Scotch Highlanders, great at an onset, with not a whit more native
knowledge of the common etiquette of war, so Henri himself, in sober
simplicity of nature, in the firm thoroughness of all he had to do,
even in the agreeable accident of personal beauty, is not unlike a
much-maligned man who lived a century before him: John Graham of
Claverhouse, the never-to-be-forgotten “deil o’ Dundee.” Claverhouse
had a habit of curling his hair on papers; and one learns, with the
same sensation, that Henri had one of those singular antipathies no
effort of will can correct. At Pontorson, while Madame de Lescure was
sewing in a room, with a tame black-and-gray squirrel in her lap, he
came in, and backed against the door, pale and trembling. The sight of
a squirrel, as he said with a laugh, gave him a feeling of invincible
terror! His friend asked him to stroke the little creature. He did so,
shaking in every limb, and avowing his weakness with great good-humor.
He was never much of a talker. Discussions were intolerable to him. If
called upon in council, he would speak his mind briefly, overcoming
an extreme diffidence; and having done, he withdrew, or worse, fell
asleep. No one was more humane at battle’s end; but, nevertheless,
Henri’s element was battle. His Paradise was like the heathen board,
where, after the combat and the chase, he might sit at the “red right
hand of Odin;” and the masterly rider looked forward to a life where
he might play soldier forever. “When the King” (Louis XVII.) “is on the
throne,” he confided to his cousin Lescure, “I shall ask for a regiment
of hussars, a regiment always on the gallop.” It was his whole desire
of guerdon.
Lescure had also the Roman devotedness: any morning he stood ready
to outdo Curtius and Horatius. In the rout of Moulin-aux-Chèvres he
drew the hostile squadrons from the pursuit of the frantic Vendeans by
calling their attention to himself and to La Rochejaquelein by name. At
Thouars he gained the bridge of Vrine alone, amid a shower of balls.
He returned to his dispirited band with exhortations; one emboldened
comrade followed him to the second charge. But on the instant Henri
arrived with Forestier, to join Lescure and fire the lagging troops,
as the celestial armies are fabled to have fought at need for the
old commonwealths. Here, this same day, mounted on the shoulders of
a gigantic peasant named Texier, one of the most useful men in the
ranks, Henri broke the mouldy coping of the fortress wall, and through
the breach hurled stones at the flying Blues. His course henceforward
is to be tracked in these flashing incidents, deeds compacted of
demonic sense and wit. Pauvert depicts him breaking the tri-color lines
outside Argenton merely by whistling through, with two friends in his
train, like a blast of wind. At Château-Gontier he seized and bore the
colors; there and elsewhere, wherever he moved, bullets ploughed the
ground under him, and sent up a puff of dust to his spurs. While his
weary infantry slept, he was known to watch for them, in an exposed
bivouac, and turn his idleness to account by picking cartridges for
his poorer “children” out of the wealthy pockets of the adjacent
slain. He and Stofflet reconnoitred the streets of hostile Châtillon
by night, on all fours, the sentinel refraining from challenging the
passage of the big dogs they were supposed to be. Observe the tricks
of a generalissimo, on whose safety the balance of empire hung! He was
a lad; he did not know his value; but what he did know was that nobody
could manage these indispensable lesser manœuvres so exquisitely as
himself. “_Quel gaillard!_” shouted those who at first held back from
this incorrigible, superculpable, adorable, business-like creature of a
Henri; “_quel gaillard!_” At the siege of Saumur, at a wavering moment
of the assault, he flung his hat into the intrenchments. “Who will
fetch that for me?” he cried, as certain of his response as was the
great Condé, or Essex before Cadiz in 1596. Of course, with his usual
verve, he leaped towards it himself, and the crowd rushed after him as
one. In the same engagement he saved the life of his loyal Ville-Baugé,
struck from his stirrups while loading Henri’s pieces for him; as at
Antrain, during the twenty-two hours’ battle, and with a call for much
greater adroitness, he saved that of La Roche Saint André.
The central event of this period was the five days’ victory at Saumur.
