Chapter X: Part 10

The attempt to reach that point began in the reign of Henry VIII of England, when Master John Davis sailed up the Greenland coast to a big cliff which he named after his becker, Sanderson’s Hope. The cliff is sheer from the sea three thousand four hundred feet high, with one sharp streak of ice from base to summit. It towers above Upernivik, the most northerly village in the world, and is one thousand one hundred twenty-eight miles from the Pole.

In 1594 Barentz carried the Dutch flag a little farther north but soon Hudson gave the lead back to Great Britain, and after that, for two hundred seventy-six years the British flag unchallenged went on from victory to victory in the conquest of the North. At last in 1882 Lieutenant Greely of the United States Army beat us by four miles at a cost of nearly his whole expedition, which was destroyed by famine. Soon Doctor Nansen broke the American record for Norway, to be beaten in turn by an Italian prince, the Duke d’Abruzzi. But meanwhile Peary, an American naval officer, had commenced his wonderful course of twenty-three years’ special training; and in 1906 he broke the Italian record. His way was afoot with dog-trains across the ice of the Polar sea, and he would have reached the North Pole, but for wide lanes of open sea, completely barring the way. At two hundred twenty-seven miles from the Pole he was forced to retreat, and camp very near to death before he won back to his base camp.

Peary’s ship was American to the last detail of needles and thread, but the vessel was his own invention, built for ramming ice-pack. The ship’s officers and crew were all Newfoundlanders, trained from boyhood in the seal fishery of the Labrador ice-pack. They were, alas! British, but that could not be helped. To make amends the exploring officers were Americans, but they were specially trained by Peary to live and travel as Eskimos, using the native dress, the dog-trains and the snow houses.

Other explorers had done the same, but Peary went further, for he hired the most northerly of the Eskimo tribes, and from year to year educated the pick of the boys, who grew up to regard him as a father, to obey his orders exactly, and to adopt his improvements on their native methods. So he had hunting parties to store up vast supplies of meat, and skins of musk-ox, ice-bear, reindeer, fox, seal and walrus, each for some special need in the way of clothing. He had women to make the clothes. He had two hundred fifty huskie dogs, sleds of his own device, and Eskimo working parties under his white officers. In twenty-three years he found out how to boil tea in ten minutes, and that one detail saved ninety minutes a day for actual marching--a margin in case of accident. Add to all that Peary’s own enormous strength of mind and body, in perfect training, just at the prime of life. He was so hardened by disaster that he had become almost a maniac, with one idea, one motive in life, one hope--that of reaching the Pole. Long hours before anything went wrong an instinct would awaken him out of the soundest sleep to look out for trouble and avert calamity.

A glance at the map will show how Greenland, and the islands north of Canada, reach to within four hundred miles of the Pole. Between is a channel leading from Baffin’s Bay into the Arctic Ocean. The _Roosevelt_, Peary’s ship, forced a passage through that channel, then turned to the left, creeping and dodging between the ice-field and the coast of Grant Land. Captain Bartlett was in the crow’s-nest, piloting, and Peary, close below him, clung to the standing rigging while the ship butted and charged and hammered through the floes. Bartlett would coax and wheedle, or shout at the ship to encourage her, “Rip ’em, Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my beauty! Now again! Once more!”

Who knows? In the hands of a great seaman like Bartlett a ship seems to be a living creature, and no matter what slued the _Roosevelt_ she had a furious habit of her own, coming to rest with her nose to the north for all the world like a compass. Her way was finally blocked just seventy-five miles short of the most northerly headland, Cape Columbia, and the stores had to be carried there for the advanced base. The winter was spent in preparation, and on March first began the dash for the Pole.

No party with dog-trains could possibly carry provisions for a return journey of eight hundred miles. If there had been islands on the route it would have been the right thing to use them as advanced bases for a final rush to the Pole. But there were no islands, and it would be too risky to leave stores upon the shifting ice-pack. There was, therefore, but one scheme possible. Doctor Goodsell marched from the coast to Camp A, unloaded his stores and returned. Using the stores at Camp A, Mr. Borup was able to march to Camp B, where he unloaded and turned back. With the stores at Camp B, Professor Marvin marched to Camp C and turned back. With the stores at Camp C, Captain Bartlett marched to Camp D and turned back. With the stores at Camp D, Peary had his sleds fully loaded, with a selection, besides, of the fittest men and dogs for the last lap of the journey, and above all not too many mouths to feed.

It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers, turned back with their Eskimo parties, were needed to pilot them to the coast. All the natives got back safely, but Professor Marvin was drowned. If Peary had not sent all his officers back, would he have been playing the game in leaving his Eskimo parties without navigating officers to guide them in the event of a storm? There is no doubt that his conduct was that of a wise and honorable man. But the feeling remains--was it sportsman-like to send Captain Bartlett back--the one man who had done most for his success, denied any share in the great final triumph? Bartlett made no complaint, and in his cheery acceptance of the facts cut a better figure than even Commander Peary.

