"'Why did he not make his escape?'
"'I was on parole!' said I, in an undertone.
"'I don't like prisoners!—the fellows ought to get killed,' said he, turning his back upon me.
"We remained motionless in file, and when the whole of his suite had passed: 'My dear fellow,' said the colonel, 'don't you see plainly that you are a fool? You have lost your promotion, and nobody thinks the better of you for it.'"
Poor obedience, blind, slavish, unreasoning; its reward was often to be spurned. "Fool" indeed; a great many people will be inclined to re-echo the colonel's epithet, not because Renaud had been a prisoner—not because he was not killed, or did not escape, but because this same habit of obedience had so thoroughly taken the true man out of him, that he did not cut the epaulets from his shoulders, and leave glory to find some other fool. But he was a soldier, and a soldier's first duty was obedience. He went to his regiment, and from his after-life we extract another "shade" of the horrors of war. Captain Renaud narrates how he surprised a detachment of Russians at their post. It was a glorious achievement of course—a parallel to any of the atrocities of the North American Indians. "I came up slowly, and I could not, I must confess, get the better of a certain emotion which I had never felt at the moment of other encounters. It was shame for attacking men who were asleep; I saw them wrapped in their cloaks, lighted by a close lantern, and my heart throbbed violently. But all at once, at the moment of acting, I feared that it was a weakness very like that of cowards; I was afraid that I had for once felt fear, and taking my sword, which had been concealed under my arm, I briskly entered first, setting the example to my grenadiers. I made a motion to them which they comprehended; they fell first upon the guns, then upon the men, like wolves upon a flock of sheep. Oh, it was a dismal, a horrible butchery. The bayonet pierced, the butt-end smashed, the knee stifled, the hand strangled. All cries were extinguished, almost before they were uttered, beneath the feet of our soldiers; and not a head was raised without receiving the mortal blow. On entering, I had struck at random a terrible stroke at something black, which I had run through and through. An old officer, a tall stout man, whose head was covered with white hair, sprung upon his feet like a phantom, made a violent lunge at my face with a sword, and instantly dropped dead pierced by the bayonets! On my part, I fell beside him, stunned by the blow, which had struck me between the eyes, and I heard beneath me the tender and dying voice of a boy, saying, 'papa!' I then comprehended what I had done, and I looked at my work with frantic eagerness. I saw one of those officers of fourteen, so numerous in the Russian armies, which invaded us at that period, and who were dragged away to this awful school. His long curling hair fell upon his bosom, as fair, as silken as that of a woman, and his head was bowed, as though he had but fallen asleep a second time. His rosy lips, expanded like those of a new-born infant, seemed to be yet moist with the nurse's milk; and his large blue eyes, half open, had a beauty of form that was fond and feminine. I lifted him upon one arm, and his cheek fell against mine, dripping with blood, as though he were burying his face in his mother's bosom to warm it again. He seemed to shrink from me, and crouch close to the ground, in order to get away from his murderer. Filial affection, and the confidence and repose of a delicious sleep pervaded his lifeless face, and he seemed to say to me, 'Let us sleep in peace!'
"At this moment, the colonel entered, followed close by his column, whose step and arms I heard.
"'Bravo, my dear fellow,' said he, 'you've done that job cleverly; but you are wounded!'
"'Look there,' said I; 'what difference is there between me and a murderer?'
"'Eh! Sacre dieu! comrade, what would you have? 'Tis our trade!'"
Great God! what a trade for men to give themselves up to, for considerations of all kinds, from peerages and pensions down to a shilling a day. Legalized murder as a profession for the poor foster-children of passive obedience, who, when they trust themselves to think, sometimes find themselves—and upon their own showing, too—little better than murderers. Poor Captain Renaud, however, continued in the service still. So thoroughly was the man smothered in the soldier, that neglect, contempt, contumely, and the sensations of a homicide were not sufficient to induce him to break his fetters. After Napoleon's fall, he remained a soldier of the Bourbons, and there was a sort of poetical justice in his death; for in the sanguinary revolution of 1830 a gamin de Paris, a boy scarcely able to hold a horse-pistol, shot the veteran of the Empire.