'

'That will not be easy, Sire,' Roger said throughtfully. 'Can you suggest any means by which I might do so?'

It was Adam Czanoryski who replied. 'You may have been misled by what you have seen of the Polish people. My nation is divided. One half believes the vague promises of Bona­parte that, given their aid to defeat Russia, he will restore Poland's independence. The other half, which includes most of our noble families and intelligentsia, puts no faith in the half-promises of this self-made Emperor, who is known many times to have broken his word. They prefer to place their trust in His Imperial Majesty, who has assured them that, under the protection of Russia, he will grant Poland independent government. It should not be difficult for you to make the acquaintance of a number of Polish officers at present serving with the French; sound them out about their political views and, when you find one or more who are in arms against Russia only with reluctance, persuade them to desert at the first opportunity and bring with them any useful information you may have for us.'

Roger believed that he owed his life to the fact that, except on very few occasions when he had seen no alternative, he had never divulged to anyone that he was a secret agent; so he at once decided against adopting the Prince's suggestion. Never­theless, he replied:

'That is certainly an idea worth exploring. But should favourable circumstances arise in which I can, without undue risk of being killed, allow myself to be captured again, that is what I will do; for I could then give you a far more complete picture of the situation of the French than I could con­vey through any messenger.'

The interview being over, Alexander extended his hand for Roger to kiss, and he bowed himself out from the Imperial presence, to be again escorted by the waiting Chernicheff back to his quarters.

A fortnight went by, during which time he had three more long talks with Prince Adam about the state of the French Army; but, except for these, he idled his time away reading French books, of which a great number were available in the Palace library.

It was on the morning of the last day in March, that Chemicheff greeted him with a cheerful smile and said,' 'Your ex­change has been arranged. I have orders to escort you to a village on the Alle, a few miles above Allenstein, and there the exchange will take place.'

This meant a journey of some one hundred and ten miles, but the thaw had set in so, instead of a sleigh, they were able to go in a well-upholstered travelling coach, accompanied by outriders who acted as servants, and with a stock of pro­visions that were cooked for them whenever they decided to halt and have a meal. In most places the snow was melting fast and pouring away in thick, muddy streams to swell rivers and lakes; in others the remains of great drifts of it still formed solid ice mounds several feet in height, over which the coach had to be manhandled; so it was four days before they reached Allenstein, where they spent the night.

Early on the morning of the fifth, Roger said good-bye to Chcrnicheff and, at some peril, was ferried across the rushing river Alle, under a flag of truce. Waiting on the far bank was a Russian Colonel, who greeted him warmly. Shaking hands, they congratulated each other on their restoration to freedom; then the Russian boarded the ferry to rejoin his countrymen.

The French officer who received Roger told him that, after remaining in the neighbourhood of Eylau for a week, to establish his claim to victory, the Emperor had withdrawn beyond the river Passargc and the upper Alle, where the Army had since remained in winter quarters. Thorn, right back on the Vistula, had become the main base of the Army, but its headquarters were at Osterode, only some twenty miles away.

Furnished with a mount and an escort of four Hussars, Roger set out for Osterode, to learn, when he reached the town, that the Emperor was actually some distance away at the Castle of Finckenstein. On arriving there, he found it very different from Znamensk, which had not been much more than an old fortified manor house. Finckenstein was a vast, grim, battlemented pile, large enough to house several hun­dred people, and the central courtyard was crowded with mounted officers, and orderlies constantly coming and going.

On enquiring for the Due de Friuli, Roger was glad to learn that his old friend was there. In the days before the Em­pire, the Duc had been simply Colonel Duroc, Chief A.D.C. to Bonaparte. Then, when the Court had been formed, he had been made Grand Marshal of the Palace or, when on a campaign, Marechal de Camp; but Napoleon had several times sent him on missions as an Ambassador—a use to which he not infrequently put the more intelligent of his military staff.

Michel Duroc received Roger with open arms, listened with sympathy to his account of his misfortunes during the past two months, then brought him up to date with the situation of the French Army.

Eylau had proved an even greater disaster than Roger had supposed. Augereau's corps, losing direction in the blizzard and infiladed by the Russian guns, had been so torn to pieces that it had had to be disbanded and its survivors drafted to other units. Napoleon habitually understated the French casual­ties in the bulletins that he issued after every major battle. On this occasion he had stated them to be one thousand nine hundred killed and five thousand seven hundred wounded; but the fact was that the effectives had been reduced by nearly thirty thousand men, and the forty-five thousand remaining were in dire straits.

