The two voltigeurs held a conference, weighing chances and eventualities as they had done when there were seven voices to contribute to the discussion. Gabriel was inclined to agree with the sergeant as to the futility of conveying Dominique any farther along the road to the west. In his present condition it seemed doubtful whether the wounded man would survive another day’s journey.
The pursuit was slackening, and here and there along the road dressing-stations were being organized. At this distance from Leipzig it seemed unlikely that the fury of the Prussians would extend to wreaking vengeance on abandoned wounded. Injured and sick men, gathered together in barns, were left in charge of such of the medical staff as were still with their regiments. Surgeons and orderlies accepted this desertion as part of the luck of the game. They scoured the small towns and farms for vegetables and medical supplies, resigning themselves to the inevitability of being made prisoners when the Allies moved on the Elbe. To stay with the army meant more fighting in the spring; to remain behind meant life, at least for the time being. The war could not last forever; few thought that it could even last through the winter. They left Dominique in a barn at Weissenfels. The tall building was crammed with wounded, and field amputations were going on in the yard outside. There was straw and a soup issue—more than Jean and Gabriel could provide in the chariot. They cut the harness ropes and sold the horse to a major of the chasseurs for a pound of tobacco and twelve potatoes. Neither Jean nor Gabriel was at home in the saddle; they had been marching for too many years.
The remnants of the second company, remustered on the banks of the Saale, were lumped together with other fragments, the whole forming a regiment of quarter-strength. Just before the column moved off, Jean and Gabriel went over to the barn to take a last look at Dominique.
He was lying flat on his back between a hussar with his right leg shorn away and a cheerful old corporal of Flying Artillery, whose head wound did not prevent his relishing the pipe of tobacco Jean handed to him. Dominique’s breathing was noisy and his face heavily flushed. Gabriel, looking down at him, thought it odd that the boy should have survived all the rigours of the Russian retreat to go down under the kick of a horse and a wetting in the Elster.
The philosophic artilleryman nodded towards the oilskin bulge in Dominique’s pack.
“What’s in there, comrade?” he asked hopefully. “More tobacco?”
“A fiddle,” Gabriel told him. “He was good at it!”
The artilleryman rolled over and pulled the bundle from the knapsack. The oilskin had preserved it from the water. He drew the tiny bow once across the strings, laid it down, adjusted the bridge and the squat pegs, then tried again.
“I used to fiddle myself,” he told Jean.
He began to scrape an army ditty, a jerky little melody that Gabriel had never heard Dominique attempt, although he had often heard it sung on the road. Dominique had usually preferred his own music.
“You can have the fiddle if they bury him,” Jean said and turned abruptly for the open door, Gabriel following.
The tune went on and someone across the barn began to sing in a high, cracked tone. Dominique stirred, but his eyes did not open. One or two other voices took up the words, and the song followed the voltigeurs out across the yard, past the busy surgeons and their orderlies, down to the river bank where the tatters of the Eighty-seventh were waiting, blowing on their hands amidst their piled arms.
Neither Jean nor Gabriel saw or heard of Dominique again. After the unit had defiled over the bridge and was moving briskly along the broad metalled road towards Erfurt, Jean spoke.
“He might have been short of wits, but he was a damned good soldier. With a few thousand like him we could hold the Rhine forever.”
Gabriel thought the comment as good an epitaph as any.
CHAPTER FIVE
They had been marching along French roads for a long time now and for the past three days had been camping in the woods of Fontainebleau.
Jean found it strange after all these years to be using his own language to local peasants and billet-holders. It was twenty years since a battle had been fought on French soil.
The odd thing about this campaign was the fact that they had won half a dozen victories in a row. Every engagement seemed to end in the rout of an enemy, but there always came another battle within forty-eight hours. It seemed to Jean that every able-bodied man from the Rhine to Moscow was in arms against them. They sought out and dispersed columns of Russians, Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, Swedes and, of course, the inevitable Habsburg troops with the low-crowned shakos. They hardly troubled to fire at these last, who still ran into the woods at the sound of a French trumpet. The Bavarians and the Saxons were not much trouble, either, only the Russians fought with the old, familiar obstinacy of Eylau and Friedland, while the Prussians were as murderous and vindictive as ever, particularly when they had the advantage of numbers.
