by John Buchan
IV
Drouet rushed into the taverns to ask if any late revellers had seen a great coach go through. The revellers shook their heads. No coach that night had passed through Varennes. Suddenly came a cry, and he looked behind him up the long hill of the Clermont road. There, on the top, were the headlights of the coach. It halted, for it was expecting Bouillé’s escort. The Clermont postilions were giving trouble; they declared that they were not bound to go down the hill, for the horses were needed early next morning to carry in the hay. At last the coach started, and the creak of its brakes could be heard on the hill. Drouet ran into the inn called “The Golden Arm,” crying on every man who was for France to come out and stop the berline, since inside it was the King.
There was only one thing for him to do, to hold the bridge over the Aire. Now, at the bridgehead stood a great furniture van without horses, waiting to start for somewhere in the morning. Drouet and his handful of assistants pulled it across the bridge and blocked the approach. Meantime one Sausse, a tallow chandler and the procurator of the town, had appeared on the scene, and seen to the rousing of every household on the west side of the river.
Half-way down the hill to the bridge the road goes through an archway under an old church. At that archway the only two men of the company who had arms took up position, and when the berline arrived challenged it and brought it to a stand. Passports were demanded, and as the Baroness de Korff fumbled for them the Queen looked out of the window. She begged the gentlemen, whoever they might be, to get the business over quickly, as “she was desirous of reaching the end of her journey as soon as might be.” It was an ill-omened phrase which was long remembered.
Meantime the two armed men had increased their numbers, and some of Bouillé’s German hussars joined the crowd, more or less drunk. The cabriolet had also been stopped and the maids in it hustled into the inn. But it seemed that the passports were in order, and the Varennes officials were prepared to let the coach continue on its way. It was the crisis of the French monarchy. Escape seemed once more certain, when Drouet intervened. He knew that Bouillé’s son was waiting beyond the river, and that Bouillé himself would arrive soon after dawn with ample forces. What he sought to gain was time; on no account must the King cross the Aire till morning.
The embarrassed officials yielded to his threats and fury. “If there is any doubt,” said the procurator, “it will do no harm to wait for daylight. It is a dark night and the beasts are tired.” He would endorse the passports in the morning. He assisted the King and the Queen to alight, and escorted them to his own house. Hope was not yet wholly gone, for there were still Choiseul and his hussars blundering through the Argonne woods. Meantime the fierce Drouet had had the tocsin sounded and every soul in Varennes was in the streets, waiting on some happening, they knew not what.
Just about dawn Choiseul arrived with his German troopers. He saw what was astir, and had he had Frenchmen in his command all might have been saved. He urged them to rescue the King, and ordered them to charge to clear the streets, which they did, and formed up outside M. Sausse’s house, in which Marie Antoinette and her two children were lying huddled on truckle beds. Outside was the perpetual noise of drums and men; every one who could find any kind of weapon trooped up to it and thronged the square. Meantime, young Bouillé across the river had heard the tocsin, and, being uncertain what to do, had returned to his father.
When the morning light broadened the whole neighbourhood was gathered outside the procurator’s house. M. Sausse, a devotee of official decorum, felt compelled to endorse the passports and let the royal family continue their journey. But Drouet had other views, and these views were shared by the crowds in the streets. Choiseul, had his mercenaries been of any value, had still the game in his hands. For the second time he ordered them to charge. But the German hussars, comprehending nothing except that there was a large number of formidable citizens opposed to them, sat still on their horses. The King in his green coat appeared at the window of his lodging and was greeted with cheers and with something else which meant the ruin of his hopes, for the mob of ten thousand with one voice shouted “Back to Paris!”
About six o’clock there arrived at Varennes two men from the Council in Paris, Bayon and Romeuf. They had ridden madly all day and night, and had brought a demand from the Council for their Majesties’ immediate return. The Queen was furious, and flung the message on the ground. But the King had made up his mind. He had had enough of this undignified secrecy and uncomfortable jolting. He would go back to Paris to the people with whom he was so popular.
