being destroyed, demolished, ruined, wrecked! A few of the bravest
guarded the eagles; because the eagles, you understand, stood for
France, for you, for the civil and military honor that had to be kept
unstained and that was not to be humbled by the cold.

We hardly ever got warm except near the Emperor. When he was in danger,
we all ran to him--although we were so nearly frozen that we would not
have held out a hand to our dearest friend. They say that he used to
weep at night over his poor family of soldiers. Nobody but he and
Frenchmen could ever have pulled out of there. We did pull out, but it
was with loss--terrible loss. Our allies ate up all of our provisions,
and then began the treachery which the Red Man had foretold.

The blatherskites in Paris, who had kept quiet since the formation of
the Imperial Guard, thought that the Guard had finally perished. So they
got up a conspiracy and hoodwinked the Prefect of Police into an attempt
to overthrow the Emperor. He heard of this and it worried him. When he
left us he said: "Good-by, boys. Guard the posts. I will come back to
you."

After he had gone, things went from bad to worse. The generals lost
their heads; and the marshals quarreled with one another and did all
sorts of foolish things, as was natural. Napoleon, who was good to
everybody, had fed them on gold until they had become as fat as pigs,
and they didn't want to do any more marching. This led to trouble,
because many of them remained idle in forts behind the army that was
driving us back to France, and didn't even try to relieve us by
attacking the enemy in the rear.

The Emperor finally returned, bringing with him a lot of splendid