Jean, who sometimes tried to estimate the strength of the French battalions, could never make them total more than fifty thousand, despite an occasional trickle of reinforcements from the south or the north-east. He supposed Paris to be strongly held, and old Augereau was said to be lurking down in Lyons with another veteran corps. If this were true Jean felt it time that the seedy old rascal shook off his torpor and marched north again.
Then there was conscientious Davout, locked up in Hamburg, and erratic Saint-Cyr, surrounded in Dresden, both with thousands of men who might have forced a decisive action here at home. Jean could not imagine why these corps had been abandoned, unless it was due to the speed and unexpectedness of the Leipzig retreat. In the old days the Emperor had never left his columns sprawled about Europe in this fashion; he had always sacrificed everything for the sake of concentration. Jean himself recalled marching a day and a night with Davout’s corps in order that it might be present at Austerlitz.
At the same time Jean was certain that there was nothing wrong with the manner in which the Emperor was fighting this final campaign. On the contrary, the Old Man had never been so nimble in taking advantage of clumsy dispositions. Time and again the French troops were turned out in the night, hustling along roads that seemed empty of the enemy, until the rattle of musketry advertised their presence just ahead. When this happened, there was always a successful charge by the Grand Army’s laughably small force of cavalry, resulting in enemy withdrawals all along the line. In this way the little army tumbled the invaders out of town after town, position after position, but still no decisive result was obtained. After searching the slain for cartridges, they were always off again the following day to find a fresh column to trounce.
Jean had no illusions left about the ultimate end of it all. Here in Fontainebleau a persistent rumour circulated the fires to the effect that the Czar was already in Paris, but most of the men had gone beyond depression. They had enough to eat, since the countryside was friendly, and that meant a great deal after the Russian and German campaigns of the two previous years. European politics had long ceased to interest them.
Someone who came into the camp announced that Paris had definitely surrendered, and that the English were driving Soult over the Pyrenees and up into the Dordogne area.
Gabriel and the other Gascons were mildly interested in this piece of news, wondering what the girls in Agen would think of the Highlanders’ kilts and the pink, clean-shaven faces of the redcoats.
In the meantime the tired infantry were glad of their rest in the forest. Spring had come to the deep glades of Fontainebleau, and the trim gardens surrounding the old palace were bright with flowers. After the winter rains dry firewood was difficult to find, but Old Jean remedied this by ordering the demolition of some outbuildings close to their bivouac. Painted summer-houses were torn down, and the boarding blazed cheerfully. The men sat by their fires, idly speculating about the future.
One morning early in April, orders came round to parade for an Imperial review. Most of the troops did not grouse, preferring a review to another
night march, and they all spent an hour or two patching clothes, polishing tarnished brass or cleaning their arms.
The second company of the Eighty-seventh had long since ceased to exist. It had melted away for the third time in two years at the battles of Brienne, Montereau, Craonne, Laon and a dozen other engagements. During March all the surviving light infantrymen had been embodied in the Guard. Old Jean made a joke about it when they took up quarters alongside the famous bearskins.
“It’s taken me fifteen campaigns to get into this outfit,” he told Gabriel, “and now it’s too late. I think we’ve fought our last battle.”
Gabriel celebrated the occasion with a sketch—of Jean sitting on a drum talking to two grenadiers, who are regarding him cryptically, as though they are not quite sure whether incorporation with line infantry can be justified even by national disaster.
The uniforms, even of the grenadiers, are much the worse for wear, while Jean looks more like a brigand than a sergeant of the Guard. Through the trees, beyond the trio, one catches a glimpse of the old palace. The sketch is dated “March 30th, 1814.”
