to this day, exactly how he looked as he took out his field-glass, watched the battle for a minute, and finally said:  “It’s all right!  Everything is going well.”  Then, just as he was coming back, an ambitious chap in a plumed hat, who was always following him around, and who bothered him, they said, even at his meals, thought he’d play smart by going up on the very same hill; but he had hardly taken the Emperor’s place when—­batz!—­away he went, plume and all!

Now follow me closely, and tell me whether what you are going to hear was natural.

Napoleon, you know, had promised that he’d keep his agreement with God to himself.  That’s the reason why his companions and even his particular friends—­men like Duroc, Bessieres, and Lannes, who were strong as bars of steel, but whom he molded to suit his purposes—­all fell, like nuts from a shaken tree, while he himself was never even hurt.

But that’s not the only proof that he was the child of God and was expressly created to be the father of soldiers.  Did anybody ever see him a lieutenant?  Or a captain?  Never!  He was commander-in-chief from the start.  When he didn’t look more than twenty-four years of age he was already an old general—­ever since the taking of Toulon, where he first began to show the rest of them that they didn’t know anything about the handling of cannon.

Well, soon after that, down comes this stripling to us as general-in-chief of the Army of Italy—­an army that hadn’t any ammunition, or bread, or shoes, or coats; a wretched army—­naked as a worm.  “Now, boys!” he said, “here we are, all together.  I want you to get it fixed in your heads that in fifteen days more you ’re going to be conquerors.  You’re going to have new clothes, good leggings, the best of shoes, and a warm overcoat for every man; but in order to get these things you’ll have to march to Milan, where they are.”  So we marched.  We were only thirty thousand bare-footed tramps, and we were going against eighty thousand crack German soldiers—­fine, well equipped men; but Napoleon, who was only Bonaparte then, breathed a spirit of—­I don’t know what—­into us, and on we marched, night and day.  We hit the enemy at Montenotte, thrashed ’em at Rivoli, Lodi, Arcola, and Millesimo, and stuck to ’em wherever they went.  A soldier soon gets to like being a conqueror; and Napoleon wheeled around those German generals, and pelted away at ’em, until they didn’t know where to hide long enough to get a little rest.  With fifteen hundred Frenchmen, whom he made to appear a great host (that’s a way he had), he’d sometimes surround ten thousand men and gather ’em all in at a single scoop.  Then we’d take their cannon, their money, their ammunition, and everything they had that was worth carrying away.  As for the others, we chucked ’em into the water, walloped ’em on the mountains, snapped ’em up in the air, devoured ’em on the ground, and beat ’em everywhere.  So at last our troops were in fine feather—­especially as Napoleon, who had a clever wit, made friends with the inhabitants of the country by telling them that we had come to set them free; and then, of course, they gave us quarters and took the best of care of us.  And it was not only the men:  the women took care of us too, which showed their good judgment!