This campaign has few parallels in history. Not a shot had been fired and many of the Austrians had not even seen a French soldier!
While the world was ringing with the news of this remarkable close to a remarkable campaign, General Savery, who is also known to history as the Duke de Rongo, accompanied Charles Louis Schulmeister on a visit to the Emperor Napoleon. The great soldier congratulated the Alsatian smuggler and loaded him down with financial favors. Schulmeister’s fortune was made—from a worldly standpoint.
He was given leave of absence, with the understanding that he must remain subject to the Emperor’s call. He had the right to go anywhere he chose and he chose to go to his home in the Alsatian village of New Freistell. The wife of his youth awaited him eagerly. This curious man, who knew neither fear nor pity, had one unexpected characteristic. He was passionately fond of children. Although married several years there was no prospect of little ones.
Schulmeister was not a man to be thwarted in his desires. He went out into the village, found two orphaned and homeless children and adopted them as his own. Visitors to the little place on the right bank of the Rhine tell of seeing the world-famous spy frolicking on the lawn of his home with these children. For the time being the man who had affected the destinies of armies was subject to the whims and the caprices of two little ones. He obeyed their slightest commands as implicitly as he had the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Queer sight in this queerest of all possible worlds!
II
BELLE BOYD, THE CONFEDERATE GIRL WHO SAVED STONEWALL JACKSON
That brilliant writer, Gilbert Chesterton, in one of his paradoxical essays said that a fact, if looked at fiercely, may become an adventure. It is certain that the most important facts in the life of Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy, constitute some of the most thrilling adventures in the great conflict between the sections—the Civil War in the United States.
She was only a girl when the flag was fired on at Sumter and her father and all the members of her family immediately enlisted in the Confederate army. When the Union troops took possession of Martinsburg, Belle Boyd found herself unwillingly inside the Federal lines. She had no formal commission from any of the Southern officers, but circumstances and her ardent nature made her an intense partisan of what was to be “The Lost Cause.”
During the occupation of Martinsburg, she shot a Union soldier, who, she claimed, had insulted a Southern woman. From that moment until the close of the war she was actively engaged either as a spy, a scout or an emissary of the Confederacy. On more than one occasion she attracted the attention of Secretary of War Stanton, and although she served a term in a military prison, she seems to have been treated with unusual leniency. After the war she escaped to England, where she published her autobiography, bitterly assailing the victorious North.