I.A STRAY SHOT.
Capital letter
WHAT is life? A perpetual see-saw with fortune—man at one end, the fickle jade at the other.
A feather at times turns the balance. In my case, an ounce of lead has disturbed the equilibrium of the fortunes of many lives.
Descended from men of war, I have become most essentially a man of peace.
Still, when that most popular of all toasts, “The Army and Navy,” is proposed, it stirs up the old leaven which still permeates the blood that came to me with the name I inherited from my sires.
My paternal grandfather had two sons, one a soldier, the younger a sailor. The latter is answerable for my sins—if I have ever committed any.
The vicissitudes of life are strange, bordering at times on fiction. During the war France had to wage against almost every other nation in Europe to defend her soil from the invasion instigated by a fallen monarchy against the Republican element which originated in 1789, anarmy, spontaneously raised from her “people,” crossed the Alps, carrying the tricolor flag into Italy, where many hard battles were fought.
These strangely composed, ill clad, badly fed, ragged hordes of French soldiers were led to victory by two young, inexperienced generals—both ambitious, energetic men—the younger, General Bonaparte, in whom the “Directoire” possessed a dangerous enemy of the Republic; the senior, my uncle, whose special mission was to watch the impetuous Corsican and counter-balance the evident sway and influence he was daily gaining over the young army by the daring of his actions and electrifying effect of those short, pithy allocutions he invariably made to the soldiers whom he sometimes so rashly led to death—but always to victory. During the Italian campaign the two young leaders vied with each other in their efforts to drill and train the undisciplined battalions, recruited and enlisted on the Champ de Mars, in Paris, during the terrible period so graphically termed the “Reign of Terror.”
From the victories gained in Italy originated that wonderful army whose glorious deeds have placed France foremost as a military Power.
During one of the most decisive battles on the fields of Novi, after a days’ hard fighting, and when the victory once more had smiled on his flag, my uncle fell, shot through the heart. When his body, carried reverently by his staff, was brought to his tent, a sealed packet was found on the General’s camp-table—a packet containing an official order from the “Directoire” to assume the supreme command of the French army!
What changes in the destinies of Europe have resulted from this stray shot! Two men then ruling the armies of France—one a staunch Republican, seeking only the welfare of his country; the other an ambitiousparvenu, ever ready to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands to his own aggrandisement. Who can say what might have been the result had Bonaparte fallen instead of his brother officer?
I only refer to this episode in the early history of the family whence I spring because I consider that it very likely had to a great extent a direct influence on my after life, even though it occurred a quarter of a century before I made my first appearance in this wicked world. It gave rise to a jealous feeling in my father’s heart and led him to leave the navy.
Soon after Napoleon became the ruler of the French Empire, my father, like the Roman of old, exchanged the sword for the plough. Instead of making a name in the naval engagements of Aboukir or Trafalgar he devoted his life to a quieter and perhaps better purpose—the drainage of the then pestilential morasses of Medoc, which have since acquired a world-wide fame for the production of some of the best wines in the south of France.
In some of the libraries of my native country some useful works are to be found on the culture of the vine, the drainage of land in the south of France, as well as a treatise on artesian wells, which was one of my father’s hobbies—the first of these useful perforations having been made in Medoc, and ultimately the great artesian well of Grenelle, in Paris.