Naturally enough I thought at once, that the first thing to be done was to get possession of this road and so cut off their communication; and I was not the only one who thought so; but we said nothing for fear of interrupting the old man. In five minutes half the battalion had gathered round him in a circle. He was smoking a clay pipe and pointing out all the positions with the stem. He was a sort of commissioner between Chatelet, Fleurus, and Namur and knew every foot of the country and all that happened every day.
He complained greatly of the Prussians, said they were proud and insolent, that they corrupted the women and were never satisfied, and that the officers boasted of having driven us from Dresden to Paris, that they had made us run like hares.
I was indignant at that, for I knew they were two to one at Leipzig, and that the Russians, Austrians, Saxons, Bavarians, Wurtemburgers, Swedes, in fact all Europe had overwhelmed us, while three-quarters of our army were sick with typhus, cold, and famine, marching and countermarching; but that even all this had not prevented us from beating them at Hanau, and fifty other times when they were three to one, in Champagne, Alsace, in the Vosges, and everywhere.
Their boasting disgusted me, I had a horror of the whole race, and I thought, "those are the rascals who sour your blood." The old man said too, that the Prussians constantly declared that they would soon be enjoying themselves in Paris, drinking good French wines; and that the French army was only a band of brigands. When I heard that, I said to myself, "Joseph, that is too much! now you will show no more mercy, there is nothing but extermination."
The clocks of Chatelet struck nine and a half, and the hussars sounded the retreat, and each one was about to dispose himself behind a hedge or a bee-house or in a furrow for the night, when the general of the brigade, Schoeffer, ordered the battalion to take up their position on the other side of the wood, as the vanguard. I saw at once that our unlucky battalion was always to be in the van, just as it was in 1813.
It is a sad thing for a regiment to have a reputation; the men change, but the number remains the same. The Sixth light infantry had always been a distinguished number, and I knew what it cost. Those of us who were inclined to sleep, were wide awake now, for when you know that the enemy is at hand, and you say to yourself, "The Prussians are in ambush, perhaps in that wood, waiting for you," it makes you open your eyes.
Several hussars deployed as scouts on our right and left, in front of the column. We marched at the route step, with the captains between the companies, and the Commandant Gémeau, on his little gray mare, in the middle of the battalion. Before starting each man had received three pounds of bread and two pounds of rice, and this was the way in which the campaign opened for us.
The sky was without a cloud, and all the country and even the forest, which lay three-quarters of a league before us, shone in the moonlight like silver. I thought involuntarily of the wood at Leipzig, where I had slipped into a clay-pit with two Prussian hussars, when poor Klipfel was cut into a thousand pieces at a little distance from me. All this made me very watchful. No one spoke, even Buche raised his head and shut his teeth, and Zébédé, who was at the left of the company, did not look toward me, but right ahead into the shadow of the trees, like everybody else.
It took us nearly an hour to reach the forest, and when within two hundred paces the order came to "halt."
The hussars fell back on the flanks of the battalion, and one company deployed as scouts. We waited about five minutes, and as not the slightest noise or sound of any kind reached our ears, we resumed our march. The road which we followed through the wood was quite a wide cart-path. The column marked step in the shadows. At every moment great openings in the forest gave us light and air, and we could see the white piles of newly cut wood between their stakes, shining in the distance from time to time.