I.
A STRAY SHOT.
WHAT is life? A perpetual see-saw with fortune—man at one end, the fickle jade at the other.
A feather at times turns the balance. In my case, an ounce of lead has disturbed the equilibrium of the fortunes of many lives.
Descended from men of war, I have become most essentially a man of peace.
Still, when that most popular of all toasts, “The Army and Navy,” is proposed, it stirs up the old leaven which still permeates the blood that came to me with the name I inherited from my sires.
My paternal grandfather had two sons, one a soldier, the younger a sailor. The latter is answerable for my sins—if I have ever committed any.
The vicissitudes of life are strange, bordering at times on fiction. During the war France had to wage against almost every other nation in Europe to defend her soil from the invasion instigated by a fallen monarchy against the Republican element which originated in 1789, an army, spontaneously raised from her “people,” crossed the Alps, carrying the tricolor flag into Italy, where many hard battles were fought.
These strangely composed, ill clad, badly fed, ragged hordes of French soldiers were led to victory by two young, inexperienced generals—both ambitious, energetic men—the younger, General Bonaparte, in whom the “Directoire” possessed a dangerous enemy of the Republic; the senior, my uncle, whose special mission was to watch the impetuous Corsican and counter-balance the evident sway and influence he was daily gaining over the young army by the daring of his actions and electrifying effect of those short, pithy allocutions he invariably made to the soldiers whom he sometimes so rashly led to death—but always to victory. During the Italian campaign the two young leaders vied with each other in their efforts to drill and train the undisciplined battalions, recruited and enlisted on the Champ de Mars, in Paris, during the terrible period so graphically termed the “Reign of Terror.”