By Cathelineau’s order a _Te Deum_ was sung in the church, the captured
flags, rent with balls and black with smoke and blood, dipping to
the chancel floor at every sound of the Holy Name. Such a spectacle
put them all in an exalted mood. Henri was found at a window, meekly
musing over their fortunes: he, the deliverer, who placed elsewhere
the primal credit of the deliverance. The garrison here was left to
his charge, much to his disrelish. “They make a veteran of me!” he
said, ruefully, for the affairs he loved were going on outside. The
inaction of the time told on his men, quite as discerning as himself,
and far less dutiful; despite the fifteen sous a day which, as the
first Vendean bribe, were offered them to remain, they perceived that
there was nothing more to fear, and slipped away to their homes. Soon
but nine were left, and with them Henri departed gloomily, carrying his
cannon, and at Thouars, since not a cannoneer came back to relieve him,
burying it in the river. Luçon, too, was lost. Having got astray during
the action, he arrived but in time to cover the retreat. At Martigné,
where D’Elbée was in command, and again at Vihiers, while Henri was
off recruiting, his name had to be cited constantly to encourage the
soldiers, though he was absent from the field.
He stood in a valley path, giving orders, during an obstinate fight
at Martigné-Briand. A ball struck his right hand, shattering the
thumb and glancing to the elbow. He did not stir, nor even drop his
pistol. “See if my elbow bleeds much,” he said to his companion. “No,
M’sieu Henri.” “Then it is only a broken thumb,” he replied, and went
on directing the troops. It proved to be an ugly and dangerous wound;
it deprived him, during the month of September, of his share of three
signal victories won by “the devils in sabots” under Bonchamp at
Torfou, Montaigu, and Saint Fulgent. Not long after, before Laval, his
arm limp and swollen in a sling, Henri was attacked on a lonely road by
a powerful foot-soldier. He seized the fellow by the collar with his
left hand, and so managed his horse with his legs that his struggling
assailant was unable to draw upon him. A dozen Vendeans ran up, eager
to kill the man who menaced their general. He forbade it, as he was
sure to do. But he checkmated his Goliath with his tongue. “Go back to
the Republicans,” he told him; “say that you were alone with the chief
of the brigands, who had but one arm to use and no weapons, and that
you could not get the better of him.”
In addition to his dark blue great-coat and his wide hat, Henri wore
anything which he found available, and chose, for his distinctive
mark, red handkerchiefs of immemorial Chollet make about his head
and neck, and another about his waist to hold his pistols. It is
striking to find him, the soul of conservatism, in the identical
dress of the Cordeliers, “the red brothers of Danton,” cravatted and
girdled in their Paris fashion, and flaunting the _bonnet rouge_. The
appropriation of the hated color must have been of malice prepense,
as a bit of not illegal bravado, and a slap of exquisite fun at the
tailorish pomp and circumstance of war. Henri made a mountain guy of
himself to some purpose. Among the Blues at Fontenay it quickly became
a universal order to fire at the Red Handkerchief. The other leaders
were unable to persuade him to doff it. “They know me by that,” was
his aggravating answer, “and besides, it is so comfortable!” But they
adorned themselves quickly with the same insignia, and saved him from
the sharp-shooters. Such was the origin of the officers’ earliest
uniform; and with their flapping boots, their huge swords, and these
floating flame-colored gingham plaids, they must indeed have resembled
the “brigands” of their enemies’ fancy. Henri continued to take pride
in his Chollet turban, and was apt to consider a hat, except on festal
occasions, as a piece of tautology. Later, after the conference at
Fougères, he adopted the white sash, with its famous little black knot.