With his negro servant and four Eskimos, the leader set forth on the last one hundred thirty-three miles across the ice. It was not plain level ice like that of a pond, but heaved into sharp hills caused by the pressure, with broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs. The whole pack was drifting southward before the wind, here breaking into mile-wide lanes of black and foggy sea, there newly frozen and utterly unsafe. Although the sun did not set, the frost was sharp, at times twenty and thirty degrees below zero, while for the most part a cloudy sky made it impossible to take observations. Here great good fortune awaited Peary, for as he neared the Pole, the sky cleared, giving him brilliant sunlight. By observing the sun at frequent intervals he was able to reckon with his instruments until at last he found himself within five miles of ninety degrees north--the Pole. A ten-mile tramp proved he had passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made the final tests. Somewhere within a mile of where he stood was the exact point, the north end of the axis on which the earth revolves. As nearly as he could reckon, the very point was marked for that moment upon the drifting ice-field by a berg-like hill of ice, and on this summit he hoisted the flag, a gift from his wife which he had carried for fifteen years, a tattered silken remnant of Old Glory.

“Perhaps,” he writes, “it ought not to have been so, but when I knew for a certainty that I had reached the goal, there was not a thing in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it, there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the earth’s surface had been the object of my every effort. To obtain it my whole being, physical, mental and moral, had been dedicated. The determination to reach the Pole had become so much a part of my being that, strange as it may seem, I long ago ceased to think of myself save as an instrument for the attainment of that end.... But now I had at last succeeded in planting the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire. It is not easy to write about such a thing, but I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the great adventure stories--a story the world had been waiting to hear for nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag that during a lonely and isolated life had come to be for me the symbol of home and everything I loved--and might never see again.”

Here is the record left at the North Pole:--

“90 N. Lat., North Pole,
“April 6th, 1909.

“I have to-day hoisted the national ensign of the United States of
America at this place, which my observations indicate to be the
North Polar axis of the earth, and have formally taken possession
of the entire region, and adjacent, for and in the name of the
president of the United States of America.

“I leave this record and United States flag in possession.

“ROBERT E. PEARY,
“United States Navy.”

Before the hero of this very grand adventure returned to the world, there also arrived from the Arctic a certain Doctor Cook, an American traveler who claimed to have reached the Pole. The Danish Colony in Greenland received him with joy, the Danish Geographical Society welcomed him with a banquet of honor, and the world rang with his triumph. Then came Commander Peary out of the North, proclaiming that this rival was a liar. So Doctor Cook was able to strike an attitude of injured innocence, hinting that poor old Peary was a fraud; and the world rocked with laughter.

In England we may have envied the glory that Peary had so bravely won for his flag and country, but knew his record too well to doubt his honor, and welcomed his triumph with no ungenerous thoughts. The other claimant had a record of impudent and amusing frauds, but still he was entitled to a hearing, and fair judgment of his claim from men of science. Among sportsmen we do not expect the runners, after a race, to call one another liars, and were sorry that Peary should for a moment lapse from the dignity expected of brave men.

It is perhaps ungenerous to mention such trifling points of conduct, and yet we worship heroes only when we are quite sure that our homage is not a folly. And so we measure Peary with the standard set by his one rival, Roald Amundsen, who conquered the Northwest passage, then added to that immortal triumph the conquest of the South Pole. In that Antarctic adventure Amundsen challenged a fine British explorer, Captain Scott. The British expedition was equipped with every costly appliance wealth could furnish, and local knowledge of the actual route. The Norseman ventured into an unknown route, scantily equipped, facing the handicap of poverty. He won by sheer merit, by his greatness as a man, and by the loyal devotion he earned at the hands of his comrades. Then he returned to Norway, they say, disguised under an assumed name to escape a public triumph, and his one message to the world was a generous tribute to his defeated rival. The modern world has no greater hero, no more perfect gentleman, no finer adventurer than Roald Amundsen.

XLVIII

WOMEN

Two centuries ago Miss Mary Read, aged thirteen, entered the Royal Navy as a boy. A little later she deserted, and still disguised as a boy, went soldiering, first in a line regiment, afterward as a trooper. She was very brave. On the peace of Ryswick, seeing that there was to be no more fighting, she went into the merchant service for a change, and was bound for the West Indies when the ship was gathered in by pirates. Rather than walk the plank, she became a pirate herself and rose from rank to rank until she hoisted the black flag with the grade of captain. So she fell in with Mrs. Bonny, widow of a pirate captain. The two amiable ladies, commanding each her own vessel, went into a business partnership, scuttling ships and cutting throats for years with marked success.

In the seventeenth century an escaped nun did well as a seafaring man under the Spanish colors, ruffled as a gallant in Chili, and led a gang of brigands in the Andes. On her return to Spain as a lady, she was very much petted at the court of Madrid. The last of many female bandits was Miss Pearl Hart, who, in 1890, robbed a stage-coach in Arizona.

Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician and a successful business man, died in New York, and was found to be a woman.

