So there was no longer any hope of preserving peace, everything was again to be put to the test of war; and troops began to pass through Villers-Cotterets for Soissons, Laon, and Mézières.
It must be admitted it gave us great pleasure to see the old uniforms once again, and the old cockades moving along the road from the isle of Elba to Paris, and the grand standards, riddled with the bullets of Austerlitz, Wagram, and Moskova, in their cylindrical-shaped cases.
It was a wonderful spectacle to watch the Old Guard, a military type that has completely disappeared in our day, the very embodiment of the ten years of imperial rule we had recently passed through, the active and glorious spirit of France.
In three days' time, 30,000 men—30,000 giants—resolute, composed, almost gloomy in their attitude, passed by, every one of whom realised that a share of the responsibility of the great Napoleonic dynasty weighed upon him, to be cemented by his blood, and all of whom, like those beautiful caryatides of Pujet, which so frightened the chevalier de Bernin when he landed at Toulon, seemed proud of this responsibility, although they felt that they might break down under the weight that was one day to crush them.
Those men who marched thus with such a firm tread to Waterloo, to their graves, must never be forgotten! They typified the devotion, the courage, the honour of the noblest, the warmest, the purest blood of France! they embodied twenty years of struggle against all Europe; they were of the Revolution, our mother; they were of the Empire, our nurse; they were not the French nobility, but the nobility of the French people!
I saw them all pass by, all, down to the last remnants of the Egyptian army, 200 Mamelukes with their baggy red pantaloons, their turbans, and their curved sabres.
There was something more than sublime in the spectacle: it was a religious, sacred, and holy sight to see these men, for they were as surely and as irrevocably condemned to death as were the gladiators of old, and, with them, they could have said: Cæsar, morituri te salutant!
Only, these were going to die, not to serve the pleasures of a people, but for its liberty, and they went to their death not by compulsion, but of their own free will, by their own unfettered choice.
The gladiator of old was but a victim; in the case of our men it was self-sacrifice.
They passed through one morning; and the sound of their steps faded, and the last strains of their music died away in the distance. I remember that the music they played was the air of Veillons au salut de l'empire....