“Amour sacré de la patrie,
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs!”
the legacy of immortal song which a Royalist had given to the Republic forever. But these externals had no real hold upon him. He was no searcher of the deep roots nor the forward-stretching tendrils of circumstance. He went across the lesser Doomsday as a child across the hostile streets of a city, thinking always, but not of the obvious things. What he saw through the medium of his sequestered soul were reeking sedition, experiments blundering and caring not whom they hurt, principles despoiling the world of quiet and gentleness and “the unbought grace of life;” and he moved, indeed, towards Burke’s own curious inference, that the Revolution was criminal because it was unmannerly. He took no time to philosophize when the one blameless and disadvantaged Bourbon needed his sword; it was nothing to him that pent-up rights, burst abroad, were about to vindicate themselves terribly and justly in “immolating a generation to make way for an idea,” while he saw, far more clearly, his order injured, his religion handicapped, and the old ideals taught him at his mother’s knee swept into the universal dust-heap. There were hundreds of honorable lives like his, impelled by the same hurrying conscientiousness, forming on either side of the great struggle from 1789 to 1792: the men who represented the early beauty of the Revolution, while yet it was a “child of many prayers.” No apology (in the primitive nor in the perverted sense of the word) need be made for their opposing courses, so soon to be defined; it is enough if we wise landsmen of posterity know the great current and whither it tends, and that we perceive, near shore, the forceful counter-current pushing backward victoriously, if but for an hour, and recognize that both are one clear water, and that the same Hand suffers them to flow. Henri went home, not to ponder much, but to grieve a little and then to fight: to fight the strength of the equinoctial tide, even as it proved.
With every foot of the Bocage he became acquainted; he travelled it over and over; he was spun like a thread of destiny into and around its level fields and farms; he crossed and re-crossed its fords; he lost and won its towns; he held its fortunes for a year in the hollow of his hand; his grave, like his birth, was in its bosom. It is small wonder that a species of folk-lore, in his own neighborhood, has, in three generations, grown up around him, which makes it a difficult thing to disentangle what is true of him from what might as well be true: for the French are not given, even in their gossip, to incongruities. Every rustic, who, having served under Henri, lived to startle a more prosaic world with his reminiscences, had anecdotes to tell of him really vital and precious; and the travellers who were able to gather them at first hand, like Monsieur Eugène Genoude and Viscount Francis Walsh, are yet to be envied. It is known from oral report how he would run any risk for a charge of his, were he, in particular, a child or a coward; or how he would deny himself bread while one mouth hungered near him; how he was a fatal apparition, looming bare-headed from the saddle, pistol in hand, to those who encountered him in a charge: for he had a sure aim, and no genteel misgivings as to his present duty. Picked out for the object of many raids, he had the strength of nerve to save himself repeatedly, by blowing out the brains of a dozen. When he achieved an admitted advantage, he seemed to overflow instantly with his native kindness and compassion. His military career was less one of thought and command than of manual killing and sparing: and in that particular he belonged with the ancient world, with Gideon and with Hector. The endless patience which he brought to bear on his heart-breaking circumstance and his ungovernable mass of men, out-soars praise. Not once, among the contradiction, the disorder, the stupidity which he deplored, was he anything but just. This autumnal sweetness of his character, which he seemed to have inherited in full at Lescure’s death, was its first and last distinction. It helped him, at an age when moods alternate with the pendulum, to take prosperity without pride, trials without a plaint. Young in every fibre, he had not a trace of the severity of youth, its raw dominance, its hasty partial will.
As he takes the eye from among the striking figures in Madame de La Rochejaquelein’s Mémoires, so, alive, he compelled the interest of on-lookers and of commentators who were foes. Jomini, in his Histoire Critique, turns to him with insistent admiration. Kléber’s reports are filled with notes on his scientific skill. It was the opinion of Sempré, after the Vendean repulse at Granville and the ensuing movement which almost cancelled it, that “Xenophon himself was not half so clever as this vagabond.” And Napoleon, the man whose attribute it was to know men, dictating to General Montholon at Saint Helena, used a significant exclamation: “What might he not have become!” Henri’s large close mental grasp, his delighting straightforward talk, his prompt deed, were all of a piece; and they won his great contemporary from the outset. Nor had the latter forgotten, when the crown was upon his head, to invent every means to gain the coveted adherence of Louis de La Rochejaquelein, who was much of the same mould.
