‘They will shoot him! Yes, I have heard it all. It’s the second time he has deserted; there is not a chance left him. I must leave this by daybreak—I must get me far away before to-morrow evening; there would not come a stir, the slightest sound, but I should fancy I heard the fusilade.’
I saw now clearly that the deserter’s fate had made the impression which brought on the attack; and although my curiosity to learn the origin of so powerful a sensibility was greater than ever, I would willingly have sacrificed it to calming his mind, and inducing thoughts of less violent excitement. But he continued, speaking with a thick and hurried utterance—
‘I was senior lieutenant of the Carabiniers de la Garde at eighteen. We were quartered at Strasbourg; more than half of the regiment were my countrymen, some from the very village where I was born. One there was, a lad of sixteen, my schoolfellow and companion when a boy; he was the only child of a widow whose husband had fallen in the wars of the Revolution. When he was drawn in the conscription, no less than seven others presented themselves to go in his stead; but old Girardon, who commanded the brigade, simply returned for answer, “Such brave men are worthy to serve France; let them all be enrolled,” and they were so. A week afterwards Louis my schoolfellow deserted. He swam the Rhine at Kehl, and the same evening reached his mother’s cottage. He was scarcely an hour at home when a party of his own regiment captured him; he was brought back to Strasbourg, tried by torchlight, and condemned to death.
‘The officer who commanded the party for his execution fainted when the prisoner was led out; the men, horror-struck at the circumstance, grounded their arms and refused to fire. Girardon was on the ground in an instant; he galloped up to the youth who knelt there with his arms bound behind him, and drawing a pistol from his holster, placed the muzzle on his forehead, and shot him dead! The men were sent back to the barracks, and by a general order of the same day were drafted into different regiments throughout the army; the officer was degraded to the ranks—it was myself.’
It was with the greatest difficulty the colonel was enabled to conclude this brief story; the sentences were uttered with short, almost convulsive efforts, and when it was over he turned away his face, and seemed buried in grief.
‘You think,’ said he, turning round and taking my hand in his—‘you think that the sad scene has left me such as you see me now. Would to Heaven my memory were charged with but that mournful event! Alas! it is not so.’ He wiped a tear from his eye, and with a faltering voice continued. ‘You shall hear my story. I never breathed it to one living, nor do I think now that my time is to be long here.’
Having fortified his nerves with a powerful opiate, the only remedy in his dreadful malady, he began:—
‘I was reduced to the ranks in Strasbourg; four years after, day for day, I was named Chef de Bataillon on the field of Elchingen. Of twelve hundred men our battalion came out of action with one hundred and eighty; the report of the corps that night was made by myself as senior officer, and I was but a captain.
‘“Who led the division of stormers along the covered way?” said the Emperor, as I handed our list of killed and wounded to Duroc, who stood beside him.
‘“It was I, sire.”