The hussar’s idea of an island 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 fine women over there.’

‘The women are beautiful.’

He said nothing, but for some time he squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest, curling up the ends of his little yellow moustache.

‘But they will escape in boats,’ he muttered at last; and I could see that he had still that picture of a little island in his imagination.  ’If they could but see us they might remain.  It has been said of the Hussars of Bercheny that they can set a whole population running, the women towards us, the men away.  We are, as you have no doubt observed, a very fine body of men, and the officers are the pick of the service, though the seniors are hardly up to the same standard as the rest of us.’