Henri, unlike Lescure and Bonchamp, was no scholar: one might guess as much from his handwriting, always too indolent and free. To one book, however, he clung, and after carrying it about for an interrupted rereading, he would put it under his pillow: this was a Life of Turenne. His age and his country were surfeited with learned and poetic persons; while they were writing things worthy to be read, he, as Sir Walter Scott would put it, was doing things worthy to be written; he was breathing abroad something of the Greece crystalizing silently in André Chénier’s brain. Shall we ascribe it to immunity from the giant literature which was the prelude of the Revolution that he was a very simple youth indeed, that he believed in God, and was strict (“sévère” is Madame de La Rochejaquelein’s word) in matters touching his conscience? “He knew me at Saumur, when I came on with Cathelineau,” a peasant told a stranger, “and he spoke to me: ‘How well it goes with us!’ ‘Yes, yes, so it does,’ I replied, ‘thanks to you, M’sieu Henri!’ ‘Thanks unto God!’ was what he said.” His own success, wonderful in the extreme to him, he preferred to charge upon supernatural agencies. When he galloped into the guns, and caught no one admiring him visibly, he took occasion to make the sign of the cross; the bigger the danger, the bigger the gesture, according to tradition. Nothing was mere mechanism with him; he was a scorner of exaggeration. His religiousness was in the current of his blood. It alone kept him to the end an optimist: one able to leap into the chasm beyond, without ever having had a single speculation about it, nor a single dread.
HE autumn of 1793, when the red flag was floating at the altar of the Fatherland, when the tombs at Saint Denis were rifled of their kingly dust, and some hearts were yet aching for the fallen Gironde,—this memorable autumn was marked in the west by the choc on the heights about Chollet, and the tragedy of the passage of the Loire. During the first attack D’Elbée and Lescure were borne helpless from the field. The ensuing night a council of war was held, Stofflet and Henri begging for leave to defend the town, and Bonchamp persistently pleading for an expedition across the river, in the hope of obtaining succor and new strength from the Bretons, and of opening a northern seaport to the expected co-operation of England. While the debate was yet seething, the second clash came, and Bonchamp was struck down. It was a terrific battle: forty thousand peasants against forty-five thousand tried and trained soldiers of the line. “They fought like tigers,” brave Kléber wrote to the Convention, “but our lions beat them.” Before daybreak on the seventeenth of October, without any order of advance, and against the impassioned efforts of Henri and other generals, panic set in, and the air was rent with a league of cries. Then began the mad rush for the Loire, and an exodus comparable to nothing human but that of the Tartar tribes. The manœuvre, suggested but a little while before as a safeguard, was adopted in complete despair, and the retreat deteriorated into a migration. Countless families emptied themselves into the rebel camp; a horde of poor creatures, including the entire population of Chollet and the near boroughs, flew to the common centre; women, babes, the aged, the sick, the fearful, hung darkening over the army, like summer insects over a pool. Once it had started, nothing could hold back the onward pressure of such numbers. Four thousand men were detached under Talmont and sent to clear the banks at Saint Florent. A whole people, their homes burning behind them, thrown upon pauperism, inevitable separation, and the rigors of the coming winter, the Republican hosts advancing from all sides to exterminate them; Bonchamp, on whose persuasion the fatal move was undertaken, on whose prudence the others relied, known to be dying; Lescure, who had been wounded at La Tremblaye in the midst of his squadrons, dying also; the bewildered, groaning multitude dropping, like the pallid passengers of the Styx, into the river-boats, and struggling from island to island;—what a spectacle! The great tears of anger and sorrow stood thick in Henri’s eyes. When a march could be formed, the foot-soldiery, with the cannon, were placed at the head, and the cavalry and picked men brought up the rear. Between them were the fifty thousand drags, stumbling along in a lunacy of terror, and in a muffled roar bewailing their bitter fate, and calling on Heaven for mercy. The habit of their enemies was invariably to attack the van or the rear:—a mistake which, more than anything else, prorogued the inevitable end.