Fleur de lis
I
N their curious dialect, the Vendeans had a verb,s’égailler,s’éparpiller, and they lived up to it. It meant scattering and sharp-shooting, every man for himself, in what we Americans might call the historic Lexington style. Each carried his cartridges in his pocket. If any complained of lack of powder, Henri had a pricking answer: “Well, my children, the Blues have plenty of it!” which reversed matters in five minutes. Bred in a hunting country, the King’s men were expert shots from boyhood. Farming weapons fixed on handles adorned the marching no-pay volunteers. Such guns as they had were put into the ablesthands; and wonderful musketeers they made, these hunters of Loroux and the Bocage. They crept behind walls and hedges, not firing, as did the troops of the line, at the height of a man, but aiming individually, and rarely missing, so that throughout an action their loss was but as one to five; they leaped garden terraces, and peered from the angles of strange little foot-paths, making sudden volleys and attacks, the chief usually foremost, the men eager and undrilled; or they ran forward by scores, fronting the hostile cannon, flinging themselves down at every explosion, and so creeping nearer and nearer, until they might grapple with the stupefied cannoneers hand to hand. This was their favorite strategy. More than one town was actually taken by savage wrestling and boxing, without a report of fire-arms at all. They lacked wagons, reserves, luggage; each carried his own rations. They travelled withouta calendar, for that sanctioned by the Republic, and therefore, with Fabre d’Eglantine’s pretty fooleries ofFloréalandPluviose, cashiered, was the only one extant in France.
They had thirty lively drums and no trumpets; when they wanted an inspiring noise they sang a hymn. Sentinels could not be trained; it seems incredible that they should have done for two years without pickets or patrols, except when the officers took turns at a necessary duty. But in this, as in other matters, the strong-minded rustics, who freely entered the ranks, reasoned, objected, fought shy, and were at once the solace and the despair of their commanders. A certain fatal independence was born in their blood. What chance, at any time and however valiant, has the army of momentary concurrence against the army of sworn obedience? Innocent of discipline, they were all butimpossible to direct on an open plain. Every movement was a farce in tactics. A chief exercised his full authority according to the individual esteem in which he was held. This singular code, likely to be subversive of all authority elsewhere, was the only one which proud and willing Vendée could be brought to understand. “Such a general goes such a way,” the adjutant would call; “who goes with him?” And the tenants of his own seigneury, the guerilla vassals, would run with a shout after him, forming their lines by some convenient object—a house or a tree. Their Monsieur Henri had a formula borrowed unconsciously from the old war-cry of Gaston de Foix: “He who loves me follows me!” When he flashed down the front on his wonderful white horse, which the cheering peasants had christened the Fallowdeer, thinking nothing else could be so wild, so delicate, so amazinglyswift, parish after parish rallied to him in a little cloud. The fashion of gathering in clans and bands, primitive as it was, had its advantages. Every one stood, in action, next another of his own estate or blood; and La Vendée was notoriously careful of its wounded and slain. Never were men more dependent on the nerve and sagacity of their leaders. A disabled officer dared not budge, or the crazy columns would give way. Lescure, unhorsed at Saumur, would have kept the troops ignorant of his hurt had not the boy Beauvolliers thrown himself upon him with a loud cry of lamentation and started a panic in the ranks. Charette being wounded long after at Dufour, his regiments dispersed like sheep. When Cathelineau of the shining brow fell in sight of his army, there was instant rout. At the recapture of Châtillon many a dissembler, sick and weak, rode forth inaffected vigor, and so forced the splendid issue of the day.
The cavalry bestrode steeds of divers eccentricities, but at the tails of one and all figured the enemy’s derided tri-color cockade. Ropes were stirrups to these gallant paladins, and their sabres hung by packthreads. They had small leisure for the conventions of the toilet: their hair and beards looked like Orson’s. The officers wore woollen blouses and gaiters, having, like the others, the little red consecrated heart sewed on their coats; they lacked at first any distinguishing dress. Neither they nor the privates received a sou for services; if a man were in want he asked for a disbursement, and, until supplies failed, he got it. Funds flowed into the general reservoir from the pockets of the gentry, and from a source as obvious—the rights of confiscation. The main army averaged twenty thousand men; at a pinchit could be doubled. Sobriety reigned in the camps, though it was the one considerable virtue to which the good peasants, un-French in most matters, were not blindly addicted. Considering the prohibition against the presence of women, it is surprising to find here and there undetected in the van some spotless amazon like Jeanne Robin, or the revered Renée Bordereau, or Dame de La Rochefoucauld, a cavalry captain, shot upon the Breton coast. Piety was universal. The scythe-bearing soldiery, meeting a wayside cross half-way to the battery, would doff hats and kneel an instant, then charge like fiends on the foe. The parishes sent carts to the road-side, laden with provisions for the passing cohorts. The women, children, and old men knelt in the cornfields, while the din went on afar off, to beseech the Lord of Hosts. At Laval and Chollet, where the sieges closed perforce in one madscrimmage in the dark, the Vendeans fired wherever they heard an oath, surer than ever the Cromwellians were before them, that in that direction they could bag none but legitimate game.
