The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (86 page)

It was an hour after, when having reflected a little, the men commenced swearing and threatening, secretly at first, but soon openly, and at last the battalion was almost in revolt. Some said that all the officers under Louis XVIII. must be exterminated, and others, that we were given up
en masse
, and several declared that the marshals were traitors, and ought to be court-martialed and shot.

At last the commandant ordered a halt, and riding down the line he told the men, that the traitors had left too late to do mischief, that we would make the attack that very day, and that the enemy would not have time to profit by the treason, and that he would be surprised and overwhelmed. This calmed the fury of a great proportion of the men, and we resumed our march, and all along the route, we heard repeatedly that the exposure of our plans had been made too late.

But our anger gave place to joy, when about ten o’clock we heard the thunder of cannon five or six leagues to the left, on the other side of the Sambre. The men raised their shakos on their bayonets and shouted: “Forward! Vive l’Empereur!”

Many of the old soldiers wept, and over all that great plain there was one immense shout; when one regiment had ceased another took it up. The cannon thundered incessantly. We quickened our steps. We had been marching on Charleroi since seven o’clock, when an order reached us by an orderly to support the right. I remember that in all the villages through which we passed, the doors and windows were full of eager friendly faces, waving their hands and shouting, “The French, the French!” We could see that they were friendly to us, and that they were of the same blood as ourselves; and in the two halts that we made, they came out with their loaves of excellent home-made bread, with a knife stuck in the crust, and great jugs of black beer, and offered them to us without asking any return. We had come to deliver them without knowing it, and nobody in their country knew it either, which shows the sagacity of the Emperor, for there were already in that corner of the Sambre et Meuse, more than one hundred thousand men, and not the slightest hint of it had reached the enemy.

The treason of Bourmont had prevented our surprising them as they were scattered about in their separate camps. We could then have annihilated them at a blow, but now it would be much more difficult.

We continued our march till after noon, in the intense heat and choking dust. The farther we advanced the greater the number of troops we saw, infantry and cavalry. They massed themselves more and more, so to speak, and behind us there were still other regiments.

Toward five o’clock we reached a village where the battalions and squadrons filed over a bridge built of brick. This village had been taken by our vanguard, and in going through it, we saw some of the Prussians stretched out in the little streets on the right and left, and I said to Jean Buche: “Those are Prussians, I saw them at Lutzen and Leipzig, and you are going to see them too, Jean.”

“So much the better,” he replied, “that is what I want.”

This village was called Chatelet. It is on the river Sambre, the water is very deep, yellow, and clayey, and those who are so unfortunate as to fall into it, find it very difficult to get out of, for the banks are perpendicular, as we found out afterward. On the other side of the bridge we bivouacked along the river; we were not in the advance, as the hussars had passed over before us, but we were the first infantry of the corps of Gérard. All the rest of that day the Fourth corps were filing over the bridge, and we learned at night, that the whole army had passed the Sambre, and that there had been fighting near Charleroi, at Marchiennes, and Jumet.

CHAPTER XVII

On reaching the other bank of the river, we stacked our arms in an orchard, and lighted our pipes and took breath as we watched the hussars, the chasseurs, the artillery, and the infantry, file over the bridge hour after hour, and take their positions on the plain. In our front was a beech forest, about three leagues in length, which extended toward Fleurus. We could see great yellow spots, here and there in this wood; these were stubble, and great patches of grain, instead of being covered with bramble or heath and furze as in our country. About twenty old decrepit houses were on that side the bridge. Chatelet is a very large village, larger than the city of Saverne.

Between the battalions and squadrons, which were constantly moving onward, the men, women, and children would come out with jugs of sour beer, bread, and strong white brandy which they sold to the soldiers for a few sous. Buche and I broke a crust as we looked on and laughed with the girls, who are blonde and very pretty in that country.

Very near us was the little village Catelineau, and in the distance on our left, between the wood and the river, lay the village of Gilly. The sound of musketry, cannon, and platoon firing, was heard constantly in that direction. The news soon came that the Emperor had driven the Prussians out of Charleroi, and that they had re-formed in squares at the corner of the wood.

We expected every moment to be ordered to cut off their retreat, but between seven and eight o’clock, the sound of musketry ceased, the Prussians retired to Fleurus, after having lost one of their squares; and the others escaped into the wood. We saw two regiments of dragoons arrive and take up their position at our right, along the bank of the Sambre. There was a rumor a few minutes afterward that General Le Tort had been killed by a ball in the abdomen, very near the place where in his youth he had watched and tended the cattle of a farmer. What strange things happen in life! The general had fought all over Europe, since he was twenty years old, but death waited for him here!

It was about eight o’clock in the evening, and we were expecting to remain at Chatelet until our three divisions had crossed. An old bald peasant, in a blue blouse and a cotton cap and as lean as a goat, came into camp and told Captain Grégoire that on the side of the beech wood in a hollow, lay the village of Fleurus, and to the right of this, the little village of Lambusart; that the Prussians had been stationed in these towns more than three weeks, and that more of them had arrived the night before, and the night before that. He told us also that there was a broad road, bordered with trees, running two good leagues along our left; that the Belgians and Hanoverians had posts at Gosselies and at Quatre-Bras; that it was the high-road to Brussels, where the English and Hanoverians and Belgians had all their forces; while the Prussians, four or five leagues at our right, occupied the route to Namur, and that between them and the English, there was a good road running from the plateau of Quatre-Bras to the plateau of Ligny in the rear of Fleurus, over which their couriers went and came from morning till night, so that the Prussians and English were in perfect communication, and could support each other with men, guns, and supplies when necessary.

