The Eagle of the Empire. Cyrus Townsend Brady

MARQUIS GRANTS AN INTERVIEW

       CHAPTER XXIV

       ON THE WHOLE DEATH MAY BE BETTER THAN LIFE

       CHAPTER XXV

       NOT EVEN LOVE CAN FIND A WAY

       CHAPTER XXVI

       THEY MEET A LION IN THE WAY

       CHAPTER XXVII

       COMRADE! GENERAL! EMPEROR!

       BOOK III

       THE LAST TRY

       CHAPTER XXVIII

       AT THE STAMP OF THE EMPEROR'S FOOT

       CHAPTER XXIX

       WATERLOO—THE FINAL REVIEW

       CHAPTER XXX

       WATERLOO—THE CHARGE OF D'ERLON

       CHAPTER XXXI

       WATERLOO—THE LAST OF THE GUARD

       CHAPTER XXXII

       AT LAST THE EAGLE AND THE WOMAN

PREFACE

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      The Battle of Waterloo, which was fought just one hundred years ago and with which the story in this book ends, is popularly regarded as one of the decisive battles of the world, particularly with reference to the career of the greatest of all Captains. Personally some study has led me to believe that Bautzen was really the decisive battle of the Napoleonic wars. If the Emperor had there won the overwhelming victory to which his combinations and the fortunes of war entitled him he would still have retained his Empire. Whether he would have been satisfied or not is another question; and anyway as I am practically alone among students and critics in my opinions about Bautzen they can be dismissed. And that he lost that battle was his own fault anyway!

      However Napoleon's genius cannot be denied any more than his failure. In this book I have sought to show him at his best and also almost at his worst. For sheer brilliance, military and mental, the campaigning in France in 1814 could not be surpassed. He is there with his raw recruits, his beardless boys, his old guard, his tactical and strategical ability, his furious energy, his headlong celerity and his marvelous power of inspiration; just as he was in Italy when he revolutionized the art of war and electrified the world. Many of these qualities are in evidence in the days before Waterloo, but during the actual battle upon which his fate and the fate of the world turned, the tired, broken, ill man is drowsily nodding before a farmhouse by the road, while Ney, whose superb and headlong courage was not accompanied by any corresponding military ability, wrecks the last grand army.

      And there is no more dramatic an incident in all history, I believe, than Napoleon's advance on the Fifth-of-the-line drawn up on the Grenoble Road on the return from Elba.

      Nor do the Roman Eagles themselves seem to have made such romantic appeal or to have won such undying devotion as the Eagles of the Empire.

      This story was written just before the outbreak of the present European war and is published while it is in full course. Modern commanders wield forces beside which even the great Army of the Nations that invaded Russia is scarcely more than a detachment, and battles last for days, weeks, even months—Waterloo was decided in an afternoon!—yet war is the same. If there be any difference it simply grows more horrible. The old principles, however, are unchanged, and over the fields upon which Napoleon marched and fought, armies are marching and fighting in practically the same way to-day. And great Captains are still studying Frederick, Wellington and Bonaparte as they have ever done.

      The author modestly hopes that this book may not only entertain by the love story, the tragic yet happily ended romance within its pages—for there is romance here aside from the great Captain and his exploits—but that in a small way it may serve to set forth not so much the brilliance and splendor and glory of war as the horror of it.

      We are frightfully fascinated by war, even the most peaceable and peace-loving of us. May this story help to convey to the reader some of the other side of it; the hunger, the cold, the weariness, the suffering, the disaster, the despair of the soldier; as well as the love and the joy and the final happiness of the beautiful Laure and the brave Marteau to say nothing of redoubtable old Bal-Arrêt, the Bullet-Stopper—whose fates were determined on the battlefield amid the clash of arms.

      CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY.

      THE HEMLOCKS,

       EDGECLIFF TERRACE, PARK-HILL-ON-HUDSON.

       YONKERS, N. Y.

      EPIPHANY-TIDE, 1915.

PROLOGUE

       VIVE L'EMPEREUR

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      The weatherworn Château d'Aumenier stands in the midst of a noble park of trees forming part of an extensive domain not far to the northwest of the little town of Sézanne, in the once famous county of Champagne, in France. The principal room of the castle is a great hall in the oldest part of the venerable pile which dates back for eight hundred years, or to the tenth century and the times of the famous Count Eudes himself, for whom it was held by one of his greatest vassals.

      The vast apartment is filled with rare and interesting mementos of its distinguished owners, including spoils of war and trophies of the chase, acquired in one way or another in the long course of their history, and bespeaking the courage, the power, the ruthlessness, and, sometimes, the unscrupulousness of the hard-hearted, heavy-handed line. Every country in Europe and every age, apparently, has been levied upon to adorn this great hall, with its long mullioned windows, its enormous fireplace, its huge carved stone mantel, its dark oak paneled walls and beamed ceiling. But, the most interesting, the most precious of all the wonderful things therein has a place of honor to itself at the end farthest from the main entrance.

      Fixed against this wall is a broken staff, or pole, surmounted by a small metallic figure. The staff is fastened to the wall by clamps of tempered steel which are further secured by delicate locks of skillful and intricate workmanship. The pole is topped by the gilded effigy