Meat was almost unprocurable and they were barely ex­isting on a meagre ration of biscuits and root crops. Their uniforms were in rags, scores of them froze to death every night and, the front being fluid, they lived in constant fear of raids by the fierce Cossacks, since their own cavalry was in­capable of protecting them, because their horses had been so weakened by semi-starvation that they could no longer be spurred into a gallop.

Amazed, Roger exclaimed, 'But it is totally unlike the Em­peror to allow his army to fall into such a parlous state. Has he done nothing in these past two months to rectify matters?'

Duroc shrugged.'After Eylau, he sent a plenitpotentiary to Frederick William of Prussia, offering to restore a part of his territories and forgo his earlier demand that Prussia should become his ally against Russia. But the Czar succeeded in browbeating that miserable, irresolute monarch into refusing our overtures.

'Berthier or, as I suppose we should now call him, Marechal le Prince de Neuchatel, has since been working like a demon, calling up reserves from Poland, Bavaria, Saxony, the Rhine and has even blackmailed the Spaniards into send­ing a corps to retain Hanover for us, so that its French garrison can be brought up here. A new levy of eighty thousand men, or rather boys, has been ordered in France. It is the third within the past year and made eighteen months before these youngsters were due to be called up. Mortier, I mean the Duke of Treviso —I shall never get used to these new names—was recalled from keeping watch on the Swedish Army that is occupying Stralsund. A week ago, it took the offensive; so he is now marching his corps back to check its advance. Meanwhile Austria is again becoming restless and, should she join our enemies, could cut our communications with France.'

'What a picture,' said Roger, making a gloomy face. 'And what of England? I take it she has not been altogether idle during this propitious time to make a telling thrust at her implacable enemy?'

Duroc laughed. 'On the contrary, for the first time in years she has ceased to show her aggressive spirit. Our intelligence informed us that it was proposed to send an expeditionary force to support the Swedes in Stralsund. But she could mus­ter no more than twelve thousand men, so thought it beneath her dignity to make such an insignificant contribution to the war against us on the Continent. It is said that the Czar is disgusted with her as an ally who will neither send him mili­tary aid, nor even a substantial subsidy to help pay his own troops. All England's present ineffectual Government have so far done this year is to send a fleet that forced the Dar­danelles in February and appeared off Constantinople. Its object was to coerce the Sultan Selim into giving way in his dispute with Russia, so that the Czar would be in a position to withdraw many of his divisions from the Danube for use as reinforcements against us up here; and to dismiss our Am­bassador, General Sebastiani. But Sebastiani has Selim so effectually under his thumb and the people of Constantinople were so enraged by the insolent demands of the English that, in a single day, they dragged a thousand cannon up to the Bosphorus, did the enemy fleet much damage and forced it to retire with ignominy.'

With a frown, Roger changed the subject. 'All you tell me of the situation here seems quite extraordinary. Berthier's ability to bring up reinforcements by roads on which they will not converge and become congested is known to us all. But what of the Emperor? Has he not used that great brain of his to devise some policy that would cause dissension among our enemies, so that they no longer have a concerted strategy and we could defeat them piecemeal?'

'Mon ami, it is .quite a time since you have been with us at headquarters. Believe it or not, Napoleon has ceased to be interested in waging war. With him here he has the Countess Maria Walewska. Admittedly, she is a charming young crea­ture: dignified, modest, unambitious. Having now been re­pudiated by her old husband, she has accepted our master wholeheartedly, and he has become a changed man. The years have dropped from him, and his is like a youth in his teens; positively besotted by her. For weeks past they have been enjoying a honeymoon. For days at a time he never emerges from their suite, and refuses all pleas to discuss business. For ten days or more I have had here missions from both the Grand Turk and the Great Sophy. Only once has he consentcd to receive these Turkish and Persian emissaries. Yet both could prove invaluable allies in harassing the Czar. Naturally, they have become resentful and contumacious; but there is nothing I can do about it.'

Roger expressed his sympathy, while inwardly much pleased that it looked as though, at last, England's arch­enemy was losing his grip and might, in a few weeks' time, be so thoroughly defeated by the Russians and Prussians that his gimcrack Empire would fall to pieces and Europe be restored to its pre-revolutionary state.