Naturally enough I thought at once, that the first thing to be done was to get possession of this road and so cut off their communication; and I was not the only one who thought so; but we said nothing for fear of interrupting the old man. In five minutes half the battalion had gathered round him in a circle. He was smoking a clay pipe and pointing out all the positions with the stem. He was a sort of commissioner between Chatelet, Fleurus, and Namur and knew every foot of the country and all that happened every day.

He complained greatly of the Prussians, said they were proud and insolent, that they corrupted the women and were never satisfied, and that the officers boasted of having driven us from Dresden to Paris, that they had made us run like hares.

I was indignant at that, for I knew they were two to one at Leipzig, and that the Russians, Austrians, Saxons, Bavarians, Wurtemburgers, Swedes, in fact all Europe had overwhelmed us, while three-quarters of our army were sick with typhus, cold, and famine, marching and countermarching; but that even all this had not prevented us from beating them at Hanau, and fifty other times when they were three to one, in Champagne, Alsace, in the Vosges, and everywhere.

Their boasting disgusted me, I had a horror of the whole race, and I thought, “those are the rascals who sour your blood.” The old man said too, that the Prussians constantly declared that they would soon be enjoying themselves in Paris, drinking good French wines; and that the French army was only a band of brigands. When I heard that, I said to myself, “Joseph, that is too much! now you will show no more mercy, there is nothing but extermination.”

The clocks of Chatelet struck nine and a half, and the hussars sounded the retreat, and each one was about to dispose himself behind a hedge or a bee-house or in a furrow for the night, when the general of the brigade, Schoeffer, ordered the battalion to take up their position on the other side of the wood, as the vanguard. I saw at once that our unlucky battalion was always to be in the van, just as it was in 1813.

It is a sad thing for a regiment to have a reputation; the men change, but the number remains the same. The Sixth light infantry had always been a distinguished number, and I knew what it cost. Those of us who were inclined to sleep, were wide awake now, for when you know that the enemy is at hand, and you say to yourself, “The Prussians are in ambush, perhaps in that wood, waiting for you,” it makes you open your eyes.

Several hussars deployed as scouts on our right and left, in front of the column. We marched at the route step, with the captains between the companies, and the Commandant Gémeau, on his little gray mare, in the middle of the battalion. Before starting each man had received three pounds of bread and two pounds of rice, and this was the way in which the campaign opened for us.

The sky was without a cloud, and all the country and even the forest, which lay three-quarters of a league before us, shone in the moonlight like silver. I thought involuntarily of the wood at Leipzig, where I had slipped into a clay-pit with two Prussian hussars, when poor Klipfel was cut into a thousand pieces at a little distance from me. All this made me very watchful. No one spoke, even Buche raised his head and shut his teeth, and Zébédé, who was at the left of the company, did not look toward me, but right ahead into the shadow of the trees, like everybody else.

It took us nearly an hour to reach the forest, and when within two hundred paces the order came to “halt.”

The hussars fell back on the flanks of the battalion, and one company deployed as scouts. We waited about five minutes, and as not the slightest noise or sound of any kind reached our ears, we resumed our march. The road which we followed through the wood was quite a wide cart-path. The column marked step in the shadows. At every moment great openings in the forest gave us light and air, and we could see the white piles of newly cut wood between their stakes, shining in the distance from time to time.

Besides this, nothing could be heard or seen. Buche said to me in a low voice, “I like the smell of the wood, it is like Harberg.”

“I despise the smell of the wood,” I thought; “and if we do not get a musket-shot, I shall be satisfied.”

At the end of two hours the light appeared again through the underwood, and we reached the other side, fortunately without encountering either enemy or obstacle. The hussars who had accompanied us returned immediately, and the battalion stacked arms.

We were in a grain country, the like of which I had never seen. Some of the grain was in flower, a little green still, though the barley was almost ripe. The fields extended as far as the eye could reach. We looked around in perfect silence, and I saw that the old man had not deceived us. Two thousand paces in front of us, in a hollow, we saw the top of an old church spire and some slated gables, lighted up by the moon. That was Fleurus. Nearer to us on our right were some thatched cottages, and a few houses; this was without doubt Lambusart. At the end of the plain, more than a league distant and in the rear of Fleurus, the surface of the country was broken into little hills, and on these hills innumerable fires were burning. Three large villages were easily recognized extending over the heights from left to right. The one nearest to us, we afterward found, was St. Amand, Ligny in the middle, and two leagues beyond, was Sombref. We could see them more distinctly, even, than in the day-time, on account of the fires of the enemy. The Prussians were in the houses and the orchards and the fields; and beyond these three villages in a line, was another, lying still higher and farther away, where fires were burning also. This was Bry, where the rascals had their reserves.

As we looked at this grand spectacle, I understood the disposition and the plan, and saw too that it would be very difficult to take the position. On the plain at our left there were fires also, but it was the camp of the Third corps, which had turned the corner of the forest after having repulsed the Prussians, and had halted in some village this side of Fleurus. There were a few fires along the edge of the forest, on a line with us; these were the fires of our own soldiers. I believe there were some on both sides of us, but the great mass were at the left.

We posted our sentinels immediately, and without lighting our fires laid down at the border of the wood to wait for further orders. General Schoeffer came again during the night with several hussar officers, and talked a long time with our commandant, Gémeau, who was watching under arms. Their conversation was quite distinct at twenty paces from us. The general said that our army corps continued to arrive, but that they were very late, and would not all reach here the next day. I saw at once that he was right; for our fourth battalion, which should have joined us at Chatelet, did not come till the day after the battle, when we were almost exterminated by those rascals at Ligny, having only four hundred men left. If they had been there they would have had their share of the combat and of the glory.