The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal Page A

“Are you disobeying orders? I am Count B——, the general in command of your division,” and so on. He pulled some more rank, and his aide flung himself on the soldiers. The corporal stuck him in the arm with his bayonet, then ran off with his men on the double.
    “Let them all get shot like that damn fool,” the corporal kept swearing, “legs shattered and arms too! Pack of cowards! All of them sold to the Bourbons and traitors to the Emperor!”
    Fabrizio listened in horror to this terrible accusation.
    By ten o’clock the little troop reached the regiment outside a village consisting of several extremely narrow alleys, but Fabrizio noticed that Corporal Aubry avoided speaking to any of the officers.
    “We can’t get through!” the corporal exclaimed.
    All these alleys were crowded with infantry, cavalry, and worst of all with artillery caissons and wagons. The corporal headed for the intersection of three of these narrow lanes; after about twenty paces he had to stop; everyone was in a rage and swearing.
    “Another traitor in command!” the corporal exclaimed. “If theenemy had the wit to surround the village, we’d all be trapped like dogs. Follow me, you men!”
    Fabrizio stared: there were no more than six soldiers with the corporal. Through a wide-open gate they entered a huge barnyard; from here they made their way into a stable whose rear door opened into a garden. Here they were lost for a moment, wandering this way and that, but finally, passing through a hedge, they found themselves in a huge field of buckwheat. In less than half an hour, guided by the shouts and confused noise of the regiment, they were back on the high road outside the village. The ditches beside this road were filled with abandoned muskets. Fabrizio chose one, but the road, though quite broad, was so crowded with fleeing men and carts that in another half hour the corporal and Fabrizio had advanced no more than five hundred yards; someone said that the road would take them to Charleroi.
    As eleven o’clock was striking in the village steeple, the corporal shouted, “Let’s cut across the fields again.” The little troop now consisted of only three soldiers, the corporal, and Fabrizio. When they were less than a league from the high road, one of the soldiers said, “I can’t go on.”
    “Me neither,” said another.
    “Nice news! We’re all in this together,” the corporal snapped; “follow my orders and you’ll get through.” He had noticed five or six trees along a little ditch in the center of a huge wheat field. “Get to those trees!” he told his men. “Lie down here,” he ordered once they had reached the trees, “and not a sound. But before you sleep, who’s got bread?”
    “I do,” said one of the soldiers.
    “Give it here,” the corporal commanded. He cut the bread into five hunks and took the smallest for himself. “Fifteen minutes before daybreak,” he said between mouthfuls, “you’ll have the enemy cavalry on your back. The point is not to get yourself cut down. If there were just one man here, he’d be done for, with the cavalry after him in these open fields, but five of us can get away: keep close to me, don’t shoot except at close range, and tomorrow night I promise to get you to Charleroi.”
    The corporal wakened them an hour before dawn and orderedthem to reload their muskets. The racket on the high road continued, as it had lasted all night: it sounded like a rushing river in the distance.
    “They’re running away like a flock of sheep,” Fabrizio observed to the corporal, innocently enough.
    “Shut up, imbecile!” snapped the corporal, furious.
    And the three soldiers who constituted his entire army along with Fabrizio stared angrily at the latter, as if he had uttered blasphemy. He had insulted the nation.
    “That’s a good one!” mused our hero. “I already saw it back in Milan, with the Viceroy: they never run away, oh no! With these Frenchmen you can’t tell the