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Updated: June 23, 2025
At eight o'clock, all fog and mist, as you marched up the defile towards the Sonnenberg hills, the brave Gudin and his division feeling their way to Blucher. Comrade, how still you stepped, your bayonet thrust out before you, clearing the mists, your eyes straining, your teeth set, ready to thrust.
But he had hardly recognized the rubicund face now furrowed with blue lines, and seen the stiffened arms and the gunshot wound before he gave a stifled cry, exclaiming, "Let us be off, commandant." The Blues started. Hulot gave his arm to his young friend. "God's thunder!" he cried. "Never mind, it is no great matter." "But he is dead," said Gudin, "dead!
Hulot's men advanced at a run to save Gudin, who, being without arms, retreated from tree to tree, seizing his opportunity as the Chouans reloaded. His danger was soon over. Hulot and the Blues met him at the spot where the marquis had thrown his musket.
When Hulot reached the summit of the rocks, he detached all the soldiers in uniform from his main body, and made them into a line of sentinels, each communicating with the other, the first with Gudin, the last with Hulot; so that no shrub could escape the bayonets of the three lines which were now in a position to hunt the Gars across field and mountain.
Lannes, the sturdiest, most rough-and-ready of all the marshals, had arrived from Spain the night before. His presence increased the army's confidence that they would win, and next day he commanded a division formed from the corps of Morand, Gudin, and Nansouty.
"Well, we behaved like Bretons, and fought before explaining." The other men were stupefied on recognizing the little company. "Who the devil would have known them in those goatskins?" cried Beau-Pied, dismally. "It is a misfortune," said Gudin, "but we are all innocent if you were not informed of the sortie. What are you doing here?" he asked.
Here Gudin himself left the road with six of them, jumping the stiff hedge into the first field of gorse that he came to, while the other six by his orders did the same on the other side of the road. Gudin advanced to an apple-tree which happened to be in the middle of the field.
On his return Gudin found Hulot's little band increased in numbers by the arrival of several soldiers taken from the various posts in the town.
The patriot, Gudin, and the driver had let him alone, thinking him asleep, after discovering that it was useless to talk to a man whose stolid face betrayed an existence spent in measuring yards of linen, and an intellect employed in selling them at a good percentage above cost.
Meanwhile he ordered his men to set up their bivouacs and to start preparing a meal. His generals complained to him in vain at this culpable inaction; Bernadotte would not budge, so that Marshal Davout, with no more than twenty-five thousand men, comprising the divisions of Friant, Morland and Gudin, faced almost eighty thousand Prussians animated by the presence of their king.
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