Temporarily Roger ignored the Corporal's insolence and said, 'We shall have to be patient; wait until our wounds are healed. Meanwhile our best policy will be to give these people no trouble and allow them to believe that we are resigned to our fate. It is getting dark again, and the more sleep we get, the sooner we'll recover. We'll talk things over in the morning.'
With no more said, but mostly gloomy thoughts, they wriggled down into the hay and made themselves as comfortable as they could for the night.
They all woke early. For the first time Roger took careful stock of his companions, and asked them about themselves.
Sergeant Fournier was a typical old soldier, with one ear shot away and a thick, drooping moustache. As a ragged sans calotte he had been with Kellermann at Valmay, that most extraordinary turning point in history, where the French, merely by standing fast and firing their cannon, had broken the Austrian attack, caused consternation in their aged commander and led him to abandon the attempt to invade France. Fournier had then served under Lannes in the glorious campaign in Italy in '96, been transferred to the Army of the Rhine, distinguished himself in General Moreau's great victory at Hohenlinden, later been promoted to the Consular—now the Imperial—Guard and had since been present at all Napoleon's battles. He was forty-two, but his lined face made him look much older. He had been wounded seven times and been decorated with the Legion d'Honneur. He was a Revolutionary of the old school, yet regarded the Emperor as his God, and his own Commander of the Imperial Guard, young Marshal Bessieres, with admiring awe. Roger knew that in him at least he had one man he could rely on.
Hans Hoffman was a nonentity. He was one of the many thousands of teenagers from the Rhineland whom Napoleon had forced the minor sovereigns, who had perforce become his allies, to conscript and send to aid him in his campaign. Secretly Hoffman loathed the French and, given the opportunity, would have deserted; but lacked the courage.
Corporal Vitu was a very different type. The son of a lawyer who had been prominent in the early days of the Revolution, he was a well-educated man in his late twenties; married and with one son. Even so, he had not been able to escape the call-up by which, now ahead of schedule, the Emperor was compelled to recruit fresh levies to make good the losses of his armies. Vitu had a thin, bitter mouth and a long nose. He was fluent, knowledgeable and aggressive; and Roger soon sized him up as a born trouble-maker.
When they talked over their situation, Vitu said, 'I'll take a chance and attempt to escape when the time is ripe. But I'll not return to the Army.'
'You will,' Fournier declared hotly. 'It's your duty, and I'll see to it that you do it.'
'Duty be damned,' the Corporal declared. 'If it were to defend France, I'd fight again, as you did at Jemappes and Wattignies. But here, in this outlandish place, why the hell should I?'
'Them Prussians would be across the Rhine again if we hadn't given them a licking at Jena; and the Russians with them. Only a fool would rather wait till he had to fight battles in his own country, instead of in the enemy's.'
'Nonsense! Neither of them would have attacked us. What had they to gain by going to war? Nothing! Not since '99 has France been in the least danger. We have been the victims of Bonaparte's crazy ambitions ever since. He's dragged us from our homes to march, starve and fight all over Europe, solely for his own glory, and I've had enough of it.'
Roger knew that the Corporal was expressing the views of a great part of the rank and file of the Army; but, as a senior officer, he could not let such remarks pass, so he said, 'That's quite enough, Corporal. Prussia and Russia are both monarchies. They would impose a King on us again if they could. If we are to retain our liberties, they have got to be defeated.'
'Liberties!' sneered Vitu. 'You must have been asleep for the past ten years, Colonel. The days of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" are as far behind us as the Dark Ages. Every law the Convention made has been annulled or altered, and the new Constitution of the Year XII, that Bonaparte gave us soon after he crowned himself in Notre Dame, has turned us into a race of slaves. As for Equality, if the men who won it for us in '93 could sec things as they are now, they'd turn in their graves. The people's representative has made himself an Emperor and his brothers Kings. His hangers-on are grand dignitaries, Princes, Dukes and the like. They doll themselves up in gold braid, jewels and feathers, cat off the fat of the land, and get themselves fortunes by looting every country they invade; while we poor devils are paid only a few francs a day and driven to risk our lives so that they can further enrich themselves.'
'You've got something there,' the Sergeant acknowledged. 'Nevertheless, I'm for the Emperor body and soul. He knows what's best for France, and never lets his men down.'
'All the same,' young Hoffman put in, 'I don't think it's fair that he should force men from other countries to fight his battles. Where I come from we had no quarrel with anyone; neither had the Dutch, the Italians and the Bavarians, yet there are thousands of us here who have been marching and fighting for years, when we might have been working happily in our farms or vineyards, with a good wife and bringing up a family.'
'Yes, that's hard luck,' Roger agreed. 'But remember, France has liberated you from the old feudal system by which all but your nobility were virtually chattels of your hereditary Princes. France has paid dearly for that in the loss, for over fifteen years, of a great part of her young manpower. To make good these losses, the Emperor has no alternative but to draw upon his allies.'
'That was fair enough in the old days,' Vitu argued. 'Then we needed every man we could get to fight in Italy and on the Moselle. But that is so no longer. What has the Rhineland or the Netherlands to gain by helping to conquer Poland? And what a campaign it's been! Staggering about in the mud, our uniforms worn to tatters, losing our way in blizzards. It's all very well for you, Colonel, and the rest of the gilded staff. You billet yourselves in the best houses in the towns, keep for yourselves the pick of every convoy of food and wine that comes up from the rear, attend splendid balls, then play chase me round the bed-posts with all the prettiest women. But meantime we have to act like fiends to the wretched peasants to get enough food to stop our bellies from rumbling and sleep in barns so cold that it is not unusual to find that by morning some of our comrades have frozen to death.'
Roger knew all this to be true, but he also knew that his best hope of escape lay in having his three companions willingly accept his leadership; so he tactfully agreed that the Army had recently had a terribly hard time, although he maintained that was no fault of the Emperor's, but due to the exceptionally bleak and sparsely-populated country over which they were fighting.
During the days that followed, the unlovely Baroness Freda came regularly to dress their wounds, and Kutzie twice a day with a big bowl of stew, in which there were pieces of meat that, from its sweetish flavour, Roger guessed to be horseflesh. As the intense cold would have prevented the dead animals from putrefying, he had little doubt that the peasants for miles round, and the survivors of whichever army had kept the field, were gorging themselves upon it.
On their third day in the loft, it was found that young Hoffman's thigh wound had become gangrenous. No surgeon being available, nothing could be done about it. For some hours he babbled deliriously in German and, on the fourth day, died.
For most of the time while their wounds were healing, they talked of the campaigns in which they had fought, and the Marshals under whom they had served. All of them admired Lannes, Ney and Augereau, who invariably led their troops into battle in full uniform, their chests blazing with stars and decorations.