er; but it was now
too late. Even if I could have turned my horse's head to a French post, I
felt myself bound to share the fortunes of the gallant army to which I had
been so closely attached. In the heat of youth, I went even further, and,
as my mission had virtually ceased, and I wore a Prussian order, I took
the _un_diplomatic step of proposing to act as one of the duke's
aides-de-camp until the army had left the enemy's territory. Behold me now,
a hulan of the duke's guard! I found no reason to repent my choice, though
our service was remarkably severe. The present war was chiefly against the
light troops and irregulars of the retreating army--the columns being too
formidable to admit of attack, at least by the multitude. Forty thousand
men, of the main army of France, were appointed to the duty of "seeing us
out of the country." But every attempt at foraging, every movement beyond
the range of our cannon, was instantly met by a peasant skirmish. Every
village approached by our squadrons, exhibited a barricade, from which we
were fired on; every forest produced a succession of sharp encounters; and
the passage of every river required as much precaution, and as often
produced a serious contest, as if we were at open war. Thus we were
perpetually on the wing, and our personal escapes were often of the most
hair-breadth kind. If we passed through a thicket, we were sure to be met
by a discharge of bullets; if we dismounted from our horses to take our
hurried and scanty meal, we found some of them shot at the inn-door; if we
flung ourselves, as tired as hounds after a chase, on the straw of a
village stable, the probability was that we were awakened by finding the
thatch in a blaze. How often we envied the easier life of the battalions!
But there an enemy, more fearful than the peasantry, began to show itself.
The weather had changed to storms of rain and bitter wind; the plains of
Champagne, never famed for fertility, were now as wild and bare as a
Russian steppe. The worst provisions, supplied on the narrowest
scale--above all, disgust, the most fatal canker of the soldier's
soul--spread disease among the ranks; and the roads on which we followed
the march, gave terrible evidence of the havoc that every hour made among
them. The mortality at last became so great, that it seemed not unlikely
that the whole army would thus melt away before it reached the boundary of
this land of death.

The horror of the scene even stru