Those officers and civic adherents who encompassed the royal family
at Paris, between the tragic forsaking of Versailles and the dawn of
the regicide year, were, as well they knew, standing under oak-boughs
in a gathering storm. Event was treading on the heels of event; every
hour was oracular; it was impossible not to forecast the morrow, and to
dread or defy it, as habit might prompt. Through the charged and purple
air strange figures were passing: Mirabeau, borne dead to the Pantheon,
to be eldest of its sleepers; Lafayette, with brave step and smile
of compromise, riding through the blue national guards; the Queen,
appearing in white on balconies, calm before mobs, with her firm fair
arm about her little son; Barbaroux and Roland escorting Madame as she
goes reluctantly from her happy dream-time in the garret of the dingy
Rue Saint Jacques into place and authority; Camille Desmoulins, ever
sauntering loose-haired, with a soiled roll of writing, and a sarcasm
not unsweet upon his tongue; the Chéniers; Vergniaud; Westermann,
with his hard, tenacious intelligence not yet amply employed; and
Robespierre, “the last word of the Revolution, which, thus early, no
man could read;” regal maskers, flown to the frontiers and snared at
Varennes, and marched back to the capital amid din of sabres; couriers
arriving with verifications of the butcheries at Avignon, and bishops
departing, after a rapturous _Te Deum_ in the cathedral, each to his
seething diocese; stout foreigners drinking in the Faubourg Saint
Honoré, and darkly prognosticating ruin for this whole wild smithy
where so much old iron was being lighted and beaten into new uses;
Maillard and his murder-men of the Abbaye, walking yet peaceably,
but looming on the horizon like huge dripping spectres of the worst
that was to be;--such was the panorama, such the France, all of which
Henri de La Rochejaquelein literally saw, and part of which, belying
the adage, he was not. He, too, had been at the Café Valois; he, too,
had watched on the quays the gaming soldiers his colleagues, and the
knowing tri-color demoiselles; and heard through his lonely windows, by
night, the mounting chorus of
“_Amour sacré de la patrie,
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs!_”
the legacy of immortal song which a Royalist had given to the Republic
forever. But these externals had no real hold upon him. He was no
searcher of the deep roots nor the forward-stretching tendrils of
circumstance. He went across the lesser Doomsday as a child across the
hostile streets of a city, thinking always, but not of the obvious
things. What he saw through the medium of his sequestered soul were
reeking sedition, experiments blundering and caring not whom they
hurt, principles despoiling the world of quiet and gentleness and “the
unbought grace of life;” and he moved, indeed, towards Burke’s own
curious inference, that the Revolution was criminal because it was
unmannerly. He took no time to philosophize when the one blameless
and disadvantaged Bourbon needed his sword; it was nothing to him
that pent-up rights, burst abroad, were about to vindicate themselves
terribly and justly in “immolating a generation to make way for an
idea,” while he saw, far more clearly, his order injured, his religion
handicapped, and the old ideals taught him at his mother’s knee swept
into the universal dust-heap. There were hundreds of honorable lives
like his, impelled by the same hurrying conscientiousness, forming
on either side of the great struggle from 1789 to 1792: the men who
represented the early beauty of the Revolution, while yet it was a
“child of many prayers.” No apology (in the primitive nor in the
perverted sense of the word) need be made for their opposing courses,
so soon to be defined; it is enough if we wise landsmen of posterity
know the great current and whither it tends, and that we perceive, near
shore, the forceful counter-current pushing backward victoriously, if
but for an hour, and recognize that both are one clear water, and that
the same Hand suffers them to flow. Henri went home, not to ponder
much, but to grieve a little and then to fight: to fight the strength
of the equinoctial tide, even as it proved.
With every foot of the Bocage he became acquainted; he travelled it
over and over; he was spun like a thread of destiny into and around its
level fields and farms; he crossed and re-crossed its fords; he lost
and won its towns; he held its fortunes for a year in the hollow of his
hand; his grave, like his birth, was in its bosom. It is small wonder
that a species of folk-lore, in his own neighborhood, has, in three
generations, grown up around him, which makes it a difficult thing
to disentangle what is true of him from what might as well be true:
for the French are not given, even in their gossip, to incongruities.
Every rustic, who, having served under Henri, lived to startle a more
prosaic world with his reminiscences, had anecdotes to tell of him
really vital and precious; and the travellers who were able to gather
them at first hand, like Monsieur Eugène Genoude and Viscount Francis
Walsh, are yet to be envied. It is known from oral report how he would
run any risk for a charge of his, were he, in particular, a child or
a coward; or how he would deny himself bread while one mouth hungered
near him; how he was a fatal apparition, looming bare-headed from the
saddle, pistol in hand, to those who encountered him in a charge: for
he had a sure aim, and no genteel misgivings as to his present duty.
Picked out for the object of many raids, he had the strength of nerve
to save himself repeatedly, by blowing out the brains of a dozen. When
he achieved an admitted advantage, he seemed to overflow instantly
with his native kindness and compassion. His military career was less
one of thought and command than of manual killing and sparing: and in
that particular he belonged with the ancient world, with Gideon and
with Hector. The endless patience which he brought to bear on his
heart-breaking circumstance and his ungovernable mass of men, out-soars
praise. Not once, among the contradiction, the disorder, the stupidity
which he deplored, was he anything but just. This autumnal sweetness of
his character, which he seemed to have inherited in full at Lescure’s
death, was its first and last distinction. It helped him, at an age
when moods alternate with the pendulum, to take prosperity without
pride, trials without a plaint. Young in every fibre, he had not a
trace of the severity of youth, its raw dominance, its hasty partial
will.
