ONE OF HALF A MILLION.
“It is not youth that turns
From the field of spears again,
For the boy’s high heart too proudly burns
Till it rests among the slain.”
It was evening in a crowded barrack-room in Paris. Recruits, not
yet clad in uniform, but wearing the blouses or the coarse fustian
jackets they had brought from their native villages, chatted, drank,
quarrelled, or dozed upon the benches or about the floor. One noisy
fellow was singing the Marseillaise at the top of his voice, another
was defying any man in France to beat him at single-stick, but by far
the greater number seemed dispirited and utterly weary.
A young lad had seated himself at the table, beneath one of the lamps
which, at long distances, lit up the darkness of the great bare room.
Writing materials were before him, and he had begun a letter, but
paused, as if unable to proceed, and shaded his face with his hand.
Presently the tears dropped slowly down between his fingers, blistering
the paper; then once more he seized the pen, and wrote eagerly and
rapidly:--
“Dearest mother, forgive me. I could not--no, I could not expose you
and Clémence to the terrible sufferings inflicted upon the families of
the refractory, even if, for myself, I was strong enough to encounter
the horrors of a convict prison. There was no way but the way I took.
M. le Curé answered for me to the maire, and concealed me in his
house until marching orders came. As we started in the gray dawn of a
winter’s morning, I hoped to pass unnoticed; but so many villagers were
there to bid farewell to their friends, that I know you must have heard
all. Mother, Clémence, pray for me; and oh, mother, forgive me if you
can! It is not for Napoleon I am going to fight, but for France.”
“Conscript, do you want that letter put into the post to-night?” asked
a short, thick-set, red-haired man with a corporal’s badge on his
sleeve; “because, if you do, I am going out, and I am a very obliging
fellow.”
Henri looked up quickly. He might perhaps have doubted the corporal’s
word, but five or six other letters which he held in his hand seemed to
corroborate his statement; besides, he knew that for him there would be
no leave to go out that night.
“Then I shall be very much obliged to you, corporal,” he said.
“Quick with you then. Sign your name and give it to me. I cannot wait
all night. You may make my compliments to your sweetheart while you are
about it, however.”
Henri hastily folded and sealed his letter, and put it in the
corporal’s outstretched hand.
“Peste, man!” said the other impatiently; “where is the postage?”
Henri took out half a franc. “That is it, I think,” he said, without
noticing the signs one of his comrades was making to attract his
attention. The corporal flung the coin upon the table, and caught it
again, as if to try whether it was genuine, muttered a curse, and went
his way.
“Fool!” said Henri’s neighbour. “Did you not see he wanted something to
drink? What else should he take your letter for? Look out for yourself
on parade to-morrow; he will do you a mischief if he can.”
“And who cares?” cried the chanter of the Marseillaise. “We want no
aristocrats among us. ‘Çà ira! çà ira!’”
“We want no bad companions either,” said Féron, who was standing near,
“so you may keep your breath for your eternal ‘Çà ira,’ Guillaume St.
Luc.” Then, going over to Henri, he sat down beside him, and laying his
hand on his shoulder, said in a low voice, “Keep up your heart, M. de
Talmont. Who knows but you have a marshal’s bâton in your knapsack?”
Henri felt grateful for the kind words, and perhaps yet more so for the
form of address, which had not fallen upon his ear since the miserable
morning when he marched out of Brie--a conscript. He placed his white,
delicate hand in the rough palm of the blacksmith’s son. “You are a
good comrade,” he said.
“I vowed you should find me that, the day Mademoiselle Clémence spoke
to me so kindly,” returned Féron.
“But as to the marshal’s bâton,” resumed Henri, “that is a fine story.
Six feet of Russian clay to lie in is what more of us are likely to
get, I fancy.”
“No good comes of burying ourselves before we are dead,” returned the
cheery Féron. “Of course, some are killed in every war. It is their
luck. If a Russian bullet has my name upon it, why, then, I shall have
the consolation of falling in the greatest war of the greatest captain
that ever lived. I shall see his eagles flap their wings over Moscow
and St. Petersburg. I shall die in the hour of victory, and I shall
die shouting, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’” In fact, the last words so nearly
approached a shout already, that they were taken up and re-echoed by
those around.
