The Czar: A Tale of the Time of the First Napoleon/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
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 tonight?" 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!"