Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)
Page 812
Has he, by some strange gift of foreknowing,
Declared his fate was hovering in such wise!
STRAGGLER III
His aged form being borne beyond the strife,
The gallant Moellendorf, in flushed despair,
Swore he would not survive; and, pressing on,
He, too, was slaughtered. Patriotic rage
Brimmed marshals' breasts and men's. The King himself
Fought like the commonest. But nothing served.
His horse is slain; his own doom yet unknown.
Prince William, too, is wounded. Brave Schmettau
Is broke; himself disabled. All give way,
And regiments crash like trees at felling-time!
HOHENLOHE
No more. We match it here. The yielding lines
Still sweep us backward. Backward we must go!
[Exeunt HOHENLOHE, Staff, stragglers, etc.]
The Prussian retreat from Jena quickens to a rout, many thousands
taken prisoners by MURAT, who pursues them to Weimar, where the
inhabitants fly shrieking through the streets.
The October day closes in to evening. By this time the troops
retiring with the King of Prussia from the second battlefield
of Auerstadt have intersected RUCHEL'S and HOHENLOHE'S flying
battalions from Jena. The crossing streams of fugitives strike
panic into each other, and the tumult increases with the
thickening darkness till night renders the scene invisible,
and nothing remains but a confused diminishing noise, and fitful
lights here and there.
SCENE V
BERLIN. A ROOM OVERLOOKING A PUBLIC PLACE
[A fluttering group of ladies is gathered at the window, gazing
out and conversing anxiously. The time draws towards noon, when
the clatter of a galloping horse's hoofs is heard echoing up the
long Potsdamer-Strasse, and presently turning into the Leipziger-
Strasse reaches the open space commanded by the ladies' outlook.
It ceases before a Government building opposite them, and the
rider disappears into the courtyard.]
FIRST LADY
Yes: surely he is a courier from the field!
SECOND LADY
Shall we not hasten down, and take from him
The doom his tongue may deal us?
THIRD LADY
We shall catch
As soon by watching here as hastening hence
The tenour of his new. [They wait.] Ah, yes: see—see
The bulletin is straightway to be nailed!
He was, then, from the field....
[They wait on while the bulletin is affixed.]
SECOND LADY
I cannot scan the words the scroll proclaims;
Peer as I will, these too quick-thronging dreads
Bring water to the eyes. Grant us, good Heaven,
That victory be where she is needed most
To prove Thy goodness!... What do you make of it?
THIRD LADY [reading, through a glass]
"The battle strains us sorely; but resolve
May save us even now. Our last attack
Has failed, with fearful loss. Once more we strive."
[A long silence in the room. Another rider is heard approaching,
above the murmur of the gathering citizens. The second lady
looks out.]
SECOND LADY
A straggler merely he.... But they decide,
At last, to post his news, wild-winged or no.
THIRD LADY [reading again through her glass]
"The Duke of Brunswick, leading on a charge,
Has met his death-doom. Schmettau, too, is slain;
Prince William wounded. But we stand as yet,
Engaging with the last of our reserves."
[The agitation in the street communicates itself to the room.
Some of the ladies weep silently as they wait, much longer this
time. Another horseman is at length heard clattering into the
Platz, and they lean out again with painful eagerness.]
SECOND LADY
An adjutant of Marshal Moellendorf's
If I define him rightly. Read—O read!—
Though reading draw them from their socket-holes
Use your eyes now!
THIRD LADY [glass up]
As soon as 'tis affixed....
Ah—this means much! The people's air and gait
Too well betray disaster. [Reading.] "Berliners,
The King has lost the battle! Bear it well.
The foremost duty of a citizen
Is to maintain a brave tranquillity.
This is what I, the Governor, demand
Of men and women now.... The King lives still."
[They turn from the window and sit in a silence broken only by
monosyllabic words, hearing abstractedly the dismay without
that has followed the previous excitement and hope.
The stagnation is ended by a cheering outside, of subdued
emotional quality, mixed with sounds of grief. They again
look forth. QUEEN LOUISA is leaving the city with a very
small escort, and the populace seem overcome. They strain
their eyes after her as she disappears. Enter fourth lady.]
FIRST LADY
How does she bear it? Whither does she go?
FOURTH LADY
She goes to join the King at Custrin, there
To abide events—as we. Her heroism
So schools her sense of her calamities
As out of grief to carve new queenliness,
And turn a mobile mien to statuesque,
Save for a sliding tear.
[The ladies leave the window severally.]
SPIRIT IRONIC
So the Will plays at flux and reflux still.
This monarchy, one-half whose pedestal
Is built of Polish bones, has bones home-made!