Then Féron resumed his low tone. “M. de Talmont, may I give you a word
of advice?”
“Certainly, comrade.”
“When you hear other people shouting, always shout too; and the greater
fools you think them, the louder you ought to shout, if only by way of
drowning their foolish voices.”
For the first time since the day of the conscription Henri laughed;
and Féron presently continued, “But as for me, I do not shout ‘Vive
l’Empereur!’ like a fool. I know very well what I am about. I am only
a conscript, it is true, but I am a soldier. The whole world is before
me, and if I am brave, active, and resolute, the marshal’s bâton is
no impossible dream for me. If we had lived in the old times, M. de
Talmont, you would have ridden a fine horse and worn a beautiful sword;
and I should have been like the dust beneath your feet--a private all
my days, and no more. Thanks to the Revolution and the Empire, we have
changed all that; so now we can be good comrades, as you have been kind
enough to say.”
Good comrades they were through many a dreary day of drill and
marching. At first the physical hardships of his life weighed so
heavily upon Henri that thought and feeling were almost crushed into
silence. When he halted for the night, after a long day’s march, he
was scarcely conscious of anything except weary limbs and blistered
feet. During his stay at the depôt in Metz, where the conscripts
had to go through some preliminary training, things were scarcely
better. The moral and the mental atmosphere of the barrack-room were
alike abhorrent to his refined, sensitive nature; while the cruel and
degrading punishments that followed any failure in skill or quickness
on the parade-ground, forced him to bend all his remaining energies
to the task of avoiding them. No answer to his letter from Paris ever
reached him, and this added to the dull apathy that was creeping over
his soul. His mother, he feared, was implacable. And Clémence?--perhaps
his mother would not allow her to write, perhaps she herself was too
deeply offended to make the attempt.
At last marching orders came once more. Strange to say, from that day
the heavy cloud of gloom that hung over Henri began to lighten. Change
of scene proved a tonic, and as he grew accustomed to long marches he
ceased to suffer so greatly from fatigue. Like other young conscripts
who did not droop and fail utterly, he gradually plucked up strength
and spirits. As he was uniformly gentle and courteous--no ordinary
merit in a French soldier of the Empire--he often met with much
kindness from the families upon whom he was billeted; and the extreme
youthfulness of his appearance gained many friends for him. By the time
he reached the headquarters of the imperial army, the profession into
which he had been forced was rather an object of indifference than of
detestation to him. When the recruits were reviewed by Napoleon in
person, he remembered the sage advice of Féron, and did not imagine
that a cry of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the lips of a De Talmont would
awaken the slumbering dust of his ancestors. Moreover, he could not but
gaze, with a kind of fascination that had in it as much of admiration
as of horror, upon the face of the man whose will at that moment was
the most stupendous force in all the world. Henri de Talmont did not
love Napoleon Buonaparte--he feared him, perhaps he hated him--but,
like almost every other man in Europe, he believed him irresistible.
There was a sense of exhilaration in the universal feeling that
to march under him was infallibly to march to victory. Some faint
reflected glow from the enthusiasm of all around could not fail to
reach him and to awaken stirrings of the martial ardour that slumbered
in the son of a long line of gallant warriors.
An unknown unit in a regiment of infantry--young recruits who as yet
had won no laurels--Henri de Talmont marched one day over a temporary
wooden bridge which had been flung by French pontoniers across the
Niemen. “Now, mes enfants,” their captain said, “you are standing upon
Russian ground.”
They cheered, embraced one another, and shouted until they were hoarse,
“Vive l’Empereur! vive Napoleon! A bas les Russes!” Henri shouted as
loudly as the rest; while, at least to the human eye, coming events
cast no shadow before, nor was there any foreboding voice raised to
whisper, as that vast and gallant host passed by,--
“The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre!”