Indeed, he had no other choice. The advance guards of Bouillé’s horse were even then appearing on the heights behind the Aire, but there were 10,000 men in Varennes, and nothing but artillery could have cleared the place. Bouillé, even had he been in time, could have done nothing. When, about seven o’clock, the royalist general himself looked down on the bridge, he saw a cloud of dust on the Clermont road which told him that the berline had begun its return journey, accompanied by thousands of marching citizens. The adventure was over. What had seemed so certain had shipwrecked on a multitude of blunders and the strange perversities of fortune. The King and Queen were returning to a prison from which there was to be no outlet but death.
V
What of the young Swede, Count Axel Fersen, whom we last saw at Bondy receiving from Marie Antoinette the broad gold ring? The lovers of queens have for the most part been tragically fated, and his lot was no exception to the rule. It is hard for us to-day to judge of the charm of Marie Antoinette; from her portraits her figure and features seem too heavy, though her hair and colouring were beautiful; but she seems to have had a share of that inexplicable compelling power which certain women have possessed — Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Mary of Scots, Elizabeth of Bohemia — which makes men willing to ride on their behalf over the edge of the world. Fersen, who had worshipped her at first sight when a boy in his teens, was to spend the nineteen remaining years of his life a slave of tragic and tender memories. After her death he became a “fey” man, silent, abstracted, grave beyond other men, and utterly contemptuous of danger, one like Sir Palamede —
“Who, riding ever through a lonely world,
Whene’er on adverse shield or helm he came
Against the danger desperately hurled,
Crying her name.”
He rose to be a famous soldier and marshal of the Swedish armies, and at the age of fifty-five was confronted with a riot in Stockholm. Inside the church of Riddenholm were the nobles of Sweden, barricaded and safe; outside on the steps he stood alone, having been dragged from his carriage, his sword in his right hand and on his left the ring of the Queen of France, which the people of the North believed to be a thing of witchcraft.
For a little he held the steps, for no man dared come within the sweep of his terrible sword or the glow of his more terrible ring. At last some one thought of stones. They were flung from a distance, and presently he was maimed and crushed till he died. Then, and not till then, the mob came near his body, shielding their eyes from the gleam of the ring. One man, a fisherman, Zaffel by name, took his axe and hacked the finger off while the crowd cheered. Averting his head he plucked at the thing, and, running to the river bank, flung it far into the stream.
The rest of the story of the ring is as wild a legend as ever came out of the North. It is said that Zaffel, going fishing next morning after the fury of the riots was over, came into a lonely reach of water and found his boat standing still. He looked up at the masthead, and there, clasping it, saw a hand lacking one finger. The mutilated hand forced the boat forward against tide and wind, and when he tried the tiller he found that the tiller had no effect upon the course. All day he sat in the boat shivering with terror, till in the cold twilight he saw in front of him a white rock in the stream, and upon a ledge of it Fersen’s ring. He took it and glanced up at the masthead. The hand had now recovered its lost finger and had disappeared, and his boat was free once more to ob
ey his direction.
In the early dawn of the next day he was back at Stockholm, babbling nonsense and singing wild songs, beyond doubt a madman. At that moment in the Riddenholm church the nobles, who had left Fersen to die, were gathered round his coffin in the act of burial. Suddenly something glimmered in the dark folds of the pall, and they saw with terror that it was the Queen’s ring. When the coffin was lowered into the grave the gravediggers dared not fling earth upon the jewel. They feared that the dead man’s spirit would haunt them, so they gave the ring to Fersen’s family, with whom it remains to this day.
II. — THE RAILWAY RAID IN GEORGIA
The time is the spring of 1862, the second year of the American Civil War. The scene is the State of Tennessee; the Confederates are concentrating at Corinth, Mississippi, and the two Northern forces of Grant and Buell are moving on that spot. A month before Grant had won the important action of Fort Donelson. A month later he was to win the battle of Shiloh.
