Here is Marbot at this end—­the first of all soldier books in the world.  This is the complete three-volume French edition, with red and gold cover, smart and debonnaire like its author.  Here he is in one frontispiece with his pleasant, round, boyish face, as a Captain of his beloved Chasseurs.  And here in the other is the grizzled old bull-dog as a full general, looking as full of fight as ever.  It was a real blow to me when some one began to throw doubts upon the authenticity of Marbot’s memoirs.  Homer may be dissolved into a crowd of skin-clad bards.  Even Shakespeare may be jostled in his throne of honour by plausible Baconians; but the human, the gallant, the inimitable Marbot!  His book is that which gives us the best picture by far of the Napoleonic soldiers, and to me they are even more interesting than their great leader, though his must ever be the most singular figure in history.  But those soldiers, with their huge shakoes, their hairy knapsacks, and their hearts of steel—­what men they were!  And what a latent power there must be in this French nation which could go on pouring out the blood of its sons for twenty-three years with hardly a pause!

It took all that time to work off the hot ferment which the Revolution had left in men’s veins.  And they were not exhausted, for the very last fight which the French fought was the finest of all.  Proud as we are of our infantry at Waterloo, it was really with the French cavalry that the greenest laurels of that great epic rested.  They got the better of our own cavalry, they took our guns again and again, they swept a large portion of our allies from the field, and finally they rode off unbroken, and as full of fight as ever.  Read Gronow’s “Memoirs,” that chatty little yellow volume yonder which brings all that age back to us more vividly than any more pretentious work, and you will find the chivalrous admiration which our officers expressed at the fine performance of the French horsemen.

It must be admitted that, looking back upon history, we have not always been good allies, nor yet generous co-partners in the battlefield.  The first is the fault of our politics, where one party rejoices to break what the other has bound.  The makers of the Treaty are staunch enough, as the Tories were under Pitt and Castlereagh, or the Whigs at the time of Queen Anne, but sooner or later the others must come in.  At the end of the Marlborough wars we suddenly vamped up a peace and, left our allies in the lurch, on account of a change in domestic politics.  We did the same with Frederick the Great, and would have done it in the Napoleonic days if Fox could have controlled the country.  And as to our partners of the battlefield, how little we have ever said that is hearty as to the splendid staunchness of the Prussians at Waterloo.  You have to read the Frenchman, Houssaye, to get a central view and to understand the part they played.  Think of old Blucher, seventy years old, and ridden over by a regiment of charging cavalry the day before, yet swearing that he would come to Wellington if he had to be strapped to his horse.  He nobly redeemed his promise.