Let the fair woman bear it. Poland did.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Meanwhile the mighty Emperor nears apace,
And soon will glitter at the city gates
With palpitating drums, and breathing brass,
And rampant joyful-jingling retinue.
[An evening mist cloaks the scene.]
SCENE VI
THE SAME
[It is a brilliant morning, with a fresh breeze, and not a cloud.
The open Platz and the adjoining streets are filled with dense
crowds of citizens, in whose upturned faces curiosity has
mastered consternation and grief.
Martial music is heard, at first faint, then louder, followed
by a trampling of innumerable horses and a clanking of arms and
accoutrements. Through a street on the right hand of the view
from the windows come troops of French dragoons heralding the
arrival of BONAPARTE.
Re-enter the room hurriedly and cross to the windows several
ladies as before, some in tears.]
FIRST LADY
The kingdom late of Prussia, can it be
That thus it disappears?—a patriot-cry,
A battle, bravery, ruin; and no more?
SECOND LADY
Thank God the Queen's gone!
THIRD LADY
To what sanctuary?
From earthquake shocks there is no sheltering cell!
—Is this what men call conquest? Must it close
As historied conquests do, or be annulled
By modern reason and the urbaner sense?—
Such issue none would venture to predict,
Yet folly 'twere to nourish foreshaped fears
And suffer in conjecture and in deed.—
If verily our country be dislimbed,
Then at th
e mercy of his domination
The face of earth will lie, and vassal kings
Stand waiting on himself the Overking,
Who ruling rules all; till desperateness
Sting and excite a bonded last resistance,
And work its own release.
SECOND LADY
He comes even now
From sacrilege. I learn that, since the fight,
In marching here by Potsdam yesterday,
Sans-Souci Palace drew his curious feet,
Where even great Frederick's tomb was bared to him.
FOURTH LADY
All objects on the Palace—cared for, kept
Even as they were when our arch-monarch died—
The books, the chair, the inkhorn, and the pen
He quizzed with flippant curiosity;
And entering where our hero's bones are urned
He seized the sword and standards treasured there,
And with a mixed effrontery and regard
Declared they should be all dispatched to Paris
As gifts to the Hotel des Invalides.
THIRD LADY
Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it!
[A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoleon's staff, now enters the
Platz immediately before the windows. In the midst rides the
EMPEROR himself. The ladies are silent. The procession passes
along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace.
At the door NAPOLEON descends from his horse and goes into the
building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the
silence of the crowd.]
SECOND LADY [impressed]
O why does such a man debase himself
By countenancing loud scurrility
Against a queen who cannot make reprise!
A power so ponderous needs no littleness—
The last resort of feeble desperates!
[Enter fifth lady.]
FIFTH LADY [breathlessly]
Humiliation grows acuter still.
He placards rhetoric to his soldiery
On their distress of us and our allies,
Declaring he'll not stack away his arms
Till he has choked the remaining foes of France
In their own gainful glut.—Whom means he, think you?
FIRST LADY
Us?
THIRD LADY
Russia? Austria?
FIFTH LADY
Neither: England.—Yea,
Her he still holds the master mischief-mind,
And marrer of the countries' quietude,
By exercising untold tyranny
Over all the ports and seas.
SECOND LADY
Then England's doomed!
When he has overturned the Russian rule,
England comes next for wrack. They say that know!...
Look—he has entered by the Royal doors
And makes the Palace his.—Now let us go!—
Our course, alas! is—whither?
[Exeunt ladies. The curtain drops temporarily.]
SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music]
Deeming himself omnipotent
With the Kings of the Christian continent,
To warden the waves was his further bent.
SEMICHORUS II
But the weaving Will from eternity,
[Hemming them in by a circling sea]
Evolved the fleet of the Englishry.
SEMICHORUS I
The wane of his armaments ill-advised,
At Trafalgar, to a force despised,
Was a wound which never has cicatrized.
SEMICHORUS II
This, O this is the cramp that grips!
And freezes the Emperor's finger-tips
From signing a peace with the Land of Ships.
CHORUS
The Universal-empire plot
Demands the rule of that wave-walled spot;
And peace with England cometh not!
THE SCENE REOPENS
[A lurid gloom now envelops the Platz and city; and Bonaparte
is heard as from the Palace:
VOICE OF NAPOLEON
These monstrous violations being in train
Of law and national integrities
By English arrogance in things marine,
[Which dares to capture simple merchant-craft,
In honest quest of harmless merchandize,
For crime of kinship to a hostile power]
Our vast, effectual, and majestic strokes
In this unmatched campaign, enable me
To bar from commerce with the Continent
All keels of English frame. Hence I decree:—
SPIRIT OF RUMOUR
This outlines his renowned "Berlin Decree."
