It was the fourth of July, 1809, and a thunderous, close evening. In
Lobau, the largest of the five islands on the Danube, where were the
imperial headquarters, the huge machinery of war, human and
insentient, was getting up steam, so to speak, for the morrow’s
milling, and eliciting, as its flywheel slowly revolved, an automatic
response in all its myriad parts from Pressburg to Vienna. The
occasion, it might be said, was an emergency occasion. If the Emperor,
himself commanding, had not been thrashed by the Austrians, under the
Archduke Charles, a couple of months earlier at Aspern, his retreat
upon the islands had looked so much like a defeat, that for the moment
his supremacy, moral and material, hung in the balance. For the first
time the Grand Army had suffered a shock to its _amour-propre_ and its
hitherto invincible faith in its leader. A little might turn the
scale, and send all its disintegrated legions scuttling back to
Strasburg.
That the impenetrable “Antichrist” himself was fully aware of the
nature of the hazard there is no reason to doubt, or that he was
concentrating all the deepest faculties of his genius on the delivery
of a blow which should be immense and final. He was much alone in his
tent, and his orders were laconic and momentous. The ordinary mind
cannot picture such a situation, and dismiss its surrounding
distractions--one might say its hauntings. There were the arsenals,
the forges, the rope walks, the sheds for boat-mending, the canteens
and parks of artillery all over the five islands; there were the boats
themselves in the river, scores of them, and the massive chains which
bound them into bridges; there were the ammunition wagons and their
loaded boxes, the forests of piled arms, the tossed oceans of tents,
the miles of tethered horses, the ring-fences of palisades; and there
were the troops for last, enough to people a great city, and each man
of them as cheerily busy as if he were one of an exodus of Israelites
picketing on his way to the promised land. Seven weeks before this
same island of Lobau had been littered with the legs and arms of those
wounded at Aspern--limbs hastily severed and flung helter-skelter
among the grass of its meadows. Its soil was soaked with blood;
thousands of mangled men and horses had sunk screaming in the waters
which thundered by its shores; a hail of iron had smashed into it and
its even more luckless neighbours; fire from burning mills had roared
down upon its bridges, melting men and metal into one horrible
annealing; it had heaved and vomited with the filth of war. And had
all that hideous picture a place in the background of the master-mind,
or had its present aspect, of busy preparation for another scene as
sickening, or worse? One sorrow may have haunted him, one bloody ghost
out of all the multitudes--the figure of his old comrade Marshal
Lannes, as he had seen him borne hither on a litter of branches and
muskets on the fatal day--one shattered horror more to feed the
carnage. He had been moved a moment, had wept, and kissed the dying
man. An unconscious thought of him may have lingered still like a
melancholy shadow in his soul. But, for the rest, one may be sure that
he looked over and beyond all these things, as a great architect sees
through the maze of scaffolding the glory of the fabric his soul has
raised. This man, it is to be supposed, ever regarded a battlefield
but as a map, so clear to his mind, that, as the opposing troops
manœuvred on it, he could check or reinforce them, show them the way
to defeat or victory with his eyes shut. He was a calculating “freak,”
and as such superhuman--or superdiabolic.
As the dark gathered, lit only by the flickering lightnings, an
immense hush fell over the islands. Every lamp and fire was
extinguished; the multitudinous tramp of moving hosts mingled with the
boom of the river, and became part with it; the song of the bugles,
soft and short, mounted on the wind, and fled with its shrilling
through the branches of the trees. One might never have guessed the
universal movement that was taking itself cover, as it were, under
these silences, as if the islands themselves had been unmoored, and
were drifting soundlessly, with their freight of death, towards the
shores.
In the midst, a little cry, sharp and sudden, rang out in the
neighbourhood of the Emperor’s tent--it might have been a trodden
bird’s; it passed, and was not repeated. A young officer, de Sainte
Croix, of the personal staff, hurried towards the spot. It was he,
vigorous and enthusiastic, who had often gained the Emperor’s approval
by climbing tall trees on the island to watch the Austrian
preparations on the distant plain. He found a sentry standing by a
clump of bushes, and another, one of the Old Guard, lying prone at his
feet.
“Malediction!” he whispered. “Who had the daring?”
The man saluted.
“It is Corporal Lebrun, Monsieur. He gave one cry--thus; and I saw him
fall. He was hit over the heart at Essling, and only his cartouchier
saved him; but he has complained since of an oppression. I think the
closeness, the thunder----”
The officer interrupted him:
“That will do. You had no right to leave your post. Return to it.”
The soldier saluted again, wheeled, and retreated. De Sainte Croix
bent over the fallen man.
“How is it, Lebrun?”
The corporal lay with a ghastly face, his breath labouring, his chest
lifting in spasms. He was not a young man, yet prematurely aged,
toughened, grizzled, tanned like old leather in the service of his
god. There was a wild, lost look in his eyes which betokened the
coming end. He struggled to speak.