In Buell’s army was General O. M. Mitchel, commanding the Northern forces in Middle Tennessee and protecting Nashville with a force of some 17,000 men. Now, President Lincoln especially desired that Eastern Tennessee should be cleared of the enemy, since it was one of the latter’s chief supply grounds. General Mitchel believed that Corinth would soon fall, and that the next movement would be eastward towards Chattanooga, that key-point on the Tennessee river which was later the scene of one of Grant’s most famous victories. He thought, rightly, that if he could press into the enemy’s country and occupy strategical points ahead, he would pave the way for Grant’s march eastward.
On the 8th of April the Northerners won the battle of Pittsburg Landing. Next day Mitchel marched south from Shelbyville into Alabama and seized Huntsville. From there he sent a detachment westward to open up communication with the Northern troops at Pittsburg Landing. On the same day he himself took another detachment seventy miles by rail and arrived without difficulty within thirty miles of Chattanooga, two hours from the key position in the West. There, however, he stuck fast, and the capture of Chattanooga was delayed for two years. He failed because another plan had failed, the plan which is the subject of this story.
Chattanooga at the moment was practically without a garrison; but in Georgia there were ample Confederate troops, and the Georgia State Railway and the East Tennessee Railway could bring them up in great force at short notice. If Mitchel was to seize and hold Chattanooga, these lines must be cut for long enough to enable him to consolidate his position. Now, in his army was a certain spy of the name of James J. Andrews, one of these daring adventurers who, in the civil war of volunteers, many of whom were as yet without regular uniforms, could perform exploits impossible in a normal campaign. Andrews conceived the idea of a raid on the Confederate railways, and Mitchel approved. Before he left Shelbyville he authorized Andrews to take twenty-four men, enter the enemy’s territory and burn the bridges on the vital railways.
The men were selected from three Ohio regiments, and told only that they were required for secret and dangerous service. They exchanged their uniforms for the ordinary dress worn by civilians in the South, and carried no arms except revolvers. On the 7th of April, by a roadside a mile east of Shelbyville, in the late evening, they met Andrews, who told them his plan. In small detachments of three or four they were to go east into the Cumberland Mountains and work southward, and on the evening of the third day rendezvous with Andrews at Marietta in Georgia, more than 200 miles distant. If any one asked them questions they were to declare that they were Kentuckians going to join the Confederate army.
The weather was bad and the travellers were much delayed by swollen streams. This led Andrews to believe that Mitchel’s column would also be delayed, so he sent secret word to the different groups that the attempt would be postponed one day, from Friday to Saturday, 12th April. Of the little party one lost his road and never arrived at the destination; two reached Marietta, but missed the rendezvous; and two were captured and forced into the Confederate army. Twenty, however, early on the morning of Saturday, 12th April, met in Andrews’ room at the Marietta Hotel.
They had travelled from Chattanooga as ordinary passengers on the Georgia State Railway. The sight of that railway impressed them with the difficulties of their task, for it was crowded with trains and soldiers. In order to do their work they must capture an engine, but the station where the capture was to be made — Big Shanty — had recently been made a Confederate Camp. Their job was, therefore, to seize an engine in a camp with soldiers all round them, to run it from one to two hundred miles through enemy country, and to dodge or overpower any trains they might meet — no small undertaking for a score of men. Some were in favour of abandoning the enterprise, but Andrews stuck stubbornly to his purpose. He gave his final instructions, and the twenty proceeded to the ticket office to purchase tickets for different stations on the line to Chattanooga.
For eight miles they rode in comfort as passengers, till at Big Shanty they saw the Confederate tents in the misty morning. It had been a drizzling April dawn, and a steady rain was now beginning. The train stopped at Big Shanty for breakfast, and this gave them their chance, for the conductor, the engine-driver, and most of the passengers descended for their meal, leaving the train unguarded.
Among the twenty were men who understood the stoking and driving of railway engines, and it did not take long to uncouple three empty vans, the locomotive, and the tender. Brown and Knight, the two engineers, and the fireman climbed into the cab, and the rest clambered into the rear goods van — no easy job, for the cars stood on a high bank. A sentry with rifle in hand stood not a dozen feet from the engine, watching the whole proceedings, but no move was made until it was too late. Andrews gave the signal, the wheels slipped at first on the greasy metals, and then the train moved forward; and before the uproar in the station behind began it had gathered speed.
