The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (69 page)

But I could not move, and lay sobbing like a child.

“Come, stand up!” he said.

“I cannot. O God! I cannot!”

I clutched his arm. Tears streamed down his face. He tried to lift me, but he was too weak; I held fast to him, crying:

“Zébédé, do not abandon me!”

Captain Tidal approached, and gazed sadly on me.

“Cheer up, my lad,” said he; “the ambulances will be along in half an hour.”

But I knew what that meant, and I drew Zébédé closer to me. He embraced me, and I whispered in his ear:

“Kiss Catharine for me—promise! Tell her that I died thinking of her, and bear her my last farewell!”

“Yes, yes!” he sobbed. “My poor Joseph!”

I could cling to him no longer. He placed me on the ground, and ran away without turning his head. The column departed, and I gazed at it as one who sees his last hope fading from his eyes. The last of the battalion disappeared over the ridge of a hill. I closed my eyes. An hour passed, or perhaps a longer time, when the boom of cannon startled me, and I saw a division of the guard pass at a quick step with artillery and wagons. Seeing some sick in the wagons, I cried, wistfully:

“Take me! Take me!”

But no one listened; still they kept on, while the thunder of artillery grew louder and louder. More than ten thousand men, cavalry and infantry, passed me, but I had no longer strength to call out to them.

At last the long line ended; I saw knapsacks and shakos disappear behind the hill, and I lay down to sleep forever, when once more I was aroused by the rolling of five or six pieces of artillery along the road. The cannoneers sat sabre in hand, and behind came the caissons. I hoped no more from these than from the others, when suddenly I perceived a tall, lean, red-bearded veteran mounted beside one of the pieces, and bearing the cross upon his breast. It was my old friend Zimmer, my old comrade of Leipzig. He was passing without seeing me, when I cried, with all the strength that remained to me:

“Christian! Christian!”

He heard me in spite of the noise of the guns; stopped, and turned round.

“Christian!” I cried, “take pity on me!”

He saw me lying at the foot of a tree, and came to me with a pale face and staring eyes:

“What! Is it you, my poor Joseph?” cried he, springing from his horse.

He lifted me in his arms as if I were an infant, and shouted to the men who were driving the last wagon:

“Halt!”

Then embracing me, he placed me in it, my head upon a knapsack. I saw too that he wrapped a great cavalry cloak around my feet, as he cried:

“Forward! Forward! It is growing warm yonder!”

I remember no more, but I have the faint impression of hearing the sound of heavy guns and rattle of musketry, mingled with shouts and commands. Branches of tall pines seemed to pass between me and the sky through the night; but all this might have been a dream. But that day, behind Solmunster, in the woods of Hanau, we had a battle with the Bavarians, and routed them.

CHAPTER XXII

On the fifteenth of January, 1814, two months and a half after the battle of Hanau, I awoke in a good bed, and at the end of a little, well-warmed room; and gazing at the rafters over my head, then at the little windows, where the frost had spread its silver sheen, I exclaimed: “It is winter!” At the same time I heard the crash of artillery and the crackling of a fire, and turning over on my bed in a few moments, I saw seated at its side a pale young woman, with her arms folded, and I recognized—Catharine! I recognized, too, the room where I had spent so many happy Sundays before going to the wars. But the thunder of the cannon made me think I was dreaming. I gazed for a long while at Catharine, who seemed more beautiful than ever, and the question rose, “Where is Aunt Grédel? am I at home once more? God grant that this be not a dream!”

At last I took courage and called softly:

“Catharine!” And she, turning her head cried:

“Joseph! Do you know me?”

“Yes,” I replied, holding out my hand.

She approached, trembling and sobbing, when again and again the cannon thundered.

“What are those shots I hear?” I cried.

“The guns of Phalsbourg,” she answered. “The city is besieged.”

“Phalsbourg besieged! The enemy in France!”

I could speak no more. Thus had so much suffering, so many tears, so many thousands of lives gone for nothing, ay, worse than nothing, for the foe was at our homes. For an hour I could think of nothing else; and now, old and gray-haired as I am, the thought fills me with bitterness. Yes, we old men have seen the German, the Russian, the Swede, the Spaniard, the Englishman, masters of France, garrisoning our cities, taking whatever suited them from our fortresses, insulting our soldiers, changing our flag, and dividing among themselves, not only our conquests since 1804, but even those of the Republic. These were the fruits of ten years of glory!

But let us not speak of these things, the future will pass upon them. They will tell us that after Lutzen and Bautzen, the enemy offered to leave us Belgium, part of Holland, all the left bank of the Rhine as far as Bâle, with Savoy and the kingdom of Italy; and that the Emperor refused to accept these conditions, brilliant as they were, because he placed the satisfaction of his own pride before the happiness of France!

But to return to my story. For two weeks after the battle of Hanau, thousands of wagons, filled with wounded, crowded the road from Strasbourg to Nancy, and passed through Phalsbourg.

They stretched in one long line through all Alsace to Lorraine.

Not one in the sad
cortége
escaped the eyes of Aunt Grédel and Catharine. What their thoughts were, I need not say. More than twelve hundred wagons had passed;—I was in none of them. Thousands of fathers and mothers sought among them for their children. How many returned without them!

The third day Catharine found me among a heap of other wretches, in basket wagons from Mayence, with sunken cheeks and glaring eyes—dying of hunger. She knew me at once, but Aunt Grédel gazed long before she cried:

“Yes! it is he! It is Joseph!”

She took me home, and watched over me night and day. I wanted only water, for which I constantly shrieked. No one in the village believed that I would ever recover, but the happiness of breathing my native air and of once more seeing those I loved, saved me.

