Chapter 16

I leave it to others to give the history of this campaign, one of the most memorable of Europe from its consequences--the tramp of that army roused the slumbering giant of France. If the Frenchman said of a battle, that it was like a ball-room, you see little beyond your opposite partner; he might have said of a campaign, that you scarcely see even so much. The largeness of the scale is beyond all personal observation. I can answer only for myself, that I was on horseback before daybreak, and marched in the midst of columns which had no more doubt of beating up the enemy's quarters than they had of eating their first meal. All were in the highest spirits; and the opinions of the staff, among whom the duke had assigned me a place, were so sanguine, that I felt some concern at their reaching the ear of the captive aide-de-camp. This induced me to draw him away gradually from the crowd. I found him lively, as his countrymen generally are, but exhibiting at once a strength of observation and a frankness of language which are more uncommon.

"I admit," said he, "that you have beaten us; but this is the natural effect of your incomparable discipline. Our army is new, our general new, every thing new but our imprudence, in venturing to meet your 100,000 with our 25,000. Yet France is not beaten. In fact, you have not met the French up to this hour."

"What!" I exclaimed in surprise; "of what nation are the troops which we have fought in the Argonne, and are now following through the high-road to Paris? The Duke of Brunswick will be amused by hearing that he has been wasting his cannon-shot on spectres."

"Ah, you English," he replied with a broad laugh, which made me still more doubt his nation, "are such matter-of-fact people, that you require substance in every thing. But what are the troops of France? Brave fellows enough, but not one of them has ever seen a shot fired in his life; even the few battalions which we had in America saw nothing but hedge-firing. The men before you have never seen more service than they could find in a cabaret, or hunting a highwayman. Some of them, I admit, have served their King in the shape of shouldering their muskets at his palace gates in Versailles, or marching in a procession of cardinals and confessors to Notre-Dame. My astonishment is, that at the first shot they did not all run to their soup, and at the second leave their muskets to take care of themselves. But they are brave; and, if they once learn to fight, the pupils will beat the master."

"You are a philosopher, Monsieur, but, I hope, no prophet. I think I observe in you something of our English blood after all. You have opinions, and speak them."

"Not quite English, nor quite French. My father was a borderer; so not even exactly either English or Scotch. He took up arms for the son of James--of course was ruined, as every one was who had to do with Stuart from the beginning of time--luckily escaped after the crash of Culloden, entered the Scottish Brigade here, and left to me nothing but his memory, his sword, and the untarnished name of Macdonald." I bowed to a name so connected with honour, and the lively aide-de-camp and I became from that moment, fast friends. After a long and fatiguing march, about noon, in one of the most sultry days of a British autumn, our advanced guard reached the front of the enemy's position. The outposts were driven in at once, and the whole army, as it came up, was formed in order of battle. Rumours had been spread of large reinforcements being on their way; and the clouds of dust which rose along the plain, and the confused sound of baggage-wagons, and heavy guns behind the hills, rendered it probable. Still the country before us was clear to the eye, and our whole force moved slowly forward to storm a range of heights, in the shape of a half-moon, which commanded the field. This was one of the sights which nothing but war can furnish, and to which no other sight on earth is equal. The motion, the shouts, the rapidity of all things--the galloping of the cavalry--the rolling of the parks of artillery--the rush of the light troops--the pressing march of the battalions--and all glittering with all the pomps of war, waving standards, flashing sabres, and the blaze thrown back from the columns' bayonets, that looked like sheets of steel, made me almost breathless. The aide-de-camp evidently enjoyed the sight as much as myself, and gave way to that instinct, by which man is a wolf, let the wise say what they will, and exults in war. But when he heard shots fired from the range of hills, his countenance changed.

"There must be some mistake here," he said, with sudden gravity. "Dumourier could never have intended to hold his position so far in advance, and so wholly unprotected. Those troops will be lost, and the whole campaign may be compromised."

