"As a school, it's very well," said he. "The soldier ought to train himself in other ways than in the Tivoli gardens, behind nurses' petticoats. But why the devil are not five hundred thousand men flung upon the back of England? England is the soul of the coalition, I can tell you that."
How many explanations were necessary to make him understand the Crimean war, where the English had fought by our sides!
"I can understand," said he, "why we took a crack at the Russians—they made me eat my best horse. But the English are a thousand times worse. If this young man" (the Emperor Napoleon III.) "doesn't know it, I'll tell him. There is no quarter possible after what they did at St. Helena! If I had been commander-in-chief in the Crimea, I would have begun by properly squelching the Russians, after which I would have turned upon the English, and hurled them into the sea. It's their element, anyhow."
They gave him some details of the Italian campaign, and he was charmed to learn that the 23d had taken a redoubt under the eyes of the Marshal the Duke of Solferino.
"That's the habit of the regiment," said he, shedding tears in his napkin. "That brigand of a 23d will never act in any other way. The goddess of Victory has touched it with her wing."
One of the things, for example, which greatly astonished him, was that a war of such importance was finished up in so short a time. He had yet to learn that within a few years the world had learned the secret of transporting a hundred thousand men, in four days, from one end of Europe to the other.
"Good!" said he; "I admit the practicability of it. But what astonishes me is, that the Emperor did not invent this affair in 1810; for he had a genius for transportation, a genius for administration, a genius for office details, a genius for everything. But (to resume your story) the Austrians are fortified at last, and you cannot possibly get to Vienna in less than three months."
"We did not go so far, in fact."
"You did not push on to Vienna?"
"No."