seemed to be limited to the little
patches which lie off the Norman or Breton coast. I tried to explain to
him that this was a great country, not much smaller than France.

'Well, well,' said he, 'we shall know all about it presently, for we are
going to conquer it. They say in the camp that we shall probably enter
London either next Wednesday evening or else on the Thursday morning.
We are to have a week for plundering the town, and then one army corps
is to take possession of Scotland and another of Ireland.'

His serene confidence made me smile. 'But how do you know you can do
all this?' I asked.

'Oh!' said he, 'the Emperor has arranged it.'

'But they have an army, and they are well prepared. They are brave men
and they will fight.'

'There would be no use their doing that, for the Emperor is going over
himself,' said he; and in the simple answer I understood for the first
time the absolute trust and confidence which these soldiers had in their
leader. Their feeling for him was fanaticism, and its strength was
religion, and never did Mahomet nerve the arms of his believers and
strengthen them against pain and death more absolutely than this little
grey-coated idol did to those who worshipped him. If he had chosen--and
he was more than once upon the point of it--to assert that he was
indeed above humanity he would have found millions to grant his claim.
You who have heard of him as a stout gentleman in a straw hat, as he was
in his later days, may find it hard to understand it, but if you had
seen his mangled soldiers still with their dying breath crying out to
him, and turning their livid faces towards him as he passed, you would
have realised the hold which he had over the minds of men.

'You have been over there?' asked the lieutenant presently, jerking his
thumb towards the distant cloud upon the water.

'Yes, I have spent my life there.'

'But why did you stay there when there was such good fighting to be had
in the French service?'

'My father was driven out of the country as an aristocrat. It was only
after his death that I could offer my sword to the Emperor.'

'You have missed a great deal, but I have no doubt that we shall still
have plenty of fine wars. And you think that the English will offer us
battle?'

'I have no doubt of it.'

'We feared that when they understood that it was the Emperor in person
who had come they would throw down their arms. I have heard that
there are some