The attack now commenced along the line, and the resistance was evidently serious. A heavy fire was sustained for some time; but the troops gradually established themselves on the lower part of the range. "I know it all now!" exclaimed my agitated companion, after a long look through my glass: "it is Kellerman's corps," said he, "which ought to have been a league to the rear of its present position at this moment. He must have received counter orders since I left him, or been desperately deceived; another half hour there, and he will never leave those hills but a prisoner or a corpse." From the shaking of his bridle, and the nervous quivering of his manly countenance, I saw how eagerly he would have received permission to bring the French general out of his dilemma. But he was a man of honour, and I was sure of him. In the midst of a thunder of cannon, which absolutely seemed to shake the ground under our feet, the firing suddenly ceased on the enemy's side. The cessation was followed on ours; there was an extraordinary silence over the field, and probably the generalissimo expected a flag of truce, or some proposal for the capitulation of the enemy's corps. But none came; and after a pause, in which aides-de-camp and orderlies were continually galloping between the advance and the spot where the duke stood at the head of his staff, the line moved again, and the hill was in our possession. But Kellerman was gone; and before our light troops could make any impression on the squadrons which covered the movement, he had again taken up a position on the formidable ground which was destined to figure so memorably in the annals of French soldiership, the heights of Valmy.

"What think you now, my friend?" was my question.

"Just what I thought before," was the answer. "We want science, without which bravery _may_ fail; but we have bravery, without which science _must_ fail. Kellerman may have been deceived in his first position, but he has evidently retrieved his error. He has now shortened his distance from his reinforcements, he has secured one of the most powerful positions in the country, and unless yon drive him out of it before nightfall, you might as well storm Ehrenbreitstein, or your own Gibraltar, by morning."

"Well, the experiment is about to be made, for my glass shows me our howitzers _en masse_, moving up to cannonade him with grape and canister. He will have an uneasy bivouac of it."

"Whether Kellerman can manoeuvre, I do not know. But that he will fight, I am perfectly sure. He is old, but one of the most daring and firm officers in our service. If it is in his orders to maintain those heights, he will hold them to his last cartridge and his last man."

Our conversation was now lost in the roar of artillery, and after a tremendous fire of an hour on the French position, which was answered with equal weight from the heights, a powerful division was sent to assail the principal battery. The attempt was gallantly made, and the success seemed infallible, when I heard, through all the roar, the exclamation of Macdonald, "Brave Steingell!" At the words, he pointed to a heavy column of infantry hurrying down the ravine in rear of the redoubt.

"Those are from the camp," he exclaimed, "and a few thousands more will make the post impregnable."

The sight of the column seemed to have given renewed vigour to both sides; for, while the French guns rapidly increased their fire, aided by the musketry of the newly arrived troops, the Prussian artillerists, then the first in Europe, threw in their balls in such showers, that the forest, which hitherto had largely screened the enemy, began to fall in masses; branch and trunk were swept away, and the ground became as naked of cover as if it had been stripped by the axe. The troops thus exposed could not withstand this "iron hail," and they were palpably staggered. The retreat of a brigade, after suffering immense loss, shook the whole line, and produced a charge of our dragoons up the hill. I gave an involuntary glance at Macdonald. He was pale and exhausted; but in another moment his eye sparkled, his colour came, and I heard him exclaim, "Bravo, Chazot! All is not lost yet." I saw a group of mounted officers galloping into the very spot which had been abandoned by the brigade, and followed by the colours of three or four battalions, which were planted directly under our fire. "There comes Chazot with his division!" cried the aide-de-camp; "gallant fellow, let him now make up for his ill fortune! Monsieur Brunswick will not sleep on the hill of Valmy to-night. He has been unable to force the centre, and now both flanks are secured: another attack would cost him ten thousand men. Nor will Monsieur Brunswick sleep on the hills of Valmy to-morrow. Dumourier was right; there was his Thermopylæ. But it will not be stormed. _Vive la France!_"

The prediction was nearly true. The unexpected reinforcements, and the approach of night, determined the generalissimo to abandon the assault for the time. The fire soon slackened, the troops were withdrawn, and, after a heavy loss on both sides, both slept upon the field.

I was roused at midnight from the deep sleep of fatigue, by an order to attend the duke, who was then holding a council. Varnhorst was my summoner, and on our way he slightly explained the purpose of his mission. "We are all in rather bad spirits at the result of to-day's action. The affair itself was not much, as it was only between detachments, but it shows two things; that the French are true to their revolutionary nonsense, and that they can fight. On even ground we have beaten them, and shall beat them again; but if Champagne gives them cover, what will it be when we get into the broken country that lies between this and Paris? Still there has been no rising of the people, and until then, we have nothing to fear for the event of the campaign."

"What then have you to fear?" was my question. "What calls the council to-night?"