As he takes the eye from among the striking figures in Madame de La
Rochejaquelein’s _Mémoires_, so, alive, he compelled the interest of
on-lookers and of commentators who were foes. Jomini, in his _Histoire
Critique_, turns to him with insistent admiration. Kléber’s reports
are filled with notes on his scientific skill. It was the opinion of
Sempré, after the Vendean repulse at Granville and the ensuing movement
which almost cancelled it, that “Xenophon himself was not half so
clever as this vagabond.” And Napoleon, the man whose attribute it was
to know men, dictating to General Montholon at Saint Helena, used a
significant exclamation: “What might he not have become!” Henri’s large
close mental grasp, his delighting straightforward talk, his prompt
deed, were all of a piece; and they won his great contemporary from
the outset. Nor had the latter forgotten, when the crown was upon his
head, to invent every means to gain the coveted adherence of Louis de
La Rochejaquelein, who was much of the same mould.
Henri, unlike Lescure and Bonchamp, was no scholar: one might guess
as much from his handwriting, always too indolent and free. To
one book, however, he clung, and after carrying it about for an
interrupted rereading, he would put it under his pillow: this was a
Life of Turenne. His age and his country were surfeited with learned
and poetic persons; while they were writing things worthy to be read,
he, as Sir Walter Scott would put it, was doing things worthy to be
written; he was breathing abroad something of the Greece crystalizing
silently in André Chénier’s brain. Shall we ascribe it to immunity
from the giant literature which was the prelude of the Revolution that
he was a very simple youth indeed, that he believed in God, and was
strict (“_sévère_” is Madame de La Rochejaquelein’s word) in matters
touching his conscience? “He knew me at Saumur, when I came on with
Cathelineau,” a peasant told a stranger, “and he spoke to me: ‘How
well it goes with us!’ ‘Yes, yes, so it does,’ I replied, ‘thanks to
you, M’sieu Henri!’ ‘Thanks unto God!’ was what he said.” His own
success, wonderful in the extreme to him, he preferred to charge upon
supernatural agencies. When he galloped into the guns, and caught no
one admiring him visibly, he took occasion to make the sign of the
cross; the bigger the danger, the bigger the gesture, according to
tradition. Nothing was mere mechanism with him; he was a scorner of
exaggeration. His religiousness was in the current of his blood. It
alone kept him to the end an optimist: one able to leap into the chasm
beyond, without ever having had a single speculation about it, nor a
single dread.
The autumn of 1793, when the red flag was floating at the altar of the
Fatherland, when the tombs at Saint Denis were rifled of their kingly
dust, and some hearts were yet aching for the fallen Gironde,--this
memorable autumn was marked in the west by the _choc_ on the heights
about Chollet, and the tragedy of the passage of the Loire. During the
first attack D’Elbée and Lescure were borne helpless from the field.
The ensuing night a council of war was held, Stofflet and Henri begging
for leave to defend the town, and Bonchamp persistently pleading for
an expedition across the river, in the hope of obtaining succor and
new strength from the Bretons, and of opening a northern seaport to the
expected co-operation of England. While the debate was yet seething,
the second clash came, and Bonchamp was struck down. It was a terrific
battle: forty thousand peasants against forty-five thousand tried and
trained soldiers of the line. “They fought like tigers,” brave Kléber
wrote to the Convention, “but our lions beat them.” Before daybreak on
the seventeenth of October, without any order of advance, and against
the impassioned efforts of Henri and other generals, panic set in,
and the air was rent with a league of cries. Then began the mad rush
for the Loire, and an exodus comparable to nothing human but that of
the Tartar tribes. The manœuvre, suggested but a little while before
as a safeguard, was adopted in complete despair, and the retreat
deteriorated into a migration. Countless families emptied themselves
into the rebel camp; a horde of poor creatures, including the entire
population of Chollet and the near boroughs, flew to the common centre;
women, babes, the aged, the sick, the fearful, hung darkening over the
army, like summer insects over a pool. Once it had started, nothing
could hold back the onward pressure of such numbers. Four thousand
men were detached under Talmont and sent to clear the banks at Saint
Florent. A whole people, their homes burning behind them, thrown upon
pauperism, inevitable separation, and the rigors of the coming winter,
the Republican hosts advancing from all sides to exterminate them;
Bonchamp, on whose persuasion the fatal move was undertaken, on whose
prudence the others relied, known to be dying; Lescure, who had been
wounded at La Tremblaye in the midst of his squadrons, dying also; the
bewildered, groaning multitude dropping, like the pallid passengers
of the Styx, into the river-boats, and struggling from island to
island;--what a spectacle! The great tears of anger and sorrow stood
thick in Henri’s eyes. When a march could be formed, the foot-soldiery,
with the cannon, were placed at the head, and the cavalry and picked
men brought up the rear. Between them were the fifty thousand drags,
stumbling along in a lunacy of terror, and in a muffled roar bewailing
their bitter fate, and calling on Heaven for mercy. The habit of their
enemies was invariably to attack the van or the rear:--a mistake which,
more than anything else, prorogued the inevitable end.
