Well, the Mamelukes, who knew that we were all in ambulances, thought
they'd bar our way; but they couldn't play that sort of game with
Napoleon. He turned to his old fire-eaters--the fellows with the
toughest hides--and said: "Go clear the road for me." Junot, who was his
devoted friend and a number one soldier, took not more than a thousand
men, and slashed right through the army of the pasha which had had the
impudence to get in our way. Then we went back to Cairo, where we had
our headquarters.

And now for another part of the story. While Napoleon was away France
was letting herself be ruined by those government scalawags in Paris,
who were keeping back the soldiers' pay, withholding their linen and
their clothes, and even letting them starve. They wanted the soldiers to
lay down the law to the universe, and that's all they cared for. They
were just a lot of idiots jabbering for amusement instead of putting
their own hands into the dough. So our armies were beaten and we
couldn't defend, our frontiers. THE MAN was no longer there. I say "the
man" because that's what they called him; but it was absurd to say that
he was merely a man, when he had a star of his own with all its
belongings. It was the rest of us who were merely men. At the battle of
Aboukir, with a single division and with a loss of only three hundred
men, he whipped the great army of the Turks, and hustled more than half
of them into the sea--r-r-rah--like that! But it was his last
thunderclap in Egypt; because when he heard, soon afterward, what was
happening in France, he made up his mind to go back there. "I am the
savior of France," he said, "and I must go to her aid." The army didn't
know what he intended to do. If they had known, they would have kept him
in Egypt by force and made him Emperor of the East.

When he had gone, we all felt very blue; because he had been the joy of