about nine o’clock in the morning
`` God grant it may be so ! '' answered M. Fanjat , who seemed to be affected by this incident . Since insanity had interested him , he had known several cases in which a spirit of prophecy and the gift of second sight had been accorded to a disordered brain -- two faculties which many travelers tell us are also found among savage tribes . So it happened that , as the colonel had foreseen and arranged , Stephanie traveled across the mimic Beresina about nine o'clock in the morning , and was awakened by an explosion of rockets about a hundred paces from the scene of action . It was a signal . Hundreds of peasants raised a terrible clamor , like the despairing shouts that startled the Russians when twenty thousand stragglers learned that by their own fault they were delivered over to death or to slavery . When the Countess heard the report and the cries that followed , she sprang out of the carriage , and rushed in frenzied anguish over the snow-covered plain ; she saw the burned bivouacs and the fatal raft about to be launched on a frozen Beresina .