There was a multitude of counselors, each counseling some different form of folly, and only my master, with one or two to support him steadfastly proclaiming that we must take Prague or be lost. There were innumerable objections made; it was a stupendous undertaking, for we had nothing fit for besieging, only our good swords and Maurice of Saxe to lead us. But at last, seeing ruin advancing upon us in the shape of an Austrian army, while starvation stood sentry over us, the King of Saxony and the rest of them were visited with a great light and concluded to let my master have his way; and the night of the twenty-seventh of November, 1741, was fixed upon to assault the town. It was a cold, clear night, with a moon that made all things white and light.
At midnight, when the town was sleeping, and only the sentries waked and walked, a tremendous cannonade broke out all around the walls, heaviest toward the south. This was but a sham attack, but the best part of the garrison hastened there to repel it. And then Count Saxe, advancing from the gardens and cottages on the Wischerad side, came to the walls. The men rushed forward with the scaling ladders, but they were full ten feet too short. Despair and blankness fell upon 452 us, until Count Saxe, seeing a great, weird Thing standing gaunt and black in the white moonlight—this Thing, the gallows tree—cried out cheerfully:
“See, my lads, yonder are likely to be some short ladders; these we will splice with rope, and so make the scalade!”
And it was done, Count Saxe himself being the first man on the rampart. He had for his body-guard, my Uhlans—men fit to be the body-guard of Mars himself. But the gods of war are invisibly protected. All the books upon war say that generals should take care of their skins. I have often noticed, however, that generals who try to take care of their skins usually get shot every time they go within the enemy’s range.
Count Saxe, however, without getting a single scratch, found himself at the head of his men in the great open market-place, where the French made their rendezvous, and there we soon found ten thousand of our fifteen thousand brave fellows. Prague was ours, and almost without the loss of a man, so masterly had been Count Saxe’s dispositions.
There is something appalling in the sight of a town taken in the night. Although Prague was supposed to be taken by assault, it was really carried by strategy, and there were none of the horrors of a capture by storming. But the horrible fears of the inhabitants, the terrors of the women and children, the dreadful midnight awakening—all, all, have in them something calculated to affright the soul.
These things passed through my mind, when, with my men posted according to Count Saxe’s orders, I listened to the cries, the screams of frightened creatures, 453 and imagined the shuddering terrors behind the walls of those tall old houses, their peaks shining in the white moonlight. And then, by an accident in handling a torch, one of those tall old houses by the market-place caught fire. Instantly, it was like Bedlam; at every one of the many windows appeared people shrieking, praying, crying. And glancing into one of those windows, where an old woman was screaming frantically, I saw a strange, a mysterious sight: upon a wretched bed lay a sick man—lay Gaston Cheverny!
I had not been brought up in the streets of Paris and forced to soldier it since my fourteenth year without becoming tolerably free from superstition. This sudden glimpse of Gaston Cheverny lying ill in a miserable garret in Prague, when I supposed him on the personal staff of Marshal Maillebois, did not prevent me from taking all possible measures to save that quarter of the town from burning, and striving to allay the panic. Both I found almost impossible. The old house blazed like tinder, the flames reddening the moonlit sky. I gave orders to blow up the houses on each side, in order to save the town. The horrible explosions, the smoke and smell of powder, the shrieking, terrified people, the soldiers battling with mob and fire—the mob believing the soldiers to have started the fire—were hideous. I have been in many a worse place than the market-place of Prague on that bleak November night, but never one which had a greater outward aspect of horror.
Toward daylight, ashes and ruins replaced the fire, trembling terror and pale exhaustion, the frantic alarm of the people, and the quarter was saved. Through it 454 all, I had Gaston Cheverny in my mind. I could not understand how he, an officer in Marshal Maillebois’s army, could be in Prague at all, but I had seen him in the glare of the blazing building as plainly as if the sun had been at the noon mark.
In the gray of the dawn, I began to investigate concerning Gaston, but he could not be found. I thought it not strange that in so much danger, terror and confusion he had disappeared for a time, but I confidently reckoned on his being found within a few days. Next day, I put the official inquiry on foot, but there was no record of any such person having been in Prague. It was difficult to account, under any circumstances, for Gaston’s being there. Yet, had not these eyes seen him? It was one more mystery and misery about this man, once the frankest, freest, most open-hearted of men. It did not lessen those vague and terrible fears which had haunted me about Francezka.