“Lift me up, monsieur, in God’s name!”
De Sainte Croix took the livid head on his knee. The posture somewhat
eased the fighting heart.
“Courage, comrade! This fit will pass with the oppression. Why, I
myself feel it--I. When the storm breaks----”
The blue lips caught at the word.
“When the storm breaks! What will he have answered?”
“He? Who?” said the young officer.
The dying corporal, twisting in his arms, made an awful gesture
towards the Emperor’s tent.
“As always,” said de Sainte Croix, “with the cry to victory.”
The other clutched his hand with a grip like madness.
“I believe it, monsieur. He will have renewed the compact.”
“What compact, my poor friend?”
“With the red man.”
De Sainte Croix could hardly catch the answer.
He laughed--men must laugh, though they died for it--and spoke a
soothing word. He believed the poor fellow delirious.
“I have laughed too, I have scorned, I have feigned to disbelieve,”
said Lebrun, thickly and passionately. “I laugh no longer. Marengo,
Hohenlinden, Jena, Austerlitz--what mortal brain unassisted could have
so added victory to victory, could so, and for so long a time, have
held the world’s destinies in the hollow of one hand? I am a soldier,
monsieur, a simple, uneducated man, and yet I know things and I have
seen things that would make the wise falter in their wisdom.”
“This red man, amongst others,” said the young officer conciliatingly.
A quiver of lightning at the moment glazed the dying face. Great drops
stood on it; the fallen cheeks were filling with shadow; the eyeballs
shone like porcelain. In spite of himself, a shiver ran down de Sainte
Croix’s spine. There was certainly something uncanny in the night,
even to war-toughened nerves. Lebrun’s voice had sunk to a whisper as
he answered:
“Didst thou never hear of the General’s proclamation in Egypt to the
Ulemas and Shereefs? He stood then on shifting sand--the English
sea-captain had just beaten us. A false step, and he were engulfed for
ever. And, to gain the people, he told them that their God had sent
him to destroy the enemies of Islam and to trample on the cross.”
“Policy, Lebrun,” said de Sainte Croix, lifting his hand to wipe his
own wet forehead. “He never meant it.”
“Then why, monsieur, did this blasphemy follow immediately on the
visit of the red man? There had been no hint of it before--and
afterwards he swore to them that their false bible was the true word.”
De Sainte Croix snapped somewhat fretfully:
“This red man? Who the devil is he?”
A shudder quite convulsed the corporal.
“Thou hast spoken it, monsieur.”
“A figment of your excited fancy, soldier.”
“With these eyes I saw him, monsieur. It was ten years ago. I was on
guard in a corridor of the palace at Cairo, _and there came out of the
General’s cabinet one who had never gone in_. Little he was, like a
child of a hundred years, and he had on a blood-red bernous, and his
face was black as a Nubian’s. Only at the lips it pulsed with fire,
and fire, dim and wavering, travelled under his cheeks. One moment
thus he stood--I could have touched him--and, behold! he was a little
draped black figure of bronze that stood on a pedestal by a red
curtain. It had always been there--I rubbed my eyes----”
“Voilà la chose!”
“Monsieur, I dared. I listened at the General’s door, and I heard him
laugh softly to himself--he who never laughs--and he said: ‘Greet
thee, Zamiel! Ten years I have given thee to make me a god, or our
compact is ended!’ Monsieur, the ten years are passed, and to-night he
stands again, as he stood then, at the parting of the ways.”
A flash, more brilliant than any that had yet shown, weltered and was
gone. The dying soldier lifted his head quickly, with a fearful cry:
“Ne savoir à quel saint se vouer! I saw him again--but now, before I
fell, I saw the red man again, and he passed into the Emperor’s tent!”
The thunder followed on his word, with a rolling slam that shook the
island.
“Lebrun!” cried the young officer. “Lebrun!”
The head was like a stone in his hands; he peered down sickly; the
soul of the corporal had been shaken out of him with the crash.
And, even as de Sainte Croix rose, the storm broke, and under cover of
it, and of the tearing wind and rain, began the first of those silent
movements which were to precipitate the gathered hosts of the French
upon the opposite shore--and victory.
A moment later the young man was back at his post, amid a shadowy
flurry of equerries and staff officers. All seemed confusion, but it
was the kaleidoscopic agitation which falls into place and order. As
he stood, the enemy’s guns, startled into action, flashed deep and
melancholy from the distant blackness, their roar mingling with the
thunder’s.
It was in an instant of quivering light that, looking down, he was
aware of something strange and red standing by his side. It might have
been a child, a dwarf, a cuirassier’s scarlet cloak, grotesquely
alive. In the momentary blinding darkness which followed it was lost
to him. He heard, as his eyes recovered their focus, a measured voice
speaking close by:
“I think we have them, M. de Sainte Croix, since I have resolved to
renew my compact with Destiny.”
He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor
himself.
“By God’s favour, sire,” he said.
“Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away.