incessant persecutions and tortures; and amongst several regiments of the army a horrible practice had sprung up, which for some time caused the greatest alarm to the Government.  This was a strange frightful custom of child-murder.  The men used to say that life was unbearable, that suicide was a crime; in order to avert which, and to finish with the intolerable misery of their position, the best plan was to kill a young child, which was innocent, and therefore secure of heaven, and then to deliver themselves up as guilty of the murder.  The King himself—­the hero, sage, and philosopher, the prince who had always liberality on his lips and who affected a horror of capital punishments—­was frightened at this dreadful protest, on the part of the wretches whom he had kidnapped, against his monstrous tyranny; but his only means of remedying the evil was strictly to forbid that such criminals should be attended by any ecclesiastic whatever, and denied all religious consolation.

The punishment was incessant.  Every officer had the liberty to inflict it, and in peace it was more cruel than in war.  For when peace came the King turned adrift such of his officers as were not noble; whatever their services might have been.  He would call a captain to the front of his company and say, ’He is not noble, let him go.’  We were afraid of him somehow, and were cowed before him like wild beasts before their keeper.  I have seen the bravest men of the army cry like children at a cut of the cane; I have seen a little ensign of fifteen call out a man of fifty from the ranks, a man who had been in a hundred battles, and he has stood presenting arms, and sobbing and howling like a baby, while the young wretch lashed him over the arms and thighs with the stick.  In a day of action this man would dare anything.  A button might be awry then and nobody touched him; but when they had made the brute fight, then they lashed him again into subordination.  Almost all of us yielded to the spell—­scarce one could break it.  The French officer I have spoken of as taken along with me, was in my company, and caned like a dog.  I met him at Versailles twenty years afterwards, and he turned quite pale and sick when I spoke to him of old days.  ’For God’s sake,’ said he, ’don’t talk of that time:  I wake up from my sleep trembling and crying even now.’

As for me, after a very brief time (in which it must be confessed I tasted, like my comrades, of the cane) and after I had found opportunities to show myself to be a brave and dexterous soldier, I took the means I had adopted in the English army to prevent any further personal degradation.  I wore a bullet around my neck, which I did not take the pains to conceal, and I gave out that it should be for the man or officer who caused me to be chastised.  And there was something in my character which made my superiors believe me; for that bullet had already served me to kill an Austrian colonel, and I would have given it to a Prussian with as little remorse.  For what cared I for their quarrels, or whether the eagle under which I marched had one head or two?  All I said was, ’No man shall find me tripping in my duty; but no man shall ever lay a hand upon me.’  And by this maxim I abided as long as I remained in the service.