But of women who, without disguise, have excelled in adventurous trades, I have known in Western Canada two who are gold miners and two who are cowboys. Mrs. Langdon, of California, drove a stage-coach for years. Miss Calamity Jane was a noted Montana bull-whacker. Miss Minnie Hill and Miss Collie French are licensed American pilots. Miss Evelyn Smith, of Nova Scotia, was a jailer. Lady Clifford holds Board of Trade certificates as an officer in our mercantile marine. A distinguished French explorer, Madame Dieulafoy, is an officer of the Legion of Honor, entitled to a military salute from all sentries, and has the singular right by law of wearing the dress of a man. Several English ladies have been explorers. Miss Bird explored Japan, conquered Long’s Peak, and was once captured by Mountain Jim, the Colorado robber. Lady Florence Dixie explored Patagonia, Miss Gordon-Cumming explored a hundred of the South Sea Isles, put an end to a civil war in Samoa and was one of the first travelers on the Pamirs. Mrs. Mulhall has traced the sources of the Amazons. Lady Baker, Mrs. Jane Moir, and Miss Kingsley rank among the great pioneers of Africa. Lady Hester Stanhope, traveling in the _Levant_, the ship being loaded with treasure, her own property, was cast away on a desert island near Rhodes. Escaping thence she traversed the Arabian deserts, and by a gathering of forty thousands of Arabs was proclaimed queen of Palmyra. This beautiful and gifted woman reigned through the first decades of the nineteenth century from her palace on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Two other British princesses in wild lands were Her Highness Florence, Maharanee of Patiala, and the sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.

Among women who have been warriors the greatest, perhaps, were the British Queen Boadicea, and the saintly and heroic Joan of Arc, burned, to our everlasting shame, at Rouen. Frances Scanagatti, a noble Italian girl, fought with distinction as an officer in the Austrian army, once led the storming of a redoubt, and after three years in the field against Napoleon, went home, a young lady again, of sweet and mild disposition.

Doctor James Barry, M. D., inspector-general of hospitals in the British Army, a duelist, a martinet, and a hopelessly insubordinate officer, died in 1865 at the age of seventy-one, and was found to be a woman.

Apart from hosts of adventurous camp followers there have been disguised women serving at different times in nearly every army. Loreta Velasquez, of Cuba, married to an American army officer, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, raised a corps of volunteers, took command, was commissioned in the Confederate Army during the Civil War of 1861–5, and fought as Lieutenant Harry Buford. She did extraordinary work as a spy in the northern army. After the war, her husband having fallen in battle, she turned gold miner in California.

Mrs. Christian Davies, born in 1667 in Dublin, was a happy and respectable married woman with a large family, when her life was wrecked by a sudden calamity, for her husband was seized by a press gang and dragged away to serve in the fleet. Mrs. Davis, crazy with grief, got her children adopted by the neighbors, and set off in search of the man she loved. When she returned two years later as a soldier, she found her children happy, the neighbors kind, and herself utterly unknown. She went away contented. She served under the Duke of Marlborough throughout his campaigns in Europe, first as an infantry soldier, but later as a dragoon, for at the battles of Blenheim and Fontenoy she was a squadron leader of the Scots Grays. The second dragoon guards have many curious traditions of “Mother Ross.” When after twelve years military service, she ultimately found her husband, he was busy flirting with a waitress in a Dutch inn, and she passed by, saying nothing. In her capacity as a soldier she was a flirt herself, making love to every girl she met, a gallant, a duelist, and notably brave. At last, after a severe wound, her sex was discovered and she forgave her husband. She died in Chelsea Hospital at the age of one hundred eight, and her monument may be seen in the graveyard.

Hannah Snell left her home because her husband had bolted with another woman, and she wanted to find and kill him. In course of her search, she enlisted, served as a soldier against the Scots rebellion of 1745, and once received a punishment of five hundred lashes. A series of wonderful adventures led her into service as a marine on board H. M. S. _Swallow_. After a narrow escape from foundering, this vessel joined Admiral Boscawen’s fleet in the East Indies. She showed such extreme gallantry in the attack on Mauritius and in the siege of Areacopong, that she was chosen for special work in a forlorn hope. In this fight she avenged the death of a comrade by killing the author of it with her own hands. At the siege of Pondicherry she received eleven wounds in the legs, and a ball in the body which she extracted herself for fear of revealing the secret of her sex. On her return voyage to England she heard that she need not bother about killing her husband, because he had been decently hanged for murder. So on landing at Portsmouth she revealed herself to her messmates as a woman, and one of them promptly proposed to her. She declined and went on the stage, but ultimately received a pension of thirty pounds a year, and set up as a publican at the sign of the Women in Masquerade.

Anna Mills, able seaman on board the _Maidstone_ frigate in 1740, made herself famous for desperate valor.

Mary Ann, youngest of Lord Talbot’s sixteen natural children, was the victim of a wicked guardian who took her to the wars as his foot-boy. As a drummer boy she served through the campaigns in Flanders, dressing two severe wounds herself. Her subsequent masquerade as a sailor led to countless adventures. She was a seaman on a French lugger, powder monkey on a British ship of the line, fought in Lord Howe’s great victory and was crippled for life. Later she was a merchant seaman, after that a jeweler in London, pensioned for military service, and was last heard of as a bookseller’s housemaid in 1807.

Mary Dixon did sixteen years’ service, and fought at Waterloo. She was still living fifty years afterward, “a strong, powerful, old woman.”

Phœbe Hessel fought in the fifth regiment of foot, and was wounded in the arm at Fontenoy. After many years of soldiering she retired from service and was pensioned by the prince regent, George IV. A tombstone is inscribed to her memory in the old churchyard at Brighton.

