At each step, in fact, we found terrible proofs of the enemy's presence. After taking possession of the towns and villages, they had arrested the inhabitants, maltreated them with saber-strokes and the butt ends of their guns, stripping them of their clothing, and compelling those to follow them whom they thought capable of serving as guides on their march; and if they were not guided as they expected they killed with the sword or shot their unfortunate prisoners. Everywhere the inhabitants were made to furnish provisions, drink, cattle, forage, in a word, everything that could be useful to an army making enormous requisitions; and when they had exhausted all the resources of their victims, they finished their work of destruction by pillage and burning. The Prussians, and above all the Cossacks, were remarkable for their brutal ferocity. Sometimes these hideous savages entered the houses by main force, shared among themselves everything that fell into their hands, loaded their horses with the plunder, and broke to pieces what they could not carry away. Sometimes, not finding sufficient to satisfy their greed, they broke down the doors and windows, demolished the ceiling in order to tear out the beams, and made of these pieces and the furniture, which was too heavy to be carried away, a fire, which being communicated to the roofs of neighboring houses consumed in a moment the dwellings of the unhappy inhabitants, and forced them to take refuge in the woods.
Sometimes the more wealthy inhabitants gave them what they demanded, especially brandy, of which they drank eagerly, thinking by this compliance to escape their ferocity; but these barbarians, heated by drink, then carried their excesses to the last degree. They seized girls, women, and servants, and beat them unmercifully, in order to compel them to drink brandy until they fell in a complete state of intoxication. Many women and young girls had courage and strength to defend themselves against these brigands; but they united three or four against one, and often to avenge themselves for the resistance of these poor creatures mutilated and slew them, after having first violated them, or threw them into the midst of the bivouac fires. Farms were burned up, and families recently opulent or in comfortable circumstances were reduced in an instant to despair and poverty. Husbands and old men were slain with the sword while attempting to defend the honor of their wives and daughters; and when poor mothers attempted to approach the fires to warm the children at their breasts, they were burned or killed by the explosion of packages of cartridges, which the Cossacks threw intentionally into the fire; and the cries of pain and agony were stifled by the bursts of laughter from these monsters.
I should never end if I attempted to relate all the atrocities committed by these foreign hordes. It was the custom at the time of the Restoration to say that the complaints and narrations of those who were exposed to these excesses were exaggerated by fear or hatred. I have even heard very dignified persons jest pleasantly over the pretty ways of the Cossacks. But these wits always kept themselves at a distance from the theater of war, and had the good fortune to inhabit departments which suffered neither from the first nor second invasion. I would not advise them to address their pleasantries to the unfortunate inhabitants of Champagne, or of the departments of the east in general. It has been maintained also that the allied sovereigns and the general officers of the Russian and Prussian army severely forbade all violence in their regular troops, and that the atrocities were committed by undisciplined and ungovernable bands of Cossacks. I have been in a position to learn, on many occasions, especially at Troves, proofs to the contrary. This town has not forgotten, doubtless, how the Princes of Wurtemberg and Hohenlohe and the Emperor Alexander himself justified the burnings, pillage, violations, and numerous assassinations committed under their very eyes, not only by the Cossacks, but also by regularly enlisted and disciplined soldiers. No measures were taken by the sovereigns or by their generals to put an end to such atrocities, and nevertheless when they left a town there was needed only an order from them to remove at once the hordes of Cossacks who devastated the country.
The field of the La Rothiere was, as I have said, the rendezvous of the pupils of the military school of Brienne. It was there that the Emperor, when a child, had foreshadowed in his engagement with the scholars his gigantic combats. The engagement at La Rothiere was hotly contested; and the enemy obtained, only at the price of much blood, an advantage which they owed entirely to their numerical superiority. In the night which followed this unequal struggle, the Emperor ordered the retreat from Troves. On returning to the chateau after the battle, his Majesty narrowly escaped an imminent danger. He found himself surrounded by a troop of uhlans, and drew his sword to defend himself. M. Jardin, junior, his equerry, who followed the Emperor closely, received a ball in his arm. Several chasseurs of the escort were wounded, but they at last succeeded in extricating his Majesty. I can assert that his Majesty showed the greatest self-possession in all encounters of this kind. On that day, as I unbuckled his sword-belt, he drew it half out of the scabbard, saying, "Do you know, Constant, the wretches have made me cut the wind with this? The rascals are too impudent. It is necessary to teach them a lesson, that they may learn to hold themselves at a respectful distance."
It is not my intention to write the history of this campaign in France, in which the Emperor displayed an activity and energy which excited to the highest point the admiration of those who surrounded him. Unfortunately, the advantages which he had obtained gradually exhausted his own troops, while only creating losses in the enemy's, which they easily repaired. It was, as M. Bourrienne has well said, a combat of an Alpine eagle with a flock of ravens: "The eagle may kill them by hundreds. Each blow of his beak is the death of an enemy; but the ravens return in still greater numbers, and continue their attack on the eagle until they at last overcome him." At Champ-Aubert, at Montmirail, at Nangis, at Montereau, and at Arcis, and in twenty other engagements, the Emperor obtained the advantage by his genius and by the courage of our army; but it was all in vain. Hardly had these masses of the enemy been scattered, before fresh ones were formed again in front of our soldiers, exhausted by continuous battles and forced marches. The army, especially that which Blucher commanded, seemed to revive of itself, and whenever beaten reappeared with forces equal, if not superior, to those which had been destroyed or dispersed. How can such an immense superiority of numbers be indefinitely resisted?
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Emperor had never shown himself so worthy of admiration as during this fatal campaign in France, when, struggling against misfortunes, he performed over again the prodigies of his first wars in Italy, when fortune smiled on him. His career had begun with an attack, and the end was marked by the most magnificent defense recorded in the annals of war. And it may be said with truth that at all times and everywhere his Majesty showed himself both the perfect general and the soldier, under all circumstances furnishing an example of personal courage to such an extent, indeed, that all those who surrounded him, and whose existence was dependent on his own, were seriously alarmed. For instance, as is well known, the Emperor, at the battle of Montereau, pointed the pieces of artillery himself, recklessly exposed himself to the enemy's fire, and said to his soldiers, who were much alarmed at his danger and attempted to remove him, "Let me alone, my friends; the bullet which is to kill me has not yet been molded."
At Arcis the Emperor again fought as a common soldier, and more than once drew his sword in order to cut his way through the midst of the enemy who surrounded him. A shell fell a few steps from his horse. The animal, frightened, jumped to one side, and nearly unhorsed the Emperor, who, with his field-glass in his hand, was at the moment occupied in examining the battlefield. His Majesty settled himself again firmly in his saddle, stuck his spurs in the horse's sides, forced him to approach and put his nose to it. Just then the shell burst, and, by an almost incredible chance, neither the Emperor nor his horse was even wounded.
In more than one similar circumstance the Emperor seemed, during this campaign, to put his life at a venture; and yet it was only in the last extremity that he abandoned the hope of preserving his throne. It was a painful sacrifice to him to treat with the enemy so long as they occupied French territory; for he wished to purge the soil of France of the presence of foreigners before entering into any agreement with them whatever. And this feeling was the reason of his hesitation and refusal to accept the peace which was offered him on various occasions.