ve only to be recognized to dissipate the ardor and fervor of the
worshipers. But Napoleon was then an exception to all rules. Though he
slew men, wasted them, threw them away, they trusted him. We look at him
through the vista of years and in some way understand his soldiers.
Reason to the contrary, we can experience in some degree, at least, even
in the cold-blooded humanitarian materialism of the present, the old
thrill and the old admiration. Did his contemporaries love him because
they believed he thought in terms of France, we wonder?

So that this body of soldiery was probably the most formidable army in
the quality of its units that had ever been mustered on the globe. There
was not a man in it who was not a veteran. Some of them were veterans of
fifteen years of campaigning with Napoleon. This that came was to be the
sixtieth pitched battle in which some of them had participated. Even the
younger men had gone through more than one campaign and taken part in
much hard fighting. Back from the prisons where they had been confined
and the great fortresses they had held until the Emperor's abdication had
come the veterans. The Old Guard had been reconstituted. As a reward
for its action at Grenoble, the Fifth-of-the-Line had been incorporated
in it as a supplementary regiment, a second Fifth regiment of Grenadiers.
The ranks of the Guard had been most carefully culled, the unserviceable
had been weeded out, their places taken by men well fitted by their
record, their physical prowess and their personal appearance to belong to
that famous corps. Not the Immortals of Xerxes, the Spartan Band of
Leonidas, the Companion Cavalry of Alexander, the Carthaginians of
Hannibal, the Tenth Legion of Caesar, the Spanish Infantry of Parma, or
the Ironsides of Cromwell, had surpassed the record of these Pretorians
of Imperial France.

The same weeding-out process had been carried out in the rest of the
army. The flower of French cavalry, the matchless French artillery and
the famous infantry which had trampled down the world were ranged under
the Eagles. Other corps had been drained for equipment. But in some
particulars the army differed from the Imperial armies of the past. With
two exceptions, the great Marshals were not there. Murat, king of
horsemen and swordsmen, was a prisoner in his ignoble Neapolitan realm
awaiting trial and execution. Marmont and Mortier dared not present
themselves before the Emperor t