In this bald record there is no room for the adventures of such military and naval heroines as prisoners of war, as leaders in battle, as victims of shipwreck, or as partakers in some of the most extraordinary love-affairs ever heard of.

Hundreds of stories might be told of women conspicuous for valor, meeting hazards as great as ever have fallen to the lot of men. In one case, the casting away of the French frigate _Medusa_, the men, almost without exception, performed prodigies of cowardice, while two or three of the women made a wonderful journey across the Sahara Desert to Senegambia, which is the one bright episode in the most disgraceful disaster on record. In the defenses of Leyden and Haarlem, besieged by Spanish armies, the Dutch women manned the ramparts with the men, inspired them throughout the hopeless months, and shared the general fate when all the survivors were butchered. And the valor of Englishwomen during the sieges of our strongholds in India, China and South Africa, has made some of the brightest pages of our history.

XLIX

THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA

Only the other day, the king of England was proclaimed emperor of India, and all the princes and governors of that empire presented their swords in homage. This homage was rendered at Delhi, the ancient capital of Hindustan; and it is only one hundred and ten years since Delhi fell, and Hindustan surrendered to the British arms. We have to deal with the events that led up to the conquest of India.

The Moslem sultans, sons of the Great Mogul, had long reigned over Hindustan, but in 1784 Shah Alam, last of these emperors, was driven from Delhi. In his ruin he appealed for help to Madhoji Scindhia, a Hindu prince from the South, who kindly restored the emperor to his palace, then gave him into the keeping of a jailer, who gouged out the old man’s eyes. Still Shah Alam, the blind, helpless, and at times very hungry prisoner, was emperor of Northern India, and in his august name Scindhia led the armies to collect the taxes of Hindustan. No tax was collected without a battle.

Scindhia himself was one of many turbulent Mahratta princes subject to the peshwa of Poona, near Bombay. He had to sit on the peshwa’s head at Poona, and the emperor’s head at Delhi, while he fought the whole nobility and gentry of India, and kept one eye cocked for British invasions from the seaboard. The British held the ocean, surrounded India, and were advancing inland. Madhoji Scindhia was a very busy man.

He had never heard of tourists, and when De Boigne, an Italian gentleman, came up-country to see the sights, his highness, scenting a spy, stole the poor man’s luggage. De Boigne, veteran of the French and Russian armies, and lately retired from the British service, was annoyed at the loss of his luggage, and having nothing left but his sword, offered the use of that to Scindhia’s nearest enemy. In those days scores of Europeans, mostly French, and scandalous rogues as a rule, were serving in native armies. Though they liked a fight, they so loved money that they would sell their masters to the highest bidder. Scindhia observed that De Boigne was a pretty good man, and the Savoyard adventurer was asked to enter his service.

De Boigne proved honest, faithful to his prince, a tireless worker, a glorious leader, the very pattern of manliness. The battalions which he raised for Scindhia were taught the art of war as known in Europe, they were well armed, fed, disciplined, and paid their wages; they were led by capable white men, and always victorious in the field. At Scindhia’s death, De Boigne handed over to the young prince Daulat Rao, his heir, an army of forty thousand men, which had never known defeat, together with the sovereignty of India.

The new Scindhia was rotten, and now the Italian, broken down with twenty years of service, longed for his home among the Italian vineyards. Before parting with his highness, he warned him rather to disband the whole army than ever be tempted into conflict with the English. So De Boigne laid down the burden of the Indian empire, and retired to his vineyards in Savoy. There for thirty years he befriended the poor, lived simply, entertained royally, and so died full of years and honors.

While De Boigne was still fighting for Scindhia, a runaway Irish sailor had drifted up-country, and taken service in one of the native states as a private soldier. George Thomas was as chivalrous as De Boigne, with a great big heart, a clear head, a terrific sword, and a reckless delight in war. Through years of rough and tumble adventure he fought his way upward, until with his own army of five thousand men he invaded and conquered the Hariana. This district, just to the westward of Delhi, was a desert, peopled by tribes so fierce that they had never been subdued, but their Irish king won all their hearts, and they settled down quite peacefully under his government. His revenue was eighteen hundred thousand pounds a year. At Hansi, his capital town, he coined his own money, cast his own cannon, made muskets and powder, and set up a pension fund for widows and orphans of his soldiers. All round him were hostile states, and whenever he felt dull he conquered a kingdom or so, and levied tribute. If his men went hungry, he starved with them; if they were weary, he marched afoot; the army worshiped him, and the very terror of his name brought strong cities to surrender, put legions of Sikh cavalry to flight. All things seemed possible to such a man, even the conquest of great Hindustan.

De Boigne had been succeeded as commander-in-chief under Scindhia by Perron, a runaway sailor, a Frenchman, able and strong. De Boigne’s power had been a little thing compared with the might and splendor of Perron, who actually reigned over Hindustan, stole the revenues, and treated Scindhia’s orders with contempt. Perron feared only one man on earth, this rival adventurer, this Irish rajah of the Hariana, and sent an expedition to destroy him.

The new master of Hindustan detested the English, and degrading the capable British officers who had served De Boigne, procured Frenchmen to take their place, hairdressers, waiters, scalawags, all utterly useless. Major Bourguien, the worst of the lot, was sent against Thomas and got a thrashing.