Having asked Duroc to request an audience with the Em­peror for him as soon as possible, they adjourned to the senior officers' Mess. There Roger was greeted with delight by many of his old comrades; but several of them were missing, and he learned to his distress that they had died at Eylau.

For three days Roger waited without receiving any sum­mons from his master, and he became more and more im­patient at the delay, because he had long been cherishing a means of getting out of Poland as soon as his exchange had been effected.

For a long time past, he had owned a small chateau near St. Maxime, in the South of France and, on the excuse of a weak chest, aggravated by a bullet through his lung at Ma­rengo, he had usually obtained long leave to winter there; which gave him an opportunity to slip over to England and report very fully to Mr. Pitt all that was going on in France.

But this year he had been caught out. After returning to France in the previous May, he had thoroughly enjoyed his summer in Paris, and it was not his custom to apply for win­ter leave until December; so he had naturally accompanied the Emperor when, in September, he had left Paris to open his campaign against Prussia. After the double victory of Jena-Auerstadt, he had welcomed—being a born lover of travel and never having been to either Berlin or Warsaw— the chance of spending a few weeks in both those cities; so, when December had come, as he was no longer in the service of the British Government and, anyway, had nothing to re­port that could be of help to his now moribund country, instead of asking for leave he had lingered oh at the Emperor's headquarters. Napoleon's taking the field again in January, much earlier than anyone had expected, had put Roger in an awkward position. To have applied then to spend the re­mainder of the winter months in the sunshine of the South of France would be regarded as an act of cowardice by many of his comrades, who were unaware of his skilfully-established disability. In consequence, he had participated in the cam­paign which had ended for him at Eylau.

However, as the thaw had only just set in and several weeks of cold, foul weather were still to be expected, he had made up his mind that, immediately he saw Napoleon, he would ask for two months' leave, in order to escape the miserable conditions that must continue to afflict the Army for some time to come. Instead, he would travel from Poland as swiftly as he could to the shores of the Mediterranean, where no one even thought of war, except to celebrate the Emperor's vic­tories with splendid dinners and lashings of champagne. There, as a rich and distinguished officer, he would lead a life of leisure, spiced with gay parties, in the company of elegant men, and pretty women who were not over-scrupulous about their morals.

No scruples about failing to serve Alexander troubled him. His code had always been 'all's fair in love and war', and he had considered himself fully justified in misleading the Czar in order to obtain his freedom.

On the morning of his fourth day at Finckenstein, he was walking along a corridor when he suddenly saw the Emperor approaching.

Napoleon's face lit up, and he exclaimed, 'Ah! mon brave Breuc! I feared you dead. When they told me you had fallen prisoner to these devilish Russians and could be exchanged, I was truly delighted. And at this juncture you are more than welcome here. The Turks and the Persians have both sent missions to me. This has led to my conceiving a plan by which I can stab that young fool Alexander in the back. So I am sending General Gardane on a mission, first to the Great Turk, then to the Shah. It will consist of a number of officers. But I need one personally attached to me, who will privately keep me informed how well or ill the mission is progressing.'

Suddenly, Napoleon lifted a hand, seized the lobe of Roger's left ear and tweaked it. 'You, Breuc, with your know­ledge of the East, are the very man for this. Procure for yourself everything you may require, at my expense, and be prepared to set off for Constantinople.'

The Greatest Statesman of his Age

Roger made a grimace of pain, for the way in which Napo­leon tweaked people's ears, although always a gesture of ap­probation, was far from gentle.

At the same moment he took in the disastrous effect that this idea of the Emperor's could have on his own plans. No carefree, lazy days in the sunshine of the Riviera; no bathing in the warm sea from a sandy beach; no pleasant expeditions into Nice and St. Tropez, where he might make the acquaint­ance of some charming lady who would become his mistress and add rapture to his days and nights. Instead, an intermin­able journey over bad roads, staying overnight at pestiferous inns, down through the semi-barbarous Balkans to countries in which all desirable women were kept under guard in harems, and the food would probably prove disgusting. Some­how or other, he must dissuade the Emperor from sending him on this mission, which threatened to ruin the daydreams with which he had been entertaining himself for the past few weeks.

As soon as he had recovered, he said, 'Sire, I have been extraordinarily lucky in that, with the chest trouble by which you know I am afflicted, I escaped pneumonia and death while a prisoner of the Russians; but I suffered severely at their hands, as you can see from my gaunt appearance. I was about to ask you for two months' leave, so that I might re­cuperate in the South of France.'