The peasants were so many big children; they had no adult comprehension of their momentous concerns, to which they gave themselves by spurts, with perfect disinterestedness, ardor, and zeal. After the first hint that the victory was theirs, they hastened to ring the church-bells, and make bonfires of the papers of the administration—proceedings which, according to Madame de Lescure, afforded them unfailing amusement. They went into action like a black whirlwind, with roundelays or litanies on their lips, and the continuous battle-cry: “The King for us, all the same!” They frolicked about the famous twelve-pounder they had named Marie-Jeanne; they kissed its ornate brazen rim; they buriedits inscriptions of Richelieu’s era in flowers and ribbons; they lost it with mopings, and they recaptured it with salvos of joy. “Above all things, boys, we must get Marie-Jeanne back!” cried La Rochejaquelein on a certain occasion. “The best runner among you, that’s the man for her!” There was no reason whatever for such special devotion: it was pure fun on all sides. They were never under arms for more than a few consecutive days. The gathering together was a sensational sight. The church-bells clanged for a signal, the windmills gesticulated, horns were blown on the hills; and proprietor, farmer, peasant, with sticks and hunting-guns, came threading the hedges, and running in many a long dark line through the waving crops into the village market-place. The troops were repeatedly dispersing and rallying, giving their chiefs endless worry and chagrin. They fought,like Spenser’s angels, “all for love, and nothing for reward.” But they left the ranks when they chose; after a success, rather than after a defeat, they would scatter to their homes like so much thistle-down in the air, and it was hopeless to try to follow up an advantage gained. It was when difficulties were suspended that, in the wisdom of their villageous heads, they hurried off, one to his wife, and one to his farm, and one to his merchandise. No general was baffled and angered oftener by this freak than Henri. The valor of the Vendeans was incomparable, though one might borrow a musical metaphor and add that it swerved too easily from pitch. And it is noteworthy, as by a paradox, that whenever they wavered it was not, at least, through dread of any personal hardship. They were often ragged and hungry, but they did not play truant for that. They soon underwent horrible poverty and distress,and lacked food and clothes. The picked men of a company long marched in grotesque dominos out of sacked playhouses, in lawyers’ gowns, even in furniture-stuffs and draperies. The chivalric De Verteuil was found dead on the field equipped in two petticoats, one about his neck, the other about his waist: as noble armor, perhaps, as officer ever wore. Frequently, when ammunition was in abundance, the unaccountable army was overcome; and as often, without a carabine among six, it swept everything before it. Napoleon was the first to see—all the world sees now—how little was wanted to secure their ultimate triumph; how drill, a few kegs of powder, a few observant, able, cool heads where the exiles were congregated, and the prestige and authority of some royal name, might have built up again, it may be in justice, the ancient fabric surely in justice pulled down.They had no fair play. “Yet these same men, by bravery and enthusiasm, and by knowledge developed of short experience, conquered a part of France, obtained an honorable peace, and defended their cause with more glory and success than did the leagued allies.”
As we get away from the grim ethics of history the æsthetics of it take shape and color, and give us an abstract pleasure from the centres of thought and pain. There is an unspeakable attractiveness, despite all, in the image of these turbulent years—an almost Arabian beguilement, as of something which never need be true. The course of events is like a romantic drama, full of “points,” of poses, of electric surprises; the dialogue flows in alexandrines; the crises are settled in the nick of time. The talk is the rhetoric of hearts sincere, but French. The devoted Marquis of Donnissan breaks in upon two duellingswords: “‘What! the Lord Christ pardons his executioners, and a soldier of the Christian army tries to slay his comrade?’ At these words they drop their swords and embrace each other!” Or, after the terrible battle of Mans, and not long before her little daughter’s birth, Madame de Lescure, hemmed in the choked streets of the city, catches in despair at the hand of a gentle-faced young trooper pushing by: “Sir, have pity on a poor woman who cannot go on. Help me!” Whereupon the young trooper weeps some feverish tears: “What can I do? I am a woman also!” Or that charming impostor, the pseudo-bishop of Agra, stands up before the serried lines, and sheds upon them such prose as Matthew Arnold should praise forever: “Race antique et fidèle des serviteurs de nos rois, pieux zélateurs du trône et de l’autel, enfants de la Vendée, marchez, combattez, triomphez! C’est Dieu qui vous l’ordonne.”