But Thomas, poor soul, had a deadlier enemy than this coward, and now lay drunk in camp for a week celebrating his victory instead of attending to business. He awakened to find his force of five thousand men besieged by thirty thousand veterans. There was no water, spies burned his stacks of forage, his battalions were bribed to desert, or lost all hope. Finally with three English officers and two hundred cavalry, Thomas cut his way through the investing army and fled to his capital.

The coward Bourguien had charge of the pursuing force that now invested Hanei. Bourguien’s officers breached the walls and took the town by storm, but Thomas fell back upon the citadel. Then Bourguien sent spies to bribe the garrison that Thomas might be murdered, but his officers went straight to warn the fallen king. To them he surrendered.

That night Thomas dined with the officers, and all were merry when Bourguien proposed a toast insulting his prisoner. The officers turned their glasses down refusing to drink. Thomas burst into tears; but then he drew upon Bourguien, and waving the glittering blade, “One Irish sword,” he cried, “is still sufficient for a hundred Frenchmen!” Bourguien bolted.

Loyal in the days of his greatness, the fallen king was received with honors at the British outposts upon the Ganges. There he was giving valuable advice to the governor-general when a map of India was laid before him, the British possessions marked red. He swept his hand across India: “All this ought to be red.”

It is all red now, and the British conquest of India arose out of the defense made by this great wild hero against General Perron, ruler of Hindustan. Scindhia, who had lifted Perron from the dust, and made him commander-in-chief of his army, was now in grave peril on the Deccan, beset by the league of Mahratta princes. In his bitter need he sent to Perron for succor. Perron, busy against his enemy in the Hariana, left Scindhia to his fate.

Perron had no need of Scindhia now, but was leagued with Napoleon to hand over the Indian empire to France. He betrayed his master.

Now Scindhia, had the Frenchmen been loyal, could have checked the Mahratta princes, but these got out of hand, and one of them, Holkar, drove the Mahratta emperor, the peshwa of Poona, from his throne. The peshwa fled to Bombay, and returned with a British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley. So came the battle of Assaye, wherein the British force of four thousand five hundred men overthrew the Mahratta army of fifty thousand men, captured a hundred guns, and won Poona, the capital of the South. Meanwhile for fear of Napoleon’s coming, Perron, his servant, had to be overthrown. A British army under General Lake swept Perron’s army out of existence and captured Delhi, the capital of the North. Both the capital cities of India fell to English arms, both emperors came under British protection, and that vast empire was founded wherein King George now reigns. As to Perron, his fall was pitiful, a freak of cowardice. He betrayed everybody, and sneaked away to France with a large fortune.

And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous triumph of Assaye, became the Iron Duke of Wellington, destined to liberate Europe at Waterloo.

L

A. D. 1805

THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON

This story is from the memoirs of Robert Guillemard, a conscript in the Grand Army of France, and to his horror drafted for a marine on board the battle-ship _Redoubtable_. The Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three battle-ships lay in Cadiz, and Villeneuve, the nice old gentleman in command, was still breathless after being chased by Lord Nelson across the Atlantic and back again. Now, having given Nelson the slip, he had fierce orders from the Emperor Napoleon to join the French channel fleet, for the invasion of England. The nice old gentleman knew that his fleet was manned largely with helpless recruits, ill-paid, ill-found, most scandalously fed, sick with a righteous terror lest Nelson come and burn them in their harbor.

Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships, raging for a fight, and Villeneuve had to oblige for fear of Napoleon’s anger.

The fleets met off the sand-dunes of Cape Trafalgar, drawn up in opposing lines for battle, and when they closed, young Guillemard’s ship, the _Redoubtable_, engaged Lord Nelson’s _Victory_, losing thirty men to her first discharge.

Guillemard had never been in action, and as the thunders broke from the gun tiers below, he watched with mingled fear and rage the rush of seamen at their work on deck, and his brothers of the marines at their musketry, until everything was hidden in trailing wreaths of smoke, from which came the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying.

Some seventy feet overhead, at the caps of the lower masts, were widespread platforms, the fighting tops on which the best marksmen were always posted. “All our topmen,” says Guillemard, “had been killed, when two sailors and four soldiers, of whom I was one, were ordered to occupy their post in the tops. While we were going aloft, the balls and grapeshot showered around us, struck the masts and yards, knocked large splinters from them, and cut the rigging to pieces. One of my companions was wounded beside me, and fell from a height of thirty feet to the deck, where he broke his neck. When I reached the top my first movement was to take a view of the prospect presented by the hostile fleets. For more than a league extended a thick cloud of smoke, above which were discernible a forest of masts and rigging, and the flags, the pendants and the fire of the three nations. Thousands of flashes, more or less near, continually penetrated this cloud, and a rolling noise pretty similar to the sound of thunder, but much stronger, arose from its bosom.”

Guillemard goes on to describe a duel between the topmen of the _Redoubtable_ and those of the _Victory_ only a few yards distant, and when it was finished he lay alone among the dead who crowded the swaying platform.