"My good friend," said Varnhorst with a grave smile, which more reminded me of Guiscard, "remember the Arab apologue, that every man is born with two strings tied to him, one large and visible, but made of twisted feathers; the other so fine as to be invisible, but made of twisted steel. Thus there are few men without a visible motive, which all can see, and an invisible one--which, however, pulls then just as the puller pleases. Berlin pulls now, and the duke's glory and the good of Europe must be sacrificed to policy."

"But will the king suffer this? Will the emperor stand by and see this done?"

"They are both zealous for the liberation of the unfortunate royal family. But, _entre nous_--and this is a secret which I scarcely dare whisper even in a French desert--their counsellors have other ideas. Poland is the prize to which the ministers of both courts look. They know that the permanent possession of French provinces is impossible. It is against the will of your great country, against the deepest request of the French king, and against their own declarations. But Polish seizures would give them provinces to which nobody has laid claim, and which nobody can envy. The consequence is, that a negotiation is on foot at this moment to conclude the war by treaty, and, having ensured the safety of the royal family, to withdraw the army into Lorraine."

"Why am I then summoned?"

"To put your signature to the preliminaries."

I started with indignation. "They shall wait long enough if they wait till I sign them. I shall not attend this council."

"Observe," said Varnhorst, "I have spoken only on conjecture. If I return without you, my candour will be rewarded by an instant sentence for Spandau."

This decided me. I shook my gallant friend by the hand, the cloud passed from his brow, and we rode together to the council. This was of a more formal nature than I had yet witnessed. Two officers expressly sent from Vienna and Berlin, a kind of military envoys, had brought the decisions of their respective cabinets upon the crisis. The duke said little. He had lost his gay nonchalance of manners, and was palpably dispirited and disappointed. His address to me was gracious as ever; but he was more of the prince and the diplomatist, and less of the soldier. Our sitting closed with a resolution, to agree upon an armistice, and to make the immediate release of the king one of the stipulations. I combated the proposal as long as I could with decorum. I placed, in the strongest light that I could, the immense impulse which any pause in our advance must give to the revolutionary spirit in France, or even in Europe--the impossibility of relying on any negotiation which depended on the will of the rabble--and, above all, the certainty that the first sign of tardiness on the part of the Allies would overthrow the monarchy, which was now kept in existence only by the dread of our arms. I was overruled. The proposal for the armistice was signed by all present but one--that one myself. And as we broke up silently and sullenly, at the first glimpse of a cold and stormy dawn, the fit omen of our future fate, I saw a secretary of the duke, accompanied by Macdonald, sent off to the headquarters of the enemy.

All was now over, and I thought of returning to my post at Paris. I spent the rest of the day in paying parting civilities to my gallant friends, and ordered my calèche to be in readiness by morning. But my prediction had been only too true, though I had not calculated on so rapid a fulfilment. The knowledge of the armistice was no sooner made public--and, to do the French general justice, he lost neither time nor opportunity--than it was regarded as a national triumph. The electric change of public opinion, in this most electric of all countries, raised the people from a condition of the deepest terror to the highest confidence. Every man in France was a soldier, and every soldier a hero. This was the miracle of twenty-four hours. Dumourier's force instantly swelled to 100,000 men. He might have had a million, if he had asked for them. The whole country became impassable. Every village poured out its company of armed peasants; and, notwithstanding the diplomatic cessation of hostilities, a real, universal, and desperate peasant war broke upon us on every side.

After a week of this most harassing warfare, in which we lost ten times the number of men which it would have cost to march over the bodies of Dumourier's army to the capital, the order was issued for a general retreat to the frontier. I remembered Mordecai's letter; but it was now too late. Even if I could have turned my horse's head to a French post, I felt myself bound to share the fortunes of the gallant army to which I had been so closely attached. In the heat of youth, I went even further, and, as my mission had virtually ceased, and I wore a Prussian order, I took the _un_diplomatic step of proposing to act as one of the duke's aides-de-camp until the army had left the enemy's territory. Behold me now, a hulan of the duke's guard! I found no reason to repent my choice, though our service was remarkably severe. The present war was chiefly against the light troops and irregulars of the retreating army--the columns being too formidable to admit of attack, at least by the multitude. Forty thousand men, of the main army of France, were appointed to the duty of "seeing us out of the country." But every attempt at foraging, every movement beyond the range of our cannon, was instantly met by a peasant skirmish. Every village approached by our squadrons, exhibited a barricade, from which we were fired on; every forest produced a succession of sharp encounters; and the passage of every river required as much precaution, and as often produced a serious contest, as if we were at open war. Thus we were perpetually on the wing, and our personal escapes were often of the most hair-breadth kind. If we passed through a thicket, we were sure to be met by a discharge of bullets; if we dismounted from our horses to take our hurried and scanty meal, we found some of them shot at the inn-door; if we flung ourselves, as tired as hounds after a chase, on the straw of a village stable, the probability was that we were awakened by finding the thatch in a blaze. How often we envied the easier life of the battalions! But there an enemy, more fearful than the peasantry, began to show itself. The weather had changed to storms of rain and bitter wind; the plains of Champagne, never famed for fertility, were now as wild and bare as a Russian steppe. The worst provisions, supplied on the narrowest scale--above all, disgust, the most fatal canker of the soldier's soul--spread disease among the ranks; and the roads on which we followed the march, gave terrible evidence of the havoc that every hour made among them. The mortality at last became so great, that it seemed not unlikely that the whole army would thus melt away before it reached the boundary of this land of death.