The review was a great success. Napoleon, riding his famous Arab barb Marengo, passed slowly along the shabby ranks, smiling faintly at the shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” There was nothing ironical about the cheers. Perhaps they were even more spontaneous than in the past, for most of the men realized that they were unlikely to have another chance of acclaiming a man who was still popular with every one of them. The veterans did not hold the Emperor responsible for the present disasters, but found scapegoats, each according to his disposition. Some blamed blundering marshals; some accused men like Murat and Marmont, who were already recognized as traitors; some thought that Napoleon’s own family had disgraced him, while others, like Old Jean and most of the veterans, were content to write off the invasion of France as the result of overwhelming odds. A nation, they said, could fight a continent for ten years, but not for twenty. There was a limit to its supplies of manpower, which had been reached and passed in Saxony the previous summer. The veterans forgot the Russian campaign, forgot their grumbling round the Dresden camp-fires when it became known that the Emperor had refused to compromise. Napoleon had cleared himself by his masterly handling of the current campaign and they felt that his obstinacy the year before was more than justified in view of the recent treachery of those whom he had raised to exalted rank. Many of the men present at the review wore the Legion of Honour; their crosses would be treasured until they died, no matter what happened to Napoleon and his Empire.
All men are reluctant to destroy their own idols. It is so much easier to make excuses for them.
Cavalry piquets brought them definite news—of Marshal Marmont’s surrender to the enemy. There was talk of marching south, of picking up Augereau at Lyons, Soult in the south-west, and continuing the fight behind the Loire or the Alps, but nobody really imagined that this course would be followed. Augereau would not stir, Soult was too far away and in any case Fontainebleau was almost surrounded.
The troops heard about the abdication, but took the news calmly. One or two whose memories reached back to faubourgs of Paris during the Terror were a trifle alarmed at the prospect of a Bourbon restoration, but their comrades soon put these fears to rest. It had all happened so long ago that the Bourbons would be certain to grant a general amnesty. France might be exhausted and the Grand Army practically non-existent, but both had such a formidable record that even the Bourbons would have to exercise tact in dealing with veterans.
The men sat about, smoking or chasing the small game which abounded in the woods. Somebody issued an order announcing the entry of the Bourbons into Paris, and the older men chuckled when they heard of the enthusiastic public welcome. So many of them could remember the grey January day, twenty-one years before, when the same Paris boulevardiers had gathered in the Place de la Révolution to acclaim a king’s execution.
“This is the best life after all, Gabriel,” said Jean. “We do the same thing every day and I’m too old to change now.”
But even Jean had to change as everything changed about him.
One morning in late April the Guard was mustered in the palace courtyard and the Emperor rode along its ranks on horseback. It was not a review, but a parting ceremony. Napoleon embraced the commanding officer and made a brief farewell speech. Old Jean wept, while beside him Gabriel stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed on the extraordinary scene that was taking place. He found himself quite unable to decide whether Napoleon’s emotion was genuine, assumed or merely self-induced. After the Emperor had kissed the eagles, Gabriel glanced beyond Jean towards the serried ranks of veterans. There was hardly a dry eye. The men looked far more tense than they did when facing fifty squadrons of cavalry.
Gabriel’s fingers itched for pencils and brushes. Here, he thought, is something of the answer to it all. They crowded round the main gate and cheered the Emperor on the first stage of his journey to exile. It was a curious end to all that marching and fighting from Moscow to the Tagus.
They were paraded again the following morning and moved off along the road to Paris. Gabriel, who had marched into four capital cities, had never visited his own. His senses thrilled with expectation, but Old Jean was not in the mood for talking and they marched, for the most part, in gloomy silence.
Outside the Paris barriers, when some of the bystanders gave them a cheer, Jean momentarily brightened. He turned to Gabriel. “What now? Will you go home?”
