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By Root 1928 0

and Rheims. Only an occasional clump of trees brought a touch of green into the expanse of grey. Three windmills stood there stretching out their skinny arms. But above the jumble of roofs of Rheims, largely hidden in the tops of chestnut trees, the colossal hull of the cathedral stood out against the blue sky, gigantic beside the low houses, in spite of the distance. Back into his mind came schoolboy memories, lessons learned by heart and repeated in a sing-song voice, the coronation of our kings, the phial of holy oil, Clovis, Joan of Arc, all the ancient glories of France. Then, as the thought of the Emperor in this unpretentious house, so discreetly shut away, made Maurice look back again at the high yellow wall, he had a shock as he read in enormous black letters: Long Live Napoleon! mixed up with obscene scribblings in huge letters. The rain had blurred these letters, but the inscription was obviously old. What a strange thing to see on this wall – the old enthusiastic war-cry which no doubt acclaimed the conqueror, the uncle, and not the nephew! Already he felt all his childhood coming back and singing in his memories, the days when, back in Le Chêne-Populeux, from earliest childhood he listened to tales told by his grandfather, a soldier of the Grande Armée. His mother was dead and his father had had to accept a job as a tax-collector in that twilight of glory which had overtaken the sons of heroes after the fall of the Empire, and the grandfather lived with them on a tiny pension, having come down to the mediocrity of this humble office-worker’s home, and his one consolation was to recount his campaigns to his grandchildren, fair-haired twins, a boy and a girl, to whom he was a kind of mother. He would sit Henriette on his left knee and Maurice on his right, and for hours there were Homeric narratives of battle.

Periods ran into each other, and it all seemed to be independent of history in a terrible collision of all the nations. English, Austrians, Prussians, Russians passed by in turn and together, and it was not always possible to know why some were beaten rather than others. But in the end they were all beaten, beaten inevitably in advance, in a surge of heroism and genius that swept armies away like straw. Marengo, the battle of the plain, with its great lines skilfully deployed, its faultless retreat, like a game of chess, by battalions, silent and unruffled under fire; the legendary battle lost at three o’clock, won by six, in which the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard broke the momentum of the whole Austrian cavalry, in which Desaix came, as he thought, to die but changed an incipient rout into an immortal victory. Austerlitz, with its wonderful sun of victory in the winter mists, Austerlitz, beginning with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending in the terrifying disaster of the frozen lakes, with a whole Russian army corps falling through the ice, men and animals in an appalling crack of doom, while the godlike Napoleon, who of course had foreseen it all, hastened the disaster with a rain of cannon-balls. Jena, the grave of Prussian power, first the sharpshooters firing through the

October mists, the impatience of Ney who nearly upset the whole plan, then Augereau coming into line and relieving him, the great collision, with an impact that carried away the enemy’s centre, and finally the panic and headlong flight of their vaunted cavalry which our hussars mowed down like ripe oats, filling the picturesque valley with a harvest of men and horses. Eylau, abominable Eylau, the bloodiest of all, a slaughter piling up heaps of hideously mutilated corpses, Eylau red with blood in a blizzard of snow, with its dismal, heroic graveyard, Eylau, still re-echoing with the thunderous charge of Murat’s eighty squadrons, cutting the Russian army through and through and strewing the ground with such a thick carpet of bodies that even Napoleon wept. And Friedland, the huge, hideous trap into which once again the Russians fell like a flock of silly sparrows, the strategic masterpiece of the Emperor