comrades in a low voice. “See, the commandant is rubbing his hands.”
In critical situations like that in which the detachment and its commander were now placed, life is so clearly at stake that men of nerve make it a point of honor to show coolness and self-possession. These are the moments in which to judge men’s souls. The commandant, better informed of the danger than his two officers, took pride in showing his tranquillity. With his eyes moving from Marche-a-Terre to the road and thence to the woods he stood expecting, not without dread, a general volley from the Chouans, whom he believed to be hidden like brigands all around him; but his face remained impassible. Knowing that the eyes of the soldiers were turned upon him, he wrinkled his brown cheeks pitted with the small-pox, screwed his upper lip, and winked his right eye, a grimace always taken for a smile by his men; then he tapped Gerard on the shoulder and said: “Now that things are quiet tell me what you wanted to say just now.”
“I wanted to ask what this new crisis means, commandant?” was the reply.
“It is not new,” said Hulot. “All Europe is against us, and this time she has got the whip hand. While those Directors are fighting together like horses in a stable without any oats, and letting the government go to bits, the armies are left without supplies or reinforcements. We are getting the worst of it in Italy; we’ve evacuated Mantua after a series of disasters on the Trebia, and Joubert has just lost a battle at Novi. I only hope Massena may be able to hold the Swiss passes against Suwarow. We’re done for on the Rhine. The Directory have sent Moreau. The question is, Can he defend the frontier? I hope he may, but the Coalition will end by invading us, and the only general able to save the nation is, unluckily, down in that devilish Egypt; and how is he ever to get back, with England mistress of the Mediterranean?”
“Bonaparte’s absence doesn’t trouble me, commandant,” said the young adjutant Gerard, whose intelligent mind had been developed by a fine education. “I am certain the Revolution cannot be brought to naught. Ha! we soldiers have a double mission,—not merely to defend French territory, but to preserve the national soul, the generous principles of liberty, independence, and rights of human reason awakened by our Assemblies and gaining strength, as I believe, from day to day. France is like a traveller bearing a light: he protects it with one hand, and defends himself with the other. If your news is true, we have never the last ten years been so surrounded with people trying to blow it out. Principles and nation are in danger of perishing together.”
“Alas, yes,” said Hulot, sighing. “Those clowns of Directors have managed to quarrel with all the men who could sail the ship. Bernadotte, Carnot, all of them, even Talleyrand, have deserted us. There’s not a single good patriot left, except friend Fouche, who holds ‘em through the police. There’s a man for you! It was he who warned me of a coming insurrection; and here we are, sure enough, caught in a trap.”
“If the army doesn’t take things in hand and manage the government,” said Gerard, “those lawyers in Paris will put us back just where we were before the Revolution. A parcel of ninnies! what do they know about governing?”
“I’m always afraid they’ll treat with the Bourbons,” said Hulot. “Thunder! if they did that a pretty pass we should be in, we soldiers!”
“No, no, commandant, it won’t come to that,” said Gerard. “The army, as you say, will raise its voice, and—provided it doesn’t choose its words from Pichegru’s vocabulary—I am persuaded we have not hacked ourselves to pieces for the last ten years merely to manure the flax and let others spin the thread.”
“Well,” interposed Captain Merle, “what we have to do now is to act as good patriots and prevent the Chouans from communicating with La Vendee; for, if they once come to an understanding and England gets her finger into the pie, I wouldn’t answer for the cap of the Republic, one and invisible.”
As he spoke the cry of an owl, heard at a distance, interrupted the conversation. Again the commander examined Marche-a-Terre, whose impassible face still gave no sign. The conscripts, their ranks closed up by an officer, now stood like a herd of cattle in the road, about a hundred feet distant from the escort, which was drawn up in line of battle. Behind them stood the rear-guard of soldiers and patriots, picked men, commanded by Lieutenant Lebrun. Hulot cast his eyes over this arrangement of his forces and looked again at the picket of men posted in advance upon the road. Satisfied with what he saw he was about to give the order to march, when the tricolor cockades of the two soldiers he had sent to beat the woods to the left caught his eye; he waited therefore till the two others, who had gone to the right, should reappear.
“Perhaps the ball will open over there,” he said to his officers, pointing to the woods from which the two men did not emerge.
While the first two made their report Hulot’s attention was distracted momentarily from Marche-a-Terre. The Chouan at once sent his owl’s-cry to an apparently vast distance, and before the men who guarded him could raise their muskets and take aim he had struck them a blow with his whip which felled them, and rushed away. A terrible discharge of fire-arms from the woods just above the place where the Chouan had been sitting brought down six or eight soldiers. Marche-a-Terre, at whom several men had fired without touching him, vanished into the woods after climbing the slope with the agility of a wild-cat; as he did so his sabots rolled into the ditch and his feet were seen to be shod with the thick, hobnailed boots always worn by the Chouans.
At the first cries uttered by the Chouans, the conscripts sprang into the woods to the right like a flock of birds taking flight at the approach of a man.
“Fire on those scoundrels!” cried Hulot.
The company fired, but the conscripts knew well how to shelter themselves behind trees, and before the soldiers could reload they were out of sight.
“What’s the use of decreeing levies in the departments?” said Hulot. “It is only such idiots as the Directory who would expect any good of a draft in this region. The Assembly had much better stop voting more shoes and money and ammunition, and see that we get what belongs to us.”
At this moment the two skirmishers sent out on the right were seen returning with evident difficulty. The one that was least wounded supported his comrade, whose blood was moistening the earth. The two poor fellows were half-way down the slope when Marche-a-Terre showed his ugly face, and took so true an aim that both Blues fell together and rolled heavily into the ditch. The Chouan’s monstrous head was no sooner seen than thirty muzzles were levelled at him, but, like a figure in a pantomime, he disappeared in a second among the tufts of gorse. These events, which have taken so many words to tell, happened instantaneously, and in another moment the rear-guard of patriots and soldiers had joined the main body of the escort.
“Forward!” cried Hulot.
The company moved quickly to the higher and more open ground on which the picket guard was already stationed. There, the commander formed his troop once more into line of battle; but, as the Chouans made no further hostile demonstrations, he began to think that the deliverance of the conscripts might have been the sole object of the ambuscade.
“Their cries,” he said to his two friends, “prove that they are not numerous. We’ll advance at a quick step, and possibly we may be able to reach Ernee without getting them on our backs.”
These words were overheard by one of the patriot conscripts, who stepped from the ranks, and said respectfully:—
“General, I have already fought the Chouans; may I be allowed a word?”
“A lawyer,” whispered Hulot to Merle. “They always want to harangue. Argue away,” he said to the young man.
“General,
