And now for another part of the story. While Napoleon was away France
was letting herself be ruined by those government scalawags in Paris,
who were keeping back the soldiers' pay, withholding their linen and
their clothes, and even letting them starve. They wanted the soldiers to
lay down the law to the universe, and that's all they cared for. They
were just a lot of idiots jabbering for amusement instead of putting
their own hands into the dough. So our armies were beaten and we
couldn't defend, our frontiers. THE MAN was no longer there. I say "the
man" because that's what they called him; but it was absurd to say that
he was merely a man, when he had a star of his own with all its
belongings. It was the rest of us who were merely men. At the battle of
Aboukir, with a single division and with a loss of only three hundred
men, he whipped the great army of the Turks, and hustled more than half
of them into the sea--r-r-rah--like that! But it was his last
thunderclap in Egypt; because when he heard, soon afterward, what was
happening in France, he made up his mind to go back there.
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