Cathelineau, the first, and, next to Charette, the ablest
commander-in-chief of the Vendeans, having been mortally wounded before
the gates of Nantes, D’Elbée, by his skilful policy at Châtillon, had
himself appointed to the succession. It was the work of an obstinate
cabal; Bonchamp, by every claim, deserved the election. But after the
passage of the Loire, D’Elbée, in the confusion, was not to be found.
Lescure, besought, in his bed, to take matters into his own hands,
immediately proposed that the officer best-beloved by all divisions of
the army, and best-known to them, Henri de La Rochejaquelein, should
be nominated to the vacant generalship. “As for me, should I recover,”
added Lescure, “you know I cannot quarrel with Henri. I shall be his
aide-de-camp.” The little senate met at Laval. Henri, never willing
to push himself forward, dissented hotly. As advocate against his own
claims, he made his longest speech. He represented that he had neither
age nor experience, that he was merely a fighter, that he had too
little practical wisdom, that he was untenacious of his opinions, that
he should never learn how to silence those who opposed him: in vain.
After the ensuing vote he was found hidden in a corner, and cried like
the child he was, on Lescure’s breast, for the unsought honor thrust
upon him. He was to have no further guardianship and support from that
dearest of his friends. On the road between Ernée and Fougères Lescure
died, not before a mighty pang was added to his passing by an oral
account of the execution of the Queen. In the room where his body lay
Henri said to his widow, “Could my life restore him to you, oh, you
might take it!”
The Royalists nearly sank under this second calamity, for Bonchamp,
too, had but lately died, on the eighteenth of October. (“The news of
these two,” cried lively Barrère in the Convention, “is better than
any victory!”) His remains, which, like Lescure’s, were carried for a
brief time under the colors, were temporarily buried at Varades. His
only son, Hermenée, became Henri’s special care. In all his trouble
and preoccupation he was pathetically kind to the child, and had him
sleep with him every night. By day Hermenée rode with Henri on the same
saddle, or trotted in the rear-guard, beating his toy-drum, haranguing
the soldiers with pretty ardor, and remembering each lovingly by name.
The poor little fellow, weakened by his hardships, succumbed to the
small-pox, in his mother’s arms, at Saint Herbelon, before the year was
over.
The wretched throng were exiled, as completely as they would have
been had they crossed the Pyrenees. Seven months of intense activity,
seven months of successful fight, even while they were surrounded like
sheep in a pen, had resulted only in this: that no single general, at
his allotted post, had been able to beat back the Revolution from La
Vendée; that the restoration of the monarchy, the remoter and greater
object, was more visionary and hypothetical than ever. They hurried
northward feverishly, pursued always by an immense force, subject
to continuous cold rains, obliged to leave at every stopping-place
the wounded and the sick, the women and babes, to mark their trail
and to perish by massacre. Kléber had his keen eye upon Henri: “I do
not believe he can hold out long, away from his own country.” But
Henri proceeded to defeat the garrison at Château-Gontier, to crush
L’Echelle’s division at Entrammes, and to score a double triumph
at Laval. It was at Château-Gontier that the venerable Monsieur de
Royrand, who had sustained the war in Lower Poitou from the very
beginning, breathed his last. His regiments ceased firing, and mourned
aloud. Henri hurried into the midst of them, his own tears flowing.
“Come, come!” he cried; “we will weep and pray for the dear friend
to-morrow. Let us avenge him to-day!” Then he swooped like an eagle on
the troops of the state, with Royrand’s orphans at his heels.