The Prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, thus suddenly appealed to, flushed, looked down and stammered, "Really, sire—I—never having read—I should say: 66 "And you would be quite right, too, Monsieur le Prince," said Napoleon hastily, to extricate the Prince from his embarrassment. "If harangues are of any use it is during the course of campaign, to dissipate false alarms, keep up good spirit in the camp and furnish material for conversation in the bivouac." The Emperor took a pinch of snuff and turned to the King of Bavaria. "I trust Your Majesty has found little difficulty in collecting your supplies," he said. "On the contrary, I have had a good deal of difficulty," said the King of Bavaria. "Your Majesty shall find, however, that the difficulties have only increased my zeal for the great cause. But sometimes I wish that, like the generals of antiquity, we did not have to pay attention to magazines." "It is an error to suppose that the generals of antiquity did not pay particular attention to their magazines," said the Emperor. "It appears from Caesar's Commentaries that in many of his campaigns this subject occupied much of his attention. They had only found out the art of not being slaves to, and depending too much on, their supplies; an art which has been that of all great captains,—Hannibal, Turenne, Conde, Prince Eugene. Frederick in his invasions of Bohemia and Moravia, in his marches on the Oder and on the banks of the Elbe and the Saale, put into practice the principles of these great cap tains. For commanders-in-chief are guided by their experience or genius; tactics, evolutions, the science of engineering and gunnery, may be learned in treatises like geometry; but the knowledge of other parts of war is only to be acquired by experience and by studying the history of the wars and battles of great leaders." "And when did Your Majesty find time to study the campaigns of Caesar and the great Frederick?" inquired the Austrian Emperor. Napoleon glanced at the brilliant crowd before him, at the Kings, the sovereign Princes, Grand Dukes and Grand Electors, at the gold-embroidered uniforms blazing with diamond stars and crosses, and answered his Imperial father-in-law, "When I was sous-lieutenant in the regiment of La Fere." CHAPTER XXV The Twenty-ninth Bulletin No pitying voice commands a halt, —Wordsworth, The French Army in Russia. ON the 24th of June, Napoleon crossed the Niemen with his Grande Armee, four hundred and twenty thousand men, seventy thousand horsemen and a thousand guns. And as we see him standing on the bank, watching that mighty host—French, Austrians, and Prussians—defiling before him over the three bridges, we may repeat the question put three years later by the bluff von Blucher, when with his muddy boots he tramped across the Apollo Gallery at Saint Cloud and looked about him: "Why should a man, who had all these fine things at home, go running off to Moscow?" Ah! let the grave historian answer; that is his affair. It was the evening of December 20th, 1812, and a boisterous evening it was. The snow had been falling since morning, and the sharp wind had been whirling it about in thin, white clouds and driving it into every chink and crevice. There were banks of it about the front of the Hotel des Trois Dauphins, and the banks kept growing. For every hour old La Barre would come and shovel it off the steps, throwing it to right and to left, and then he would stamp his big wooden shoes and shake his rough coat and go in to warm his wrinkled hands by the fire; for when the mercury stands at four degrees below zero and a sharp wind is blowing it is more pleasant indoors than out. Old La Barre was a harmless soul, and he had helped Philippe Courteau at the Trois Dauphins for many years. He was the best man in that quarter to bed a horse or wash windows. Henri Jodelle always used to say, when he went to the stable and saw La Barre bedding a horse, that "if he were the Crown Prince of Prussia he would have envied that horse." So La Barre was a useful soul, and being a harmless one he was in nobody's path, and picked up many an odd sou, which he kept in a woollen sock in his garret, until one day the rats, being on campaign, and cut off from their base of supplies, and finding the country about them rather unproductive, ate the toe of La Barre's sock and spilled the money. There never was a man so distressed as La Barre, for two centimes rolled in a crack, where they could not be gotten out without taking up the floor, and Philippe didn't want that. So he gave La Barre two other centimes, and also a tin box for the balance of his money. La Barre got a rat-trap and put it at the foot of his bed, then he got a mouse-trap and put it at the head, and then he put the tin box under one end of his pillow. But he was not easily consoled for the loss of those two centimes, and often when he was in his room he would light a candle and place it by the crack and watch it carefully. No one knows what he expected to see come out of the crack, but that was what he did. So La Barre, like the rest of the world, had his troubles. Philippe Cousteau and Henri Jodelle were sitting in Philippe's room on the ground floor of the Trois Dauphins. It was a comfortable room, but, as might be expected, there was nothing gaudy about it. The log fire was burning brightly in the fireplace, and nearby was a pile of logs that La Barre had brought in not long before and which were still moist from melted snow. Philippe had stood some of the short ones up on end about the fire to dry thoroughly before he put them on. There were two pairs of Philippe's boots beside the fireplace also, and over it hung the sabre of honor which he had told Pierre he would show him when he came to the Trois Dauphins. But Pierre hadn't had time to come when he was getting married, and now he was with the Grand Army—at the other end of the world, so Marie thought, and Heaven knew when she would see him again, if ever. That was not a cheering thought, but there were thousands in France who had the same about others who were charging the Russian guns at La Moscowa. Under the sabre of honor hung a picture of the Little Corporal, with thin cheeks and long hair—a copy of one of Gros's or David's pictures—and that was the way Philippe remembered him, for he had not seen him since the days in Italy and Egypt, when he led them with Victory at his right hand, and Glory at his left. About the round table in the middle of the room sat Philippe and Henri. There were two bottles of wine on the table, some cheese and a dozen slices of thick, fine bread. There was also an empty chair at |