It was about six months after, on the 15th of July, 1814, that Catharine and I were married; Monsieur Goulden, who loved us as his own children, gave me half his business, and we lived together as happy as birds.

Then the wars were ended; the allies gradually returned to their homes; the Emperor went to Elba, and King Louis XVIII. gave us a reasonable amount of liberty. Once more the sweet days of youth returned—the days of love, of labor, and of peace. The future was once more full of hope—of hope that every one, by good conduct and economy, would at some time attain a position in the world, win the esteem of good men, and raise his family without fear of being carried off by the conscription seven or eight years after.

Monsieur Goulden, who was not too well satisfied at seeing the old kings and nobility return, thought, notwithstanding, that they had suffered enough in foreign lands to understand that they were not the only people in the world, and to respect our rights; he thought, too, that the Emperor Napoleon would have the good sense to remain quiet—but he was mistaken. The Bourbons returned with their old notions, and the Emperor only awaited the moment of vengeance.

All this was to bring more miseries upon us, which I would willingly relate, if this story did not seem already long enough. But here let us rest. If people of sense tell me that I have done well in relating my campaign of 1813—that my story may show youth the vanity of military glory, and prove that no man can gain happiness save by peace, liberty, and labor—then I will take up my pen once more, and give you the story of Waterloo!

5
League of virtue.

6
A game at cards, played among soldiers, in which the loser wears a forked stick on his nose till he wins again.

7
On the English map the river is the Rotha, not the Partha (or Parde), and at the point here alluded to it joins the
Elster
, not the Pleisse, as stated previously.—
Translator’s Note
.

WATERLOO

A SEQUEL TO THE CONSCRIPT OF 1813

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Often as the campaign of Waterloo has been described by historians and frequently as it has been celebrated in fiction it has rarely been narrated from the stand-point of a private soldier participating in it and telling only what he saw. That this limitation, however, does not exclude events of the greatest importance and incidents of the most intensely dramatic interest is abundantly proved by the narrative of the Conscript who makes another campaign in this volume and describes it with his customary painstaking fulness and fidelity. But what renders “Waterloo” still more interesting is the picture it presents of the state of affairs after the first Bourbon restoration, and its description of how gradually but surely the way was prepared by the stupidity of the new
régime
for that return to power of Napoleon which seems so dramatically sudden and unexpected to a superficial view of the events of the time. In this respect “Waterloo” deserves to rank very high as a chapter of familiar history, or at least of historical commentary.

CHAPTER I

The joy of the people on the return of Louis XVIII., in 1814, was unbounded. It was in the spring, and the hedges, gardens, and orchards were in full bloom. The people had for years suffered so much misery, and had so many times feared being carried off by the conscription never to return, they were so weary of battles, of the captured cannon, of all the glory and the Te Deums, that they wished for nothing but to live in peace and quiet and to rear their families by honest labor.

Indeed, everybody was content except the old soldiers and the fencing-masters.

I well remember how, when on the 3d of May the order came to raise the white flag on the church, the whole town trembled for fear of the soldiers of the garrison, and Nicholas Passauf, the slater, demanded six louis for the bold feat. He was plainly to be seen from every street with the white silk flag with its “fleur-de-lis,” and the soldiers were shooting at him from every window of the two barracks, but Passauf raised his flag in spite of them and came down and hid himself in the barn of the “Trois Maisons,” while the marines were searching the town for him to kill him.

That was their feeling, but the laborers and the peasants and the tradespeople with one voice hailed the return of peace and cried, “Down with the conscription and the right of union.” Everybody was tired of living like a bird on branch and of risking their lives for matters which did not concern them.

In the midst of all this joy nobody was so happy as I; the others had not had the good luck to escape unharmed from the terrible battles of Weissenfels and Lutzen and Leipzig, and from the horrible typhus. I had made the acquaintance of glory and that gave me a still greater love for peace and horror of conscription.

I had come back to Father Goulden’s, and I shall never in my life forget his hearty welcome, or his exclamation as he took me in his arms: “It is Joseph! Ah! my dear child, I thought you were lost!” and we mingled our tears and our embraces together. And then we lived together again like two friends. He would make me go over our battles again and again, and laughingly call me “the old soldier.” Then he would tell me of the siege of Pfalzbourg, how the enemy arrived before the town, in January, and how the old republicans with a few hundred gunners were sent to mount our cannon on the ramparts, how they were obliged to eat horseflesh on account of the famine, and to break up the iron utensils of the citizens to make case-shot and canister.

Father Goulden, in spite of his threescore years, had aimed the pieces on the Magazine bastion on the Bichelberg side, and I often imagined I could see him with his black silk cap and spectacles on, in the act of aiming a twenty-four pounder. Then this would make us both laugh and helped to pass away the time.

We had resumed all our old habits. I laid the table and made the soup. I was occupying my little chamber again and dreamed of Catherine day and night. But now, instead of being afraid of the conscription as I was in 1813, I had something else to trouble me. Man is never quite happy, some petty misery or other assails him. How often do we see this in life? My peace was disturbed by this.

You know I was to marry Catherine; we were agreed, and Aunt Grédel desired nothing better. Unhappily, however, the conscripts of 1815 were disbanded, while those of 1813 still remained soldiers. It was no longer so dangerous to be a soldier as it was under the Empire, and many of these had returned to their homes and were living quietly, but that did not prevent the necessity of my having a permit in order to be married. Mr. Jourdan, the new mayor, would never allow me to register without this permission, and this made me anxious.