For the first time since the day of the conscription Henri laughed; and Féron presently continued, “But as for me, I do not shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ like a fool. I know very well what I am about. I am only a conscript, it is true, but I am a soldier. The whole world is before me, and if I am brave, active, and resolute, the marshal’s bâton is no impossible dream for me. If we had lived in the old times, M. de Talmont, you would have ridden a fine horse and worn a beautiful sword; and I should have been like the dust beneath your feet—a private all my days, and no more. Thanks to the Revolution and the Empire, we have changed all that; so now we can be good comrades, as you have been kind enough to say.”
Good comrades they were through many a dreary day of drill and marching. At first the physical hardships of his life weighed so heavily upon Henri that thought and feeling were almost crushed into silence. When he halted for the night, after a long day’s march, he was scarcely conscious of anything except weary limbs and blistered feet. During his stay at the depôt in Metz, where the conscripts had to go through some preliminary training, things were scarcely better. The moral and the mental atmosphere of the barrack-room were alike abhorrent to his refined, sensitive nature; while the cruel and degrading punishments that followed any failure in skill or quickness on the parade-ground, forced him to bend all his remaining energies to the task of avoiding them. No answer to his letter from Paris ever reached him, and this added to the dull apathy that was creeping over his soul. His mother, he feared, was implacable. And Clémence?—perhaps his mother would not allow her to write, perhaps she herself was too deeply offended to make the attempt.
At last marching orders came once more. Strange to say, from that day the heavy cloud of gloom that hung over Henri began to lighten. Change of scene proved a tonic, and as he grew accustomed to long marches he ceased to suffer so greatly from fatigue. Like other young conscripts who did not droop and fail utterly, he gradually plucked up strength and spirits. As he was uniformly gentle and courteous—no ordinary merit in a French soldier of the Empire—he often met with much kindness from the families upon whom he was billeted; and the extreme youthfulness of his appearance gained many friends for him. By the time he reached the headquarters of the imperial army, the profession into which he had been forced was rather an object of indifference than of detestation to him. When the recruits were reviewed by Napoleon in person, he remembered the sage advice of Féron, and did not imagine that a cry of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the lips of a De Talmont would awaken the slumbering dust of his ancestors. Moreover, he could not but gaze, with a kind of fascination that had in it as much of admiration as of horror, upon the face of the man whose will at that moment was the most stupendous force in all the world. Henri de Talmont did not love Napoleon Buonaparte—he feared him, perhaps he hated him—but, like almost every other man in Europe, he believed him irresistible. There was a sense of exhilaration in the universal feeling that to march under him was infallibly to march to victory. Some faint reflected glow from the enthusiasm of all around could not fail to reach him and to awaken stirrings of the martial ardour that slumbered in the son of a long line of gallant warriors.
An unknown unit in a regiment of infantry—young recruits who as yet had won no laurels—Henri de Talmont marched one day over a temporary wooden bridge which had been flung by French pontoniers across the Niemen. “Now, mes enfants,” their captain said, “you are standing upon Russian ground.”
They cheered, embraced one another, and shouted until they were hoarse, “Vive l’Empereur! vive Napoleon! A bas les Russes!” Henri shouted as loudly as the rest; while, at least to the human eye, coming events cast no shadow before, nor was there any foreboding voice raised to whisper, as that vast and gallant host passed by,—
“The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre!”
CHAPTER XII.
ONE OF FIFTY MILLION.
“The might that slumbers in a peasant’s arm.”