The first and worst problem was the passing of trains coming from the north. There were two trains on the time-table which had to be passed at certain stations, and there was also a local goods train not scheduled, which might be anywhere. Andrews hoped to avoid the danger of collision by running according to the schedule of the train he had captured, until the goods train was passed, and then to increase to topmost speed till he reached the Oostenaula and Chickamauga bridges, burn them and pass on through Chattanooga to Mitchel as he moved up from Huntsville. He hoped to reach his chief early in the afternoon.
It was a perfectly feasible plan, and it would almost certainly have been carried out but for that fatal day’s delay. On Friday, the day originally fixed, all the trains had been up to time, and the weather had been good; but on that Saturday, as luck would have it, the whole railway was in disorder, every train was late, and two “extras” had been put on, of which the leader had no notion. Had he known this, even a man of his audacity would scarcely have started, and the world would have been the poorer by the loss of a stirring tale.
The party had to make frequent stops, particularly between stations, to tear up the track, cut the telegraph wires, and load on sleepers to be used for bridge burning; and also at wayside stations to take on wood and water. At the latter Andrews bluffed the officials by telling them that he was one of General Beauregard’s officers, and was running a powder train through to that General at Corinth. Unfortunately he had no proper instruments for pulling up the rails, and it was important to keep to the schedule of the captured train, so they tore light-heartedly past towns and villages, trusting to luck, and exhilarated by the successful start of their wild adventure.
At a station called Etowah they found the “Yonah,” an old engine owned by an iron company, standing with steam up; but their mind was all on the local goods train, so they left it untouched. Thirty miles on from Big Shanty they reached Kingston, where a branch line entered from the town of Rome. On the branch a train was waiting for the mail — that is to say, their captured train — and Andrews learned that the local goods was expected immediately; so
he ran on to a side track, and waited for it.
Presently it arrived, and to the consternation of the little party it carried a red flag to show that another train was close behind it. Andrews marched boldly across to its conductor and asked what was the meaning of the railway being blocked in this fashion, when he had orders to take the powder straight through to General Beauregard? In reply he was told that Mitchel had captured Huntsville and was said to be marching on Chattanooga, and that everything was being cleared out of that town. Andrews ordered him to move his train down the line out of the way, and he obeyed.
It seemed an eternity to the party before the “extra” arrived, and to their dismay when it turned up they saw that it bore another red flag. The reason given was that it was too heavy for one engine and had therefore to be made up into two sections. So began another anxious wait. The little band — Andrews with the engine-drivers and fireman in the cab, and the rest taking the place of Beauregard’s ammunition in the goods vans — had to preserve composure as best they could, with three trains clustered round them and every passenger in the three extremely curious about the mysterious powder train into which the morning mail had been transformed. For one hour and five minutes they waited at Kingston, the men in the goods vans being warned by Andrews to be ready to fight in case of need. He himself kept close to the station in case some mischief-maker should send an inquiring telegram down the line. At long last came the second half of the local, and as soon as it passed the end of their side track the adventurers moved on. But the alarm had now been raised behind them. From the midst of the confusion at Big Shanty two men set out on foot along the track to make some effort to capture the Northerners. They were railwaymen — one the conductor of the train, W. A. Fuller, and the other a foreman of the Atlanta railway machine shops, called Anthony Murphy. They found a hand-car and pushed forward on it till they reached Etowah, where they realized that the line had been cut by pitching headforemost down the embankment into a ditch. A little thing like this did not dismay them, and at Etowah they found the “Yonah,” the iron company’s old locomotive, which, as we know, was standing with steam up. They got on board, filled it up with soldiers who happened to be near, and started off at full speed for Kingston, where they were convinced they would catch the filibusters. The “Yonah” actually entered Kingston station four minutes after Andrews had started, and was of course immediately confronted with the three long trains facing the wrong way. It would have taken too long to move them, so the “Yonah” was abandoned, and Murphy uncoupled the engine and one coach of the Rome train, and continued the chase. It was now any one’s race. Andrews and his merry men were only a few minutes ahead.
