March to June. Spirit of the French Army. 59 former humiliation and subjection, the result of an almost uninterrupted course of victory and triumph to which the history of France presented no parallel, had served to flatter and to gratify the national vanity. It was this feeling, combined with a dread of that retributive justice which would inevitably follow in the train of a successful invasion, that operated so powerfully upon the mass of the nation, with whom the cry of "Vive l'Empereur!" merged into that of "Vive la France!" To the above cause may also be traced the temporary reconciliation of the different factions which it was one of the main objects of NAPOLEON'S celebrated Champ de Mai to establish. This Convocation of the Popular Representatives, which had in a measure been forced upon the Emperor by the political vantage ground the people had gained during even the short constitutional reign of LOUIS XVIII., and of which they had begun to feel the benefit, did not in any degree fulfil the expectations of its projector. The stern Republicans were dissatisfied with the retention of a Chamber of Peers, which, in the late reign, they had regarded as an English importation; and the Royalists were no less disgusted with the materials out of which such a Chamber had been constructed; while both parties felt it to be a mere semblance of a constitutional body, destined to be composed of the willing slaves of the despot, his ready instruments for counteracting and paralysing the effects of any violent ebullition of the popular will. When it is considered that an overwhelming majority of the members of the new Chamber of Deputies were men of avowed Republican principles, and that in their very first sittings, they evinced by the tone of their debates, and by the tenor of their measures, a determination to uphold the authority vested in them by the people, and to make even 60 Public Opinion in France. March to June. the military power of the Emperor subservient to their views of Popular Government; when, also, it is considered that the two predominant Parties in the State, the Republicans and the Royalists, relied upon, and awaited but, the issue of events, for the ultimate success and realisation of their respective principles: it need not excite surprise that NAPOLEON, on quitting the capital to take the Field, should have appeared to feel that he left behind him a power even more dangerous to the stability of his authority, and more destructive of his ambitious projects, than that which he was going personally to confront. He naturally calculated largely upon the enthusiasm of his troops and their devotion to his cause: but he must have entertained serious doubts as to whether this spirit was shared by the great majority of the nation; and must have foreseen that it would only be by means of a successful result of the approaching contest, that he could possibly avert the dangers to which his sovereignty was exposed, as much by the machinations of political opponents at home, as by the combinations of hostile forces abroad. He was now made painfully sensible of the vast change which the result of all his former Wars, the restoration of the legitimate Monarch, and the newly chartered Liberty of the Subject, had gradually wrought in the political feelings and sentiments of the Nation. In short, he found that he had to contend with a mighty, and an uncontrollable, power-the great moral power of Public Opinion-compared with which, the Military Power, centred in a single Individual, however brilliant the latter in genius and in conception, however fertile in expedients, and however daring and successful in enterprise and in execution, can acquire no permanent stability, when not based upon, and emanating from, the broad and comprehensive moral energies of the Nation; and even a March to June. Parties in France. 61 succession of dazzling triumphs, when gained through the instrumentality of an arbitrary drain upon the national resources, and in opposition to the real interests and welfare of the State, tends but to hasten the downfall of the Military Dictator: whose career may be aptly likened to a Grecian column erected upon a loose foundation, displaying around its lofty capital an exuberance of meretricious ornament, which, by its disproportionate weight, destroys the equilibrium of the ill-supported shaft, and involves the entire structure in one confused and irretrievable ruin. Its fall may startle the world with its shock; the fragments may strew the earth in a wreck as gigantic as were its proportions when it drew the gaze of admiring or trembling nations: but they are but the more striking proofs of the destruction that has overtaken it;-it is a ruin still. B CHAPTER II. ELGIUM, the frequent battle-ground of Europe, another and a mighty struggle-a struggle in which were arrayed, on the one side, the two foremost of the confederated Armies advancing towards the French frontiers; and, on the other, the renowned Grande Armée of Imperial France, resuscitated at the magic call of its original founder-the great NAPOLEON himself. During the months of April and May, troops of all arms continued to enter upon, and spread themselves over, the Belgian soil. Here might be seen the British soldier, flushed with recent triumphs in the Peninsula over the same foe with whom he was now prepared once more to renew the combat ; and here the Prussian, eager for the deadly strife, and impatiently rushing onward to encounter that enemy whose ravages and excesses in his Fatherland still rankled in his memory. The Englishman was not fired by the desire of retribution; for it had pleased Divine Providence to spare Great Britain from the scourge of domestic war, and to preserve her soil unstained by the footprint of a foreign enemy. The Prussian soldier looked forward with a sullen pleasure to the prospect of revenge: vengeance seemed to him a sacred duty, imposed upon him by all the ties of kindred, and by all those patriotic feelings, which, in the hour of Prussia's need, had roused her entire people from April to June. Belgium, the Theatre of War. 63 the abject state to which they had been so fatally subdued; which, when the whole country lay prostrate at the conqueror's feet, so wonderfully, so powerfully, and SO successfully prompted her sons to throw off the yoke. History will mark this deliverance as the brilliant point in Prussia's brightest era, affording as it does, a clear and beautiful parallel to that in which an equally forcible appeal to the energies of the nation was made with similar success by that illustrious Statesman and General, FREDERICK THE GREAT, when opposed single-handed to the immense Armies and powerful resources of surrounding States. France was about to expiate by her own sufferings the wrongs she had wrought upon his country and his kind, and the Prussian panted for an opportunity of satiating his revenge. The Briton, if he had no such spur as that which urged the Prussian soldier forward, did not want a sufficiently exciting stimulus; he cherished, in an eminent degree, that high feeling and proud bearing which a due sense of the obligations imposed on him by his country, and of her anxious expectations of his prowess, could not fail to inspire; determined resolutely and cheerfully to discharge the former, and, if possible, to more than realise the latter. These feelings and dispositions of the soldiery in the two most advanced of the Allied Armies were concentrated with remarkable intensity in the characters of their respective Chiefs. With peculiar propriety may it be said of the illustrious WELLINGTON, that he personified, as he ever has done, the pure ideal of the British soldier-the true character of his own followers. Resolute, yet cool, cautious and calculating |