Gabriel glanced at the lean face beside him. The cheekbones were so prominent that they appeared to be pushing through the taut skin. The moustaches, as meagre as ever notwithstanding his enrolment in the Guard, drooped with the same touch of melancholy. Something rose in Gabriel’s throat, a full tide of affection for the scarred veteran at his side. Memories fell into position like the figures running to join a parade, recollections that buckled their belts and adjusted their haversacks as they took their place in the muster of the years: Old Jean handing out his first bowl of soup in the Lobau bivouac. Jean rejoining the column on the Burgos road, with a haversack full of onions dug from a cottage garden. Jean swinging a pick in a Devon trench, Jean rallying the company when it had been isolated by the Russian light cavalry outside Smolensk. Jean, always resourceful, always cool, always able to produce a handful of rice and a pinch of salt for the communal kettle; Jean shepherding his file through the burning streets of Moscow and brushing the ashes from his bloodshot eyes. Jean plodding through the snow with the blood of a half-cooked bear on his moustaches. Jean at a loss on the banks of the Elster, Jean standing with his back to Dresden’s spires and aiming at Nicholas’s rosette. The others had come and gone. Gabriel recalled and cherished their characteristics, Manny’s gay laugh, Louis’ good temper, Nicholas’s quiet cynicism, Dominique’s doglike fidelity, but Jean was different, he was the epitome of them all, of all they had endured, of all the leagues that they had tramped together in the last five years.
Gabriel reflected that the man had been grafted onto him, like flesh onto a wound, had become a daily habit like the weight of a musket on his right shoulder, the smell of burned powder and the shuffle of infantry on the march.
Home? How much did the people of Agen mean to him when measured against Jean?
Gabriel considered his own future. If they were discharged, as was currently anticipated, what could he do? How could he earn a living? He had a small amount of his aunt’s money left, enough to keep him a year, perhaps two, in moderate circumstances. He knew Jean to be penniless.
Jean said: “I can’t get over that gipsy I met in Brabant when I was a boy. She insisted that I’d die on a battlefield, and here I am, with the war over and nothing but scars to support a pension claim!”
They marched down towards the incomplete Arc, raised to commemorate twenty years of unbroken triumphs. The bourgeois stared at them curiously, as if they had been a circus troupe, and Jean noticed that everyone sported a white cockade, emblem of the Bourbons.
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br /> “We’ll stick together, Jean, no matter what happens,” said Gabriel.
As the battalion swung down the Elysée a group of bystanders shouted at the bandsmen.
“Play ‘Henri Quatre’!” called someone.
But the drums and fifes of the Guard were silent. The bandsmen did not know any Royalist tunes.
PART SIX
The Sambre
CHAPTER ONE
Old Jean became a silent spectator of the Paris festivities when he and Gabriel settled in the lodging they had found behind the Invalides. Jean thought that the crowds in the street might have been celebrating a national triumph instead of a national disgrace. He did not pretend to understand the air of gaiety that pervaded the capital during the first two months of the Restoration. He had been in the ranks far too long to realize that soldiering is abhorrent to most men and that, whilst they will cheer lustily for every victory gained in a far-off country, the prospect of donning a uniform themselves and of charging a battery needs somewhat more compensation than a few evanescent monuments and a wagon train of pilfered art treasures. The average Parisian was quite willing to restore pictures and statues to Venice and Vienna, even to find another name for the Bridge of Jena, if it meant that the shadow of conscription would be lifted from himself and his family, and that he could talk of glorious campaigning days without having to contribute to their lustre.
The Bourbons made every mistake it was possible to make. They renamed the Imperial Guard the Royal Guard and forced soldiers, most of whom had never been to church in their lives, to attend mass every Sunday. They distributed the cross of the Legion of Honour, coveted by every veteran who had the luck to win it, to unblooded young popinjays of ancient houses who gaily donned the brilliant plumage of the Household troops. They were miserly with pensions for the crippled and the orphaned. They placed thousands of the finest officers in Europe on half-pay, standing by when returned émigrés sneered at soldiers who had marched into half the capitals of Europe during the last twenty years. They imported a glut of English goods, throwing whole populations of manufacturing towns like Lyons out of employment. Despite all this, the ageing King Louis had good intentions, but he could do little to curb the arrogance of the aristocrats who had sulked in exile whilst Frenchmen were tumbling down autocracies north, south, east and west.
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