The horror of the scene even struck the peasantry, and whether through fear of the contagion, or through the uselessness of hunting down men who were treading to the grave by thousands, the peasantry ceased to follow us. Yet such was the wretchedness of that hideous progress, that this cessation of hostility was scarcely a relief. The animation of the skirmishes, though it often cost life, yet kept the rest more alive; the strategem, the adventure, the surprise, nay, even the failure and escape, relieved us from the dreadful monotony of the life, or rather the half-existence, to which we were now condemned. Our buoyant and brilliant career was at an end; we were now only the mutes and mourners of a funeral procession of seventy thousand men.

I still look back with an indescribable shudder at the scenes which we were compelled to witness from day to day during that month of misery; for the march, which began in the first days of October, was protracted till its end. I had kept up my spirits when many a more vigorous frame had sunk, and many a maturer mind had desponded; but the perpetual recurrence of the same dreary spectacles, the dying, and the more fortunate dead, covering the highways, the fields, and the village streets, at length sank into my soul. Some recollections of earlier principles, and the memory of my old friend Vincent, prevented my taking the summary and unhappy means of ridding myself of my burden, which I saw daily resorted to among the soldiery--a bullet through the brain, or a bayonet through the heart, cured all. But, thanks to early impressions, I was determined to wait the hand of the enemy, or the course of nature. Many a night I lay down beside my starving charger, with something of a hope that I should never see another morning; and many a morning, when I dragged my feeble limbs from the cold and wet ground, I looked round the horizon for the approach of some enemy's squadron, or peasant band, which might give me an honourable chance of escape from an existence now no longer endurable. But all was in vain. For leagues round no living object was visible, except that long column, silently and slowly winding on through the distance, like an army of spectres.

My diminished squadron had at length become almost the only rear-guard. From a hundred and fifty as fine fellows as ever sat a charger, we were now reduced to a third. All its officers, youths of the first families of Prussia, had either been left behind dying in the villages, or had been laid in the graves by the road-side, and I was now the only commandant. Perhaps even this circumstance was the means of saving my life. My new responsibility compelled me to make some exertion; and I felt that, live or die, I might still earn an honourable name. Even in those darkest hours, the thought that Clotilde might ask where and how I finished my ill-fortuned career, and perhaps give a moment's sorrow to one who remembered her to the last, had its share in restoring me to a sense of the world. In that sort of fond frenzy, which seems so fantastic when it is past, but so natural, and is actually so irresistible while it is in the mind, I wrote down my feelings, wild as they were--my impossible hopes, and a promise never to forget her while I remained in this world, and, if there could be an intercourse between the living and the dead, in that world to which I felt myself hastening. I then bade her a solemn and heartfelt farewell. Placing the paper in my bosom, with a locket containing a ringlet of her beautiful hair, which Marianne had contrived to obtain for me, the only legacy I had to offer, I felt as if I had done my last duty among mankind.

Still we wandered on, through a country which had the look of a boundless cemetery. Not a peasant was met; not a sound of human labour, joy or sorrow, reached the ear; not a smoke rose from mansion or cottage; all was still, except when the wind burst in bitter gusts over the plain, or the almost ceaseless rain swelled into sheets, and sent the rivers roaring down before us. If the land had never been inhabited, or had been swept of its inhabitants by an avenging Providence, it could not have been more solitary. I never conceived the idea of the wilderness before. It was the intensity of desolation.