XL
One can see the splendid bays, clamping their bits of solid silver, their sleek skins and their costly harness glittering in the sunshine that had driven the early morning fogs away, the postilions and outriders in their green and gold liveries sitting in the saddle, the landaus of the suite drawn up at the distance prescribed by etiquette.
Everybody was breakfastless, save the Emperor, his son, and cousin, and their immediate following. The regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique, the gorgeous Cent Gardes in gold-crested, crimson-tufted, silver helmets with flowing white horsetails and caped cloaks of azure, were empty of all but air, like their own famous kettledrums. Their horses had cropped a little grass in the fields during the night's bivouac, and were better off than their riders, by one meal.
The young Prince Imperial looked sulky and discontented, but neat and soldierlike in his new uniform of a subaltern of infantry. Prince Jerome Napoleon, the portly M. Plon-Plon of the Crimean War caricatures, wore a cocked hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and was buttoned up in a military cloak.
The Emperor had suffered in the night, for a traveler who had slept in an attic above his bedroom had heard him pacing to and fro and groaning. He wore a black-caped, red-lined waterproof cloak over the uniform of a General of Division; a glimpse of the Star of the Legion of Honor fastened on his breast showed as he raised his hand to throw away the butt of the inseparable cigarette, and set his neat little polished gold-spurred boot on the carriage-step, and beckoned with a small white-kid-gloved hand.
Obeying this signal, a green-and-gold equerry and a demure elderly valet hoisted him respectfully on one side, while a keen-eyed, lean-jawed young man, accurately attired in deep black, propped him scientifically upon the other. We know this deft and silent personage to have been a brilliant young Paris surgeon, retained about the person of the Emperor; a specialist whose ministrations, in dulling unbearable pain with subcutaneous injections of morphia, and combating the progress of disease by skilled surgical treatment, became more necessary every day.
They got him in. The sweat was starting through the rouge upon his livid face as he sank heavily upon the seat of the carriage. His son and cousin followed. Bazaine,—who was accompanied by Canrobert and Bourbaki, and did not dismount, rode up to receive his master's farewells.
He did not entreat again to be relieved of the supreme responsibility. Perhaps the Emperor imagined that he might. For he put out his hand in haste and shook the Marshal's, reiterating:
"All will go well! Excellently, I have no doubt of it! You understand, you have broken the spell."
Of ill-luck, did he mean, clinging to the fatalist whose Star was on the point of setting. He added:
"I go to Verdun and Châlons. Put yourself upon the road for Châlons as soon as possible.... May you be fortunate! Au revoir! En avant!"
The brigadier-general in charge of the escort gave the word. The Advance was sounded, the Chasseurs on their gray Arabs dashed onward, riding in fours, keeping a sharp lookout for Uhlans. A half-troop of Cent Gardes preceded the Emperor's carriage, his equerries and aides and those of the Prince's household followed on their empty, chafing beasts. Another peloton of Cent Gardes were succeeded by three Imperial carriages containing the surgeon, secretaries and valets; grooms followed with led horses; and the Empress's regiment of Dragoons, brass-helmeted, black-plumed warriors, in green with white plastrons, brought up the rear.
It was four o'clock in the morning when they started. Deep defiles rather than roads, with wooded, precipitous banks, stretch between Metz and Gravelotte. By the time the Imperial cortège had extricated itself from the stray columns and batteries choking these, and the cliffy banks had lowered to hedgerows, it was six o'clock and a gloriously sunny morning.
One may imagine, as the landscape broadened and smoothed like a human face relieved from carking anxiety, the young Prince Imperial turning in his seat, and looking back upon the scene he was unwillingly quitting, with a scowl of resentment and dissatisfaction that changed and aged his boyish face.
He saw the white tents of the huge camps of the Imperial Divisions snowing over a vast area of country on the French side of the river, and the clotting of cavalry and infantry in swarms upon the roads, where vast aggregations of baggage and provisions and ambulance wagons impeded their passage. He saw the Imperial Standard break out above the Tricolor on the flagstaff of the Fort of Plappeville, signifying that Bazaine had entered. He could see the artillery-batteries on the high ground at Rezerieulles, and he knew that others were posted behind the woods of Genivaux, and yet others near the quarries of Amanvilliers. The glitter of steel and the flutter of red and white lance-pennons told of the Light Cavalry outposts at St. Ruffine. And sinister moving specks upon the hill-crests beyond the river above St. Barbe—and others moving in the villages, with darker, bigger patches toward Sarrebourg, testified, like the gray-white drifts of powder-smoke that came down upon the northeast breeze, with the reduplicated rattle of musketry, the detonation of field-guns and the yapping of mitrailleuses—to the near, active presence of the ancient, racial foe.
He was drawing nearer, always nearer, to the coveted key-city of the Two Rivers, seated within her ancient fortifications, guarding the northeast frontiers of France. He wanted Metz, with her vast modern arsenal, her huge hospitals and military colleges, her fifteen bridges—(the railway-bridge had been blown up by Bazaine's engineers on the night before last, when the squadron of Uhlans, greatly daring, had made their way into the French lines, with the project of seizing upon the person of papa)—and her glorious Cathedral, whose vast gray bulk was now bathed in the misty golden sunshine of a perfect autumn day.