“On the poop of the English vessel was an officer covered with orders and with only one arm. From what I had heard of Nelson I had no doubt that it was he. He was surrounded by several officers, to whom he seemed to be giving orders. At the moment I first perceived him several of his sailors were wounded beside him by the fire of the _Redoubtable_. As I had received no orders to go down, and saw myself forgotten in the tops, I thought it my duty to fire on the poop of the English vessel, which I saw quite clearly exposed, and close to me. I could even have taken aim at the men I saw, but I fired at hazard among the groups of sailors and officers. All at once I saw great confusion on board the _Victory_; the men crowded round the officer whom I had taken for Nelson. He had just fallen, and was taken below covered with a cloak. The agitation shown at this moment left me no doubt that I had judged rightly, and that it really was the English admiral. An instant afterward the _Victory_ ceased from firing, the deck was abandoned.... I hurried below to inform the captain.... He believed me the more readily as the slackening of the fire indicated that an event of the highest importance occupied the attention of the English ship’s crew.... He gave immediate orders for boarding, and everything was prepared for it in a moment. It is even said that young Fontaine, a midshipman ... passed by the ports into the lower deck of the English vessel, found it abandoned, and returned to notify that the ship had surrendered.... However, as a part of our crew, commanded by two officers, were ready to spring upon the enemy’s deck, the fire recommenced with a fury it had never had from the beginning of the action.... In less than half an hour our vessel, without having hauled down her colors, had in fact, surrendered. Her fire had gradually slackened and then had ceased altogether.... Not more than one hundred fifty men survived out of a crew of about eight hundred, and almost all those were more or less severely wounded.”

When these were taken on board the _Victory_, Guillemard learned how the bullet which struck down through Lord Nelson’s shoulder and shattered the spine below, had come from the fighting tops of the _Redoubtable_, where he had been the only living soul. He speaks of his grief as a man, his triumph as a soldier of France, who had delivered his country from her great enemy. What it meant for England judge now after nearly one hundred years, when one meets a bluejacket in the street with the three white lines of braid upon his collar in memory of Nelson’s victories at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar, and the black neckcloth worn in mourning for his death.

It seemed at the time that the very winds sang Nelson’s requiem, for with the night came a storm putting the English shattered fleet in mortal peril, while of the nineteen captured battle-ships not one was fit to brave the elements. For, save some few vessels that basely ran away before the action, both French and Spaniards had fought with sublime desperation, and when the English prize-crews took possession, they and their prisoners were together drowned. The _Aigle_ was cast away, and not one man escaped; the _Santissima Trinidad_, the largest ship in the world, foundered; the _Indomitable_ sank with fifteen hundred wounded; the _Achille_, with her officers shooting themselves, her sailors drunk, went blazing through the storm until the fire caught her magazine. And so with the rest of eighteen blood-soaked wrecks, burned, foundered, or cast away, while only one outlived that night of horror.

When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was brought on board the _Victory_, where Nelson lay in state, for the voyage to England. Villeneuve, wounded in the hand, was unable to write, and sent among the French prisoners for a clerk. For this service Guillemard volunteered as the only uninjured soldier who could write. So Guillemard attended the admiral all through the months of their residence at Arlesford, in Devon, where they were at large on parole. The old man was treated with respect and sympathy.

Prisoners of war are generally released by exchange between fighting powers, rank for rank, man for man; but after five months Villeneuve was allowed to return to France. He pledged his honor that unless duly exchanged he would surrender again on the English coast at the end of ninety days. So, attended by Guillemard and his servant, he crossed the channel, and from the town of Rennes--the place where Dreyfus had his trial not long ago--he wrote despatches to the government in Paris. He was coming, he said in a private letter, to arraign most of his surviving captains on the charge of cowardice at Trafalgar.

Of this it seems the captains got some warning, and decided that for the sake of their own health Villeneuve should not reach Paris alive.

Anyway, Guillemard says that while the admiral lay in the Hotel de Bresil, at Rennes, five strangers appeared--men in civilian dress, who asked him many questions about Villeneuve. The secretary was proud of his master, glad to talk about so distinguished a man, and thought no evil when he gave his answers. The leader of the five was a southern Frenchman, the others foreigners, deeply tanned, who wore mustaches--in those days an unusual ornament.

That night the admiral had gone to bed in his room on the first floor of the inn, and the secretary was asleep on the floor above. A cry disturbed him, and taking his sword and candle, he ran down-stairs in time to see the five strangers sneak by him hurriedly. Guillemard rushed to the admiral’s room “and saw the unfortunate man, whom the balls of Trafalgar had respected, stretched pale and bloody on his bed. He ... breathed hard, and struggled with the agonies of death.... Five deep wounds pierced his breast.”

So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be alone with Villeneuve at his death.

When he reached Paris the youngster was summoned to the Tuileries, and the Emperor Napoleon made him tell the whole story of the admiral’s assassination. Yet officially the death was announced as suicide, and Guillemard met the leader of the five assassins walking in broad daylight on the boulevards.

The lad kept his mouth shut.

Guillemard lived to fight in many of the emperor’s battles, to be one of the ten thousand prisoners of the Spaniards on the desert island of the Cabrera, whence he made a gallant escape; to be a prisoner of the Russians in Siberia; to assist in King Murat’s flight from France; and, finally, after twenty years of adventure, to return with many wounds and few honors to his native village.

