After all the retreating, advancing and engaging with the enemy at Pultusk and Preussisch-Eylau, our army was now concentrated around Bartenstein awaiting the arrival of the Tsar and the start of a new campaign.
The Pavlograd regiment, as an army section which had taken part in the hostilities of 1805, had stayed behind in Russia to make up its numbers and did not arrive in time for action in the first skirmishes of the campaign. It took no part in the battles of Pultusk or Preussisch-Eylau, and when it did join the army in the field, in the second half of the campaign, it was attached to Platov’s division.12
Platov’s division was acting independently of the main army. Several times the Pavlograd hussars exchanged fire with the enemy, took prisoners and on one notable occasion captured Marshal Oudinot’s carriages. In April the Pavlograd hussars had spent weeks on end encamped near a ravaged and deserted German village, and never stirred from that spot.
It was thawing, muddy and cold, the ice had broken up on the river, the roads were impassable, and for some days there had been no provisions, nothing for the horses or the men. With transport out of the question, the soldiers had dispersed about the abandoned and empty villages in search of potatoes, but very few were to be had.
Everything had been eaten up, and every last inhabitant had fled; those that remained were worse than beggars, and there was nothing to be taken from them; in fact the soldiers, not normally the most compassionate of men, often gave them what they had left.
The Pavlograd regiment had lost only two soldiers wounded in action, but almost half its men had gone down with hunger and disease. In the hospitals death was so certain that soldiers who became feverish or bloated from their bad diet preferred to stay on duty and drag themselves up and down the front line rather than go to any hospital. As spring came on the soldiers began to find a plant that looked like asparagus coming up out of the ground. For some reason they called it Mary’s sweet-wort, and they scoured the fields and meadows in search of this Mary’s sweet-wort (which was actually very bitter). They dug it up with their sabres and ate it, despite many warnings that it was dangerous and shouldn’t be eaten. So that spring, when a new disease broke out among the soldiers, with swelling of the arms, legs and face, the doctors blamed it on this root. But no amount of warning could stop the soldiers of Denisov’s squadron eating hardly anything but Mary’s sweet-wort, because they had been eking out their last biscuits for a couple of weeks now, doled out at the rate of half a pound a man, and the last consignment of potatoes had arrived frozen and sprouting.
The horses, too, after two weeks feeding on nothing but thatch, looked shockingly thin and moth-eaten as their winter coats came away in tufts.
In spite of these appalling conditions, the soldiers and officers went on living just as usual, though their faces were pale and swollen and their uniforms were torn. They formed up on parade and numbered off, went out foraging, groomed their horses and cleaned their weapons, they fetched thatch for fodder and gathered round the cauldrons at dinner-time, only to walk away as empty as ever, joking about the awful food and going hungry again. Off duty the soldiers went on as before, lighting their fires, stripping off and steaming in front them, smoking, sorting out one or two sprouting, rotten potatoes for baking, and swapping Potyomkin or Suvorov stories or sometimes tales about folk heroes like Alyosha, prince of rogues, or Mikolka who worked for the priest.
The officers lived as usual two or three to a roofless ruin of a house. The senior ones spent their time trying to get hold of straw and potatoes to feed the men, while the younger ones did the usual things, playing cards for money (which was plentiful, though there was nothing to eat), or enjoying innocent games like quoits and skittles. Nobody had much to say about the general run of the campaign, partly because nothing very positive was known, partly because of a vague idea that things were not going too well.