Soon, soon, those indomitable dark blue soldiers would be at grips with Frenchmen for the possession of Metz. Oh! not to be able to fire a shot, or strike a blow with her defenders, because of one's pitiable weakness and youth! Oh! to be perpetually guarded and protected and plucked from the very possibility of danger, because one happened to be Heir to the Imperial Throne.
Why had the Emperor resigned the supreme command of the Army? There had been reverses—does a Commander-in-Chief give up for that? True, he was not well, but the First Napoleon had fought battles and won them, in spite of cramps and colic. He would never have driven away under the noses of King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck and the Prince Commanders. He would have called the nephew who could commit such an impair as that a godichon. He would have said: "To the devil with you, who boast yourself of my blood! A Napoleon—and not a general! You might have proved yourself a fighter, at least!"
The soldiers regarded the Emperor's resignation as the Great Napoleon would have done. They had not cried "Vive l'Empereur!" when papa had driven out of Metz. Upon the contrary, they had maintained silence, scowling or sneering covertly. To-day, the meanest piou-piou had presumed to wink or grin. More, voices from the depths of company-columns had called out horrible insults; things that had made the son's teeth set and his fists clench with the passionate desire to thrash the offenders, yet had not twitched one muscle in the father's impassive face....
"Why do you look back so often, Louis? What are you thinking about?"
The Emperor's question brought the young head round. He muttered, twisting the gold knot of his little sword:
"I am looking at the Army, and at Metz—and at those Uhlan outposts. And I want to know why we are going away—just because the Prussians are coming? Why cannot we stay—and fight?"
The diplomatic, evasive answer came:
"Because for the present it is more prudent that we should withdraw ourselves."
The boy shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and his young face took on an expression of heavy obstinacy, bringing out, quite startlingly, a resemblance to the sire. He muttered:
"All very well.... But it isn't nice to—absquatulate!"
The slang term filer might be rendered as above. The Emperor's gray face with the patches of rouge on the flaccid cheeks moved not a muscle. Turning his hunched shoulders upon the scene of his horrible humiliations, he stared with fixed eyes along the road to Verdun, stretching away to the west between its bordering poplars, whose long blue shadows—the day being yet young—barred the white dust rather suggestively.
At Etain, where the cortège halted for breakfast, the Prince had a much nearer view of those ubiquitous horsemen in the dark blue uniforms. Indeed, the Emperor and his suite barely escaped a surprise, and the escort of Cent Gardes, who were here replaced by some of MacMahon's Chasseurs d'Afrique, were hotly chased and sniped at on the way back to camp.
Through the journey of that night, performed in the cushionless plank seats of a third-class carriage, his suite being accommodated in a string of cattle-trucks, of what did the sleepless Emperor think? What questions occupied that sick and sluggish brain?
The question of returning to Paris, the refuge he longed for and yet dreaded inexpressibly. The question as to whether the Empress Regent would welcome the Emperor who could no longer rule the State, and what kind of ovation the people would extend to the General who had deserted the Army of Metz before the advancing hordes of United Germany.
Would not Rebellion, Anarchy and Revolution rear up their hydra-heads to greet the Third Napoleon, reëntering his capital? Would his reign end in the explosion of a bomb, and a shower of torn flesh and scattered blood upon the paving-stones? Would his son ever wear the Imperial crown, won by bribery, bloodshed, fraud and trickery? Would the Church forgive the rape of temporal power? Would Heaven succor one who had defrauded Her? Was this the beginning of the end?
Lugubrious doubts like these and many others haunted his sleepless pillow in the Imperial pavilion of the camp on the dusty plains of Champagne. Dismantled at the close of the October maneuvers, and now hastily prepared for the Emperor's reception, the place was damp, dismal, and cheerless, as such places usually are.
The newly levied troops were showing signs of insubordination; the Gardes Mobiles from Paris were in open mutiny against their generals. The great camp was a wasp's nest, which the presence of the Emperor stirred to frenzy; the lewd songs in which he figured, the yells of savage laughter greeting obscene jests leveled at him and his, reached him, pacing the mildewed carpets underneath the damp-stained draperies festooned from the claws of Imperial eagles, whose gilding was tarnished and discolored, like the Imperial central crown.
All night he paced, on thorns. With the dawn of day he had the answer to his questions. From the Empress, who wished him to abdicate that she might reign for her son; from the new War Minister, a creature of his own aggrandizing, who by influencing the Empress, who detested him, dreamed of becoming another Richelieu; from the Prefect of Police—who indeed brought the warning in person—came a triple sentence of exile for the sick, dejected man.
Spewed forth again upon the road toward the northern frontier, he was a clog upon the feet of the army that might, by a movement in which boldness combined with rapidity, have relieved Bazaine at the critical moment and changed the fate of France. Thenceforth he was to be a passive witness, rather than a participator, in scene after scene of horrible disaster; disgraces, disillusions, defeats, crowding one upon the other, to be crowned by the unspeakable catastrophe of Sedan.