London, April to September 1822
RUMOR spread that finally we were going to see action. The Prince of Waldeck was to attempt a frontal assault, while we, after having crossed the river, would serve as a diversion by making a feigned attack on Thionville from the direction of France.
Five Breton companies, mine included, the company of the Picardy and Navarre officers, and the regiment of volunteers, composed of young Lorraine peasants and various deserters, were ordered up for duty. We were to be supported by the Royal German Guards, a few squadrons of musketeers, and several corps of dragoons who would cover our left flank: my brother took part in this cavalry together with the Baron de Montboissier, who had married one of M. de Malesherbes’s daughters, Madame de Rosambo’s sister, and therefore an aunt to my sister-in-law. We would escort three Austrian artillery companies carrying heavy guns and a battery of three mortars.
We set out at six o’clock in the evening, and by ten o’clock we were crossing the Moselle above Thionville on copper pontoons:
amoena fluenta
Subterlabentis tacito rumore Mosellae.[35]
At daybreak, we were in battle formation on the left bank, the heavy cavalry echeloned on both sides and the light cavalry in front. Our second maneuver was to form a column and begin to march.
About nine o’clock, we heard a volley fired to our left. A carabinier officer came riding full tilt toward us, to tell us that a detachment of Kellermann’s army was about to meet us and that skirmishes were already underway. This officer’s horse had been struck in the nose by a bullet; it was rearing and streaming foam from its mouth and blood from its nostrils. This carabinier, with his sword in hand, on his wounded steed, looked superb. The corps marching from Metz now maneuvered to take us in flank. They had field cannon with which they opened fire on our volunteers. I heard the screams of a few recruits touched by the ball. These last cries of youth wrenched from the sap and vigor of life made me profoundly sad. I pitied their poor mothers.
The drums beat the charge, and we rushed in disarray upon the enemy. They were so close to us that not even the smoke could prevent us from seeing all that is terrible in the face of a man prepared to spill your blood. The patriots had not yet acquired that aplomb which comes from long familiarity with combat and victory: their maneuvers were weak, they were groping in the dark. Fifty grenadiers of the old guard would have routed such a motley mass of unruly nobles, young and old; but ten or twelve hundred foot soldiers were scared off by a few shots from the Austrian heavy artillery. They retreated, and our cavalry chased them for two leagues.
A deaf and dumb German girl, named Libbe or Libba, had grown fond of my cousin Armand and had followed him. I found her sitting on the grass, which had bloodied her dress: her elbows were propped on her folded and upraised knees; her hand, tangled in her thin blond hair, supported her head. She was crying, staring at three or four dead men, new conscripts in the ranks of the deaf and the dumb, around her. She had never heard the thunderclaps whose effect she beheld or the sighs that escaped her lips whenever she looked at Armand. She had never heard the voice of the man she loved, nor would she hear the first cry of the baby she was carrying in her womb. If the grave held only silence, she would have gone down to it without knowing.
But the fields of carnage are everywhere; at Père Lachaise, in Paris, twenty-seven thousand tombs and two hundred and thirty thousand bodies tell you of the battle that death wages day and night at your door.[36]
After a rather long halt, we resumed our march and arrived at nightfall beneath the walls of Thionville.
The drums had gone silent. Orders were given in a low voice. The cavalry, in an effort to repulse all attacks, moved quietly along the roads and the hedgerows toward the gate that we were to cannonade. The Austrian artillery, protected by our infantry, took up a position fifty yards from the outworks, behind a few hastily assembled gabions. At one o’clock in the morning, on September 6, a rocket sent up from the Prince of Waldeck’s camp, on the other side of town, gave the signal. The Prince launched a round of heavy fire to which the town vigorously replied. We began shooting at once.
The besieged, unaware that we had troops on that side, and not having foreseen this assault, had left the southern ramparts unprotected. They did not waste time waiting. The garrison armed a double battery which shattered our fortifications and dismounted two of our guns. The sky was on fire; we were shrouded in torrents of smoke. I behaved like a little Alexander: knocked out by fatigue, I fell sound asleep almost beneath the wheels of the gun carriage I was guarding. A shell, bursting six inches above the ground, sent a splinter into my right thigh. Awoken by the blow, but feeling no pain, I knew that I was wounded only by the wet flow of my blood. I bound up my thigh with my handkerchief. Already, in the fighting on the plain, two bullets had struck my rucksack during a wheeling maneuver. Atala, like a devoted daughter, had placed herself between her father and the enemy lead: she was yet to sustain the fire of Abbé Morellet.[37]
At four o’clock in the morning, the Prince of Waldeck’s firing ceased. We believed the town had surrendered, but the gates were not opened, and we were compelled to beat a retreat. We went back to our positions, after a punishing three-day march.
The Prince of Waldeck had advanced as far as the edge of the ditches, which he had tried to cross, hoping to provoke surrender by means of simultaneous attack. Our side supposed that a few divisions were already inside the town and flattered itself in thinking that the Royalist partisans within would soon deliver the keys of the city to the Princes. The Austrians, having fired in barbette, had lost a considerable number of men. The Prince of Waldeck himself had lost an arm. But while a few drops of blood flowed beneath the walls of Thionville, blood flowed in torrents in the prisons of Paris. My wife and my sister were in far more danger than I.