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Updated: May 6, 2025
His address to Bonaparte, announcing the votes of the troops under him respecting the consulate for life and the elevation to the Imperial throne, contain such mean and abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it must have required more self-command and more courage to pronounce them than to brave the fire of a hundred cannons; but these very addresses, contemptible as their contents are, procured him the Field-marshal's staff.
As their former chief entered a room in the disorder of maps and packing-cases, the staff-officers rose from their work to stand at salute like stone images, in respect to a field-marshal's rank. There was no word of greeting but a telling silence before Turcas spoke. His voice had lost its parchment crinkle and become natural.
"Happy fellow!" he said, sighing; "he can gallop as light as a bird, while I must sit here as a poor old prisoner!" At this moment his adjutant, Major von Nostiz, rode up to the field-marshal's carriage. "Well, Nostiz, tell me how things look in the outer world. What is the news?" "Bad and good, your excellency," said Nostiz.
They turned their heads simultaneously inward without moving any other part of their bodies. They nodded to one another. "Well," cried the Prince, "what reward do you desire?" "Now for the Field-Marshal's wand!" said the Councillor near to me, under his breath. "Twelve dozen Rhenish!" said Jorian. The Prince looked at Boris. "And you?" he said.
By the third deal Schwerin had lost his twenty counters and asked for twenty more; but the banker told him he must pay for them, and the self-styled field-marshal's nephew lapsed into silence and played no more. At the following deal Castelbajac was in the same position as his friend, and being on my side he begged to be allowed to take ten pieces.
I remembered my old field-marshal's maxim, Von Feinden umringt, ist die Zeit zu zerschmettern; and truly, being so plentifully outnumbered, we did strike both first and hard. A line of the ragged horsemen strung itself awkwardly across the road to guard the flimsy barricade, and at this we charged, stirrup to stirrup.
He was a youngish officer sent from the Field-Marshal's staff to discuss some diplomatic-military details with my chief. The business part was soon over, for there was really little to decide, and then the man fell to talking about what should be done.
Knowing my name and circumstance, and having, moreover, a high regard for my old field-marshal's genius, Major Ferguson was very willing to make use of my experience. These askings from one whom I knew for a brave and honorable gentleman let me fall between two stools. As a patriot spy, it was my duty to turn the major's confidence as a weapon against him.
He held it, not as other conductors do, by the end, but gripped it about the middle with his clenched fist, waving it so as to make it evident that he wielded his baton like a field-marshal's staff, not for beating time, but for command.
The sun, reaching down to the mountain-girt horizon in the west, filled all the upper air with the glory of its departing, and the higher leaf plumes of the great maples before my cabin door wrought lustrous patterns in gilded green upon a zenith background of turquoise shot with crimson, like the figurings of some rich old tapestries I had once seen in my field-marshal's castle in the Mark of Moravia.
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