LI

A. D. 1812

THE FALL OF NAPOLEON

The greatest of modern adventurers, Napoleon Bonaparte, was something short of a gentleman, a person of mean build, coarse tastes, odious manners and defective courage, yet gifted with Satanic beauty of face, charm that bewitched all fighting men, stupendous genius in war and government. Beginning as a penniless lieutenant of French artillery, he rose to be captain, colonel, general, commander-in-chief, consul of France, emperor of the French, master of Europe, almost conqueror of the world--and he was still only thirty-three years of age, when at the height of his glory, he invaded Russia. His army of invasion was gathered from all his subject nations--Germans, Swiss, Italians, Poles, Austrians, numbering more than half a million men, an irresistible and overwhelming force, launched like a shell into the heart of Russia.

The Russian army could not hope to defeat Napoleon, was routed again and again in attempting to check his advance, yet in retreating laid the country waste, burned all the standing harvest, drove away the cattle, left the towns in ashes. Napoleon’s host marched through a desert, while daily, by waste of battle, wreckage of men left with untended wounds, horrors of starvation, and wolf-like hordes of Cossacks who cut off all the stragglers, the legions were swept away. In Lithuania alone Napoleon lost a hundred thousand men, and that only a fourth part of those who perished before the army reached the gates of Moscow.

That old city, hallowed by centuries of brave endeavor, stored with the spoils of countless victories, that holy place at the very sight of which the Russian traveler prostrated himself in prayer, had been made ready for Napoleon’s coming. Never has any nation prepared so awful a sacrifice as that which wrenched a million people from their homes. The empty capital was left in charge of a few officers, then all the convicts were released and provided with torches. Every vestige of food had been taken away, but the gold, the gems, the silver, the precious things of treasuries, churches and palaces, remained as bait.

Despite the horrors of the march, Napoleon’s entry was attended by all the gorgeous pageantry of the Grand Army, a blaze of gold and color, conquered Europe at the heels of the little Corsican adventurer with waving flags and triumphal music. The cavalry found cathedrals for stabling, the guard had palaces for barracks, where they could lie at ease through the winter; but night after night the great buildings burst into flames, day after day the foraging parties were caught in labyrinths of blazing streets, and the army staled on a diet of wine and gold in the burning capital.

In mortal fear the emperor attempted to treat for peace, but Russia kept him waiting for a month, while her troops closed down on the line of escape, and the winter was coming on--the Russian winter.

From the time when the retreat began through a thousand miles of naked wilderness, not a single ration was issued to the starving army. The men were loaded with furs, brocades, chalices, ingots of silver, bars of gold and jewels, but they had no food. The transport numbered thousands of carts laden with grain, but the horses died because there was no forage, so all the commissariat, except Napoleon’s treasure train, was left wrecked by the wayside.

Then the marching regiments were placed in the wake of the cavalry, that they might get the dying horses for food, but when the cold came there was no fuel to cook the frozen meat, and men’s lips would bleed when they tried to gnaw that ice. So the wake of the army was a wide road blocked with broken carts, dead horses, abandoned guns, corpses of men, where camp followers remained to murder the dying, strip the dead and gather the treasures of Moscow, the swords, the gold lace, the costly uniforms, until they were slaughtered by the Cossacks. Then came the deep snow which covered everything.

No words of mine could ever tell the story, but here are passages from the _Memoirs_ of Sergeant Burgogne (Heineman). I have ventured to condense parts of his narrative, memories of the lost army, told by one who saw. He had been left behind to die:--

“At that moment the moon came out, and I began to walk faster. In this immense cemetery and this awful silence I was alone, and I began to cry like a child. The tears relieved me, gradually my courage came back, and feeling stronger, I set out again, trusting to God’s mercy, taking care to avoid the dead bodies.

“I noticed something I took for a wagon. It was a broken canteen cart, the horses which had drawn it not only dead, but partly cut to pieces for eating. Around the cart were seven dead bodies almost naked, and half covered with snow; one of them still covered with a cloak and a sheepskin. On stooping to look at the body I saw that it was a woman. I approached the dead woman to take the sheepskin for a covering, but it was impossible to move it. A piercing cry came from the cart. ‘Marie! Marie! I am dying!’

“Mounting on the body of the horse in the shafts I steadied myself by the top of the cart. I asked what was the matter. A feeble voice answered, ‘Something to drink!’

“I thought at once of the frozen blood in my pouch, and tried to get down to fetch it, but the moon suddenly disappeared behind a great black cloud, and I as suddenly fell on top of three dead bodies. My head was down lower than my legs, and my face resting on one of the dead hands. I had been accustomed for long enough to this sort of company, but now--I suppose because I was alone--an awful feeling of terror came over me--I could not move, and I began screaming like a madman--I tried to help myself up by my arm, but found my hand on a face, and my thumb went into its mouth. At that moment the moon came out.

“But a change came over me now. I felt ashamed of my weakness, and a wild sort of frenzy instead of terror took possession of me. I got up raving and swearing, and trod on anything that came near me ... and I cursed the sky above me, defying it, and taking my musket, I struck at the cart--very likely I struck also at the poor devils under my feet.”

Such was the road, and here was the passing of the army which Burgogne had overtaken.

