The Drums of War

We had been travelling since morning, three of us--my father, General Count Mahon, myself, and Joubert--to say nothing of Marengo the boarhound which followed our carriage. The great old family travelling-carriage, packed with luggage, wine, and cigars, and drawn by two stout horses, had been making the dust of Germany fly over the hedgeless German fields since dawn. It was noon now, and hot. I remember still the exact feel and smell of the blazing blue cushions as I pressed my childish cheek against them and felt how hot they were, and the unfailing pleasure and wonder with which the apple and plum trees bordering the road filled my soul. Apple trees and plum trees bordering the road, laden with fruit and unprotected, the snub-nosed German children we passed on the wayside, seemed to my mind happier than the inhabitants of Golconda, living in a country like that.

It was the first of September, 1860. I was only nine then, but I did not complain of the heat or the dust, or the cramp that inhabited, like a crab, the old-time travelling-carriage, seizing you now in the back, now in the leg, now in the spirit. For one thing, I was to be a soldier, like my father, and wear white moustaches and smoke cigars, and carry a sword; for another thing, we had been travelling a month, and I was inured to the business, and, for another thing, I was a Mahon.

The man beside me, buttoned in a blue frock-coat, adorned with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, stout, rubicund of face, opulent, and magnificent-looking, was, with the exception of my small self, the last representative of the Mahons of Tullaghmore.

Napoleon had drawn the Mahons from Ireland to France just as a magnet attracts steel-filings. My grandfather had seen the burning of Moscow, and had ridden in the charge of Millhaud's cuirassiers on that fatal Sunday men call Waterloo Day; and my father, the man beside me in the blue frock-coat, had adorned the French army with the help of his splendid personality, his sword, and a few francs a day, till his marriage with Marie Marquise de Saluce, a woman of marvellous beauty, great wealth, and the inheritor of the Château de Saluce, which is near Etiolles, but a few miles from Paris.

It was a love-match pure and simple--one of those fairyland marriages arranged by love--and she died when I was born.

My father would have shot himself only for Joubert--Joubert, corporal in the 121st of the Line, a personage with an angry, withered, sunburnt face, eyes and moustache like the eyes and moustache of a wrathful cat, the heart of a child, and the figure and perfume of a ramrod.

The sense of smell plays a large part in the lives of children, and conjures up visions with a tremendous potency, lost as the child deteriorates into a man.

Joubert smelt of gunpowder. Probably it was only the Caporal which he smoked, but to my mind it was the true smell of the Grand Army.

Sitting on Joubert's knee and listening to tales of battle, and sniffing him at the same time, I could see the Mamelukes charging, backgrounded by the Pyramids; I could hear the thunder of Marengo, the roar of the cannons, and the drums of war leading the Grand Army over the highways of Europe.

Echoes from the time before I was born.

What a splendid nurse for a child an old soldier makes if he is of the right sort! Joubert was my nurse and my picture-book.

A drummer of fifteen, he had beaten the charge for the "Growlers" at Waterloo, when the 121st of the Line, shoal upon shoal of bayonets, had stormed La Haye Sainte. He had received a bullet in the shoulder during that same charge; he had killed an Englishman; but all that seemed little compared with the fact that--HE HAD SEEN NAPOLEON!

Joubert was driving us.

We were bound for the Schloss Lichtenberg, not far from Homburg, on a visit to Baron Carl Lichtenberg, a relation of my mother. Of course, we could have travelled by more rapid means of transport, but it suited the humour of my father to travel just as he did in his own carriage, driven by his own man, with all his luggage about him, after the fashion of a nobleman of the year 1810.

We had stopped at Carlsruhe, we had stopped at Mayence, we had stopped here and there. How that journey lies like a living and lovely picture in my mind! Time has blown away the dust. I do not feel the fatigue now. The vast blue sky of a continental summer, the poplar trees, the fields, the storks' nests, the old-time inns, Carlsruhe and its military bands, Mayence and its drums and marching soldiers, the vivid blue of the Rhine, and the courtyards and pleasaunces of the lordly houses we stopped at, lie before me, a picture made poetical by distance, a picture which stands as the beginning of my life and the beginning of this story of war and love.

Joubert was driving us.

"Joubert," cried my father, "we are near Frankfort now. Remember, the Hôtel des Hollandaise."

Joubert, who had been speechless for miles, flung up his elbows just as a duck flings up her wings, he gave the horses a cut with the whip, and then he burst out:

"Frankfort. Ah, yes! Frankfort. Do you think I can't smell it? I can smell a German town a league away, just as I can see a German woman a league away, by the size of her feet. Ah, mon Dieu! Come up, Cæsare; come up, Polastron. My God! Frankfort!"

At a hotel, before strangers, in any public place, it was always "Oui, mon Général," "Oui, monsieur"; but alone, with no one to listen, Joubert talked to the General just as the General talked to Joubert. An extraordinary and solid friendship cemented the relationship of master and man ever since that terrible day in the library of the Château de Saluce, when Joubert had torn the pistol from the hand of his master, flung it through the glass of the great window, and, turning from a paid servant into a man tremendous and heroic, had wrestled with him as the angel wrestled with Jacob.

We passed through the suburbs of the town, and then through the Ghetto. You never can imagine how much colour is in dirt till you see the Jews' quarter of Frankfort--how much poetry, and also, how much perfume!

Joubert, who could not speak a word of the Hogs' language--as he was pleased to style the language of Germany--drove on, piercing the narrow streets to the heart of the town, and in the Kaisserstrasse he drew up. The General inquired the way of a policeman, and in five minutes or less we were before the doors of the Hôtel des Hollandaise.