United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yonder are all the kings of Europe, the general's flushed with victory, the Jupiter's darting thunderbolts; they have a hundred thousand victorious soldiers, and back of the hundred thousand a million; their cannon stand with yawning mouths, the match is lighted; they grind down under their heels the Imperial guards, and the grand army; they have just crushed Napoleon, and only Cambronne remains, only this earthworm is left to protest.
Such, with a few wretched prints representing Napoleon passing the Alps seated on an eagle; Poniatowsky and his white horse attempting to cross the Oder; Cambronne, with imperial moustachios, on his knees repeating the celebrated mot which he never said: "La garde meurt et ne se rend pas," &c., such, I am grieved to confess, is the miserable intellectual food, the wretched mental and moral stock of human and religious knowledge that supplies the literary and artistic wants of the greater portion of the peasants of our departments.
Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget invents the "Marseillaise," under the visitation of a breath from on high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes sweeping over these men, and they shake, and one of them sings the song supreme, and the other utters the frightful cry.
A single regiment of the Old Guard was formed by Napoleon into a last square around which to rally the fugitives. The Emperor stood in the midst and declared his purpose to die with them. Marshal Soult forced him out of the melee, and the famous square, commanded by Cambronne flinging his profane objurgation into the teeth of the English perished with the wild cry of "Vive l'Empereur!"
If Wellington had not begun, Blucher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man spending his last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of it, he is offered this mockery, life! How could he restrain himself?
There were no large houses, the so-called château on the Bucquoy road being a very moderate mansion, and, apart from it, the rectory, mairie, the mill by the pond used as Brigade Headquarters, and the pleasant villa called Poste Cambronne, alone stood out in modest prominence. There were very few inns, the largest of which bore the touching and appropriate sign, 'A la Renaissance.
It was between Mure and Vizele that Cambronne, who commanded his advanced guard of forty grenadiers, met suddenly a battalion sent forwards from Grenoble to arrest the march. The colonel refused to parley with Cambronne; either party halted until Napoleon himself came up. He did not hesitate for a moment.
Until dawn men and women paraded the streets singing the "Marseillaise" and shouting "Vive l'Empereur!" In a small room, simply furnished but cosy and comfortable, the great adventurer, who had conquered half the world and lost it and had now set out to conquer it again, sat with half a dozen of his most faithful friends: Cambronne and Raoul, Victor de Marmont and Emery.
A writer may no longer call a spade a spade; he must cautiously refer to it as an agricultural implement lest he shock the supersensitiveness of hedonists and call down upon his head the Anathema Maranatha of men infinitely worse than Oscar Wilde. I present extracts from the account of Cambronne, which he suspects may have given the pietistical Quakers a pain.
This Messire de Cambronne, when bidden to yield by you of England, answered this, 'The guard dies but never surrenders; and fought a long time afterwards, as became a good knight. In our wars with you of England it may have pleased the Fates to give you the greater success, but on our side, also, there has been no lack of brave deeds performed by brave men."
Word Of The Day