ened at this dreadful protest,
on the part of the wretches whom he had kidnapped, against his monstrous
tyranny; but his only means of remedying the evil was strictly to forbid
that such criminals should be attended by any ecclesiastic whatever, and
denied all religious consolation.

The punishment was incessant. Every officer had the liberty to inflict
it, and in peace it was more cruel than in war. For when peace came
the King turned adrift such of his officers as were not noble; whatever
their services might have been. He would call a captain to the front of
his company and say, 'He is not noble, let him go.' We were afraid of
him somehow, and were cowed before him like wild beasts before their
keeper. I have seen the bravest men of the army cry like children at a
cut of the cane; I have seen a little ensign of fifteen call out a man
of fifty from the ranks, a man who had been in a hundred battles, and
he has stood presenting arms, and sobbing and howling like a baby, while
the young wretch lashed him over the arms and thighs with the stick.
In a day of action this man would dare anything. A button might be awry
THEN and nobody touched him; but when they had made the brute fight,
then they lashed him again into subordination. Almost all of us yielded
to the spell--scarce one could break it. The French officer I have
spoken of as taken along with me, was in my company, and caned like
a dog. I met him at Versailles twenty years afterwards, and he turned
quite pale and sick when I spoke to him of old days. 'For God's sake,'
said he, 'don't talk of that time: I wake up from my sleep trembling and
crying even now.'

As for me, after a very brief time (in which it must be confessed
I tasted, like my comrades, of the cane) and after I had found
opportunities to show myself to be a brave and dexterous soldier, I
took the means I had adopted in the English army to prevent any further
personal degradation. I wore a bullet around my neck, which I did not
take the pains to conceal, and I gave out that it should be for the man
or officer who caused me to be chastised. And there was something in
my character which made my superiors believe me; for that bullet had
already served me to kill an Austrian colonel, and I would have given
it to a Prussian with as little remorse. For what cared I for their
quarrels, or whether the eagle under which I marched had one head or
two? All I said was, 'No man shall find me tripping in my duty;