Maybe he meditates its scheme in sleep,
Or hints it to his suite, or syllables it
While shaping, to his scribes.
VOICE OF NAPOLEON
All England's ports to suffer strict blockade;
All traffic with that land to cease forthwith;
All natives of her isles, wherever met,
To be detained as windfalls of the war.
All chattels of her make, material, mould,
To be good prize wherever pounced upon:
And never a bottom hailing from her shores
But shall be barred from every haven here.
This for her monstrous harms to human rights,
And shameless sauciness to neighbour powers!
SPIRIT SINISTER
I spell herein that our excellently high-coloured drama is not
played out yet!
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Nor will it be for many a month of moans,
And summer shocks, and winter-whitened bones.
[The night gets darker, and the Palace outlines are lost.]
SCENE VII
TILSIT AND THE RIVER NIEMEN
[The scene is viewed from the windows of BONAPARTE'S temporary
quarters. Some sub-officers of his suite are looking out upon
it.
It is the day after midsummer, about one o'clock. A multitude
of soldiery and spectators lines each bank of the broad river
which, stealing slowly north-west, bears almost exactly in its
midst a moored raft of bonded timber. On this as a floor stands
a gorgeous pavilion of draped woodwork, having at each side,
facing the respective banks of the stream, a round-headed doorway
richly festooned. The cumbersome erection acquires from the
current a rhythmical movement, as if it were breathing, and the
breeze now and then produces a shiver on the face of the stream.]
DUMB SHOW
On the south-west or Prussian side rides the EMPEROR NAPOLEON
in uniform, attended by the GRAND DUKE OF BERG, the PRINCE OF
NEUFCHATEL, MARSHAL BESSIERES, DUROC Marshal of the Palace, and
CAULAINCOURT Master of the Horse. The EMPEROR looks well, but is
growing fat. They embark on an ornamental barge in front of them,
which immediately puts off. It is now apparent to the watchers
that a precisely similar enactment has simultaneously taken place
on the opposite or Russian bank, the chief figure being the
EMPEROR ALEXANDER—a graceful, flexible man of thirty, with a
courteous manner and good-natured face. He has come out from
an inn on that side accompanied by the GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE,
GENERAL BENNIGSEN, GENERAL OUWAROFF, PRINCE LABANOFF, and ADJUTANT-
GENERAL COUNT LIEVEN.
The two barges draw towards the raft, reaching the opposite sides
of it about the same time, amidst discharges of cannon. Each
Emperor enters the door that faces him, and meeting in the centre
of t
he pavilion they formally embrace each other. They retire
together to the screened interior, the suite of each remaining in
the outer half of the pavilion.
More than an hour passes while they are thus invisible. The French
officers who have observed the scene from the lodging of NAPOLEON
walk about idly, and ever and anon go curiously to the windows,
again to watch the raft.
CHORUS OF THE YEARS [aerial music]
The prelude to this smooth scene—mark well!—were the shocks
whereof the times gave token
Vaguely to us ere last year's snows shut over Lithuanian pine
and pool,
Which we told at the fall of the faded leaf, when the pride of
Prussia was bruised and broken,
And the Man of Adventure sat in the seat of the Man of Method
and rigid Rule.
SEMICHORUS I OF THE PITIES
Snows incarnadined were thine, O Eylau, field of the wide white
spaces,
And frozen lakes, and frozen limbs, and blood iced hard as it left
the veins:
Steel-cased squadrons swathed in cloud-drift, plunging to doom
through pathless places,
And forty thousand dead and near dead, strewing the early-lighted
plains.
Friedland to these adds its tale of victims, its midnight marches
and hot collisions,
Its plunge, at his word, on the enemy hooped by the bended river
and famed Mill stream,
As he shatters the moves of the loose-knit nations to curb his
exploitful soul's ambitions,
And their great Confederacy dissolves like the diorama of a dream.
DUMB SHOW [continues]
NAPOLEON and ALEXANDER emerge from their seclusion, and each is
beheld talking to the suite of his companion apparently in
flattering compliment. An effusive parting, which signifies
itself to be but temporary, is followed by their return to the
river shores amid the cheers of the spectators.
NAPOLEON and his marshals arrive at the door of his quarters and
enter, and pass out of sight to other rooms than that of the
foreground in which the observers are loitering. Dumb show ends.
[A murmured conversation grows audible, carried on by two persons
in the crowd beneath the open windows. Their dress being the
native one, and their tongue unfamiliar, they seem to the officers
to be merely inhabitants gossiping; and their voices continue
unheeded.]
FIRST ENGLISH SPY [below]
Did you get much for me to send on?
SECOND ENGLISH SPY