“This was November twenty-five, 1812, perhaps about seven o’clock in the morning, and as yet it was hardly light. I was musing on all that I had seen, when the head of the column appeared. Those in advance seemed to be generals, a few on horseback, but the greater part on foot. There were also a great number of other officers, the remnant of the doomed squadron and battalion formed on the twenty-second and barely existing at the end of three days. Those on foot dragged themselves painfully along, almost all of them having their feet frozen and wrapped in rags, and all nearly dying of hunger. Afterward came the small remains of the cavalry of the guard. The emperor came next on foot, carrying a baton, Murat walked on foot at his right, and on his left, the Prince Eugene, viceroy of Italy. Next came the marshals--Berthier, Prince of Neuchâtel, Ney, Mortier, Lefevre, with other marshals and generals whose corps were nearly annihilated. Seven or eight hundred officers and non-commissioned officers followed walking in order, and perfect silence, and carrying the eagles of their different regiments which had so often led them to victory. This was all that remained of sixty thousand men. After them came the imperial guard. And men cried at seeing the emperor on foot.”

So far the army had kept its discipline, and at the passage of the River Berezina the engineers contrived to build a bridge. But while the troops were crossing, the Russians began to drive the rear guard, and the whole herd broke into panic. “The confusion and disorder went on increasing, and reached their full height when Marshal Victor was attacked by the Russians, and shells and bullets showered thickly upon us. To complete our misery, snow began to fall, and a cold wind blew. This dreadful state of things lasted all day and through the next night, and all this time the Berezina became gradually filled with ice, dead bodies of men and horses, while the bridge got blocked up with carts full of wounded men, some of which rolled over the edge into the water. Between eight and nine o’clock that evening, Marshal Victor began his retreat. He and his men had to cross the bridge over a perfect mountain of corpses.”

Still thousands of stragglers had stayed to burn abandoned wagons, and make fires to warm them before they attempted the bridge. On these the Russians descended, but it was too late for flight, and of the hundreds who attempted to swim the river, not one reached the farther bank. To prevent the Russians from crossing, the bridge was set on fire, and so horror was piled on horror that it would be gross offense to add another word.

Of half a million men who had entered Russia, there were only twenty-five thousand left after that crossing of the Berezina. These were veterans for the most part, skilled plunderers, who foraged for themselves, gleaning a few potatoes from stripped fields, shooting stray Cossacks for the food they had in their wallets, trading with the Jews who lurked in ruined towns, or falling back at the worst on frozen horse-flesh. Garrisons left by Napoleon on his advance fell in from time to time with the retreating army, but unused to the new conditions, wasted rapidly. The veterans found their horses useful for food, and left afoot, they perished.

Even to the last, remnants of lost regiments rallied to the golden eagles upon their standards, but these little clusters of men no longer kept their ranks, for as they marched the strong tried to help the weak, and often comrades would die together rather than part. All were frozen, suffering the slow exhaustion of dysentery, the miseries of vermin and starvation, and those who lived to the end were broken invalids, who never again could serve the emperor.

From Smorgony, Napoleon went ahead, traveling rapidly to send the relief of sleighs and food which met the survivors on the German border. Thence he went on to Paris to raise a new army; for now there was conspiracy in France for the overthrow of the despot, and Europe rose to destroy him. So on the field of Leipsic, in the battle of the nations, Napoleon was overwhelmed.

Once again he challenged fate, escaped from his island prison of Elba, and with a third army marched against armed Europe. And so came Waterloo, with that last banishment to Saint Helena, where the great adventurer fretted out his few sore years, dreaming of glories never to be revived and that great empire which was forever lost.

LII

A. D. 1813

RISING WOLF

This is the story of Rising Wolf, condensed from the beautiful narrative in _My Life as an Indian_, by J. B. Schultz.

“I had heard much of a certain white man named Hugh Monroe, and in Blackfoot, Rising Wolf. One afternoon I was told that he had arrived in camp with his numerous family, and a little later met him at a feast given by Big Lake. In the evening I invited him over to my lodge and had a long talk with him while he ate bread and meat and beans, and smoked numerous pipefuls of tobacco.” White man’s food is good after years without any. “We eventually became firm friends. Even in his old age Rising Wolf was the quickest, most active man I ever saw. He was about five feet six in height, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and his firm square chin and rather prominent nose betokened what he was, a man of courage and determination. His father, Hugh Monroe, was a colonel in the British army, his mother a member of the La Roches, a noble family of French émigrés, bankers of Montreal and large land owners in that vicinity.

“Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at Three Rivers (Quebec) and attended the parish school just long enough to learn to read and write. All his vacations and many truant days from the class room were spent in the great forest surrounding his home. The love of nature, of adventure and wild life were born in him. He first saw the light in July, 1798. In 1813, when but fifteen years of age, he persuaded his parents to allow him to enter the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company and started westward with a flotilla of that company’s canoes that spring. His father gave him a fine English smoothbore, his mother a pair of the famous La Roche dueling pistols and a prayer book. The family priest gave him a rosary and cross and enjoined him to pray frequently. Traveling all summer, they arrived at Lake Winnipeg in the autumn and wintered there. As soon as the ice went out in the spring the journey was continued and one afternoon in July, Monroe beheld Mountain Fort, a new post of the company’s not far from the Rocky Mountains.