Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

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Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) Page 812

by Thomas Hardy


  Has he, by some strange gift of foreknowing,

  Declared his fate was hovering in such wise!

  STRAGGLER III

  His aged form being borne beyond the strife,

  The gallant Moellendorf, in flushed despair,

  Swore he would not survive; and, pressing on,

  He, too, was slaughtered. Patriotic rage

  Brimmed marshals' breasts and men's. The King himself

  Fought like the commonest. But nothing served.

  His horse is slain; his own doom yet unknown.

  Prince William, too, is wounded. Brave Schmettau

  Is broke; himself disabled. All give way,

  And regiments crash like trees at felling-time!

  HOHENLOHE

  No more. We match it here. The yielding lines

  Still sweep us backward. Backward we must go!

  [Exeunt HOHENLOHE, Staff, stragglers, etc.]

  The Prussian retreat from Jena quickens to a rout, many thousands

  taken prisoners by MURAT, who pursues them to Weimar, where the

  inhabitants fly shrieking through the streets.

  The October day closes in to evening. By this time the troops

  retiring with the King of Prussia from the second battlefield

  of Auerstadt have intersected RUCHEL'S and HOHENLOHE'S flying

  battalions from Jena. The crossing streams of fugitives strike

  panic into each other, and the tumult increases with the

  thickening darkness till night renders the scene invisible,

  and nothing remains but a confused diminishing noise, and fitful

  lights here and there.

  SCENE V

  BERLIN. A ROOM OVERLOOKING A PUBLIC PLACE

  [A fluttering group of ladies is gathered at the window, gazing

  out and conversing anxiously. The time draws towards noon, when

  the clatter of a galloping horse's hoofs is heard echoing up the

  long Potsdamer-Strasse, and presently turning into the Leipziger-

  Strasse reaches the open space commanded by the ladies' outlook.

  It ceases before a Government building opposite them, and the

  rider disappears into the courtyard.]

  FIRST LADY

  Yes: surely he is a courier from the field!

  SECOND LADY

  Shall we not hasten down, and take from him

  The doom his tongue may deal us?

  THIRD LADY

  We shall catch

  As soon by watching here as hastening hence

  The tenour of his new. [They wait.] Ah, yes: see—see

  The bulletin is straightway to be nailed!

  He was, then, from the field....

  [They wait on while the bulletin is affixed.]

  SECOND LADY

  I cannot scan the words the scroll proclaims;

  Peer as I will, these too quick-thronging dreads

  Bring water to the eyes. Grant us, good Heaven,

  That victory be where she is needed most

  To prove Thy goodness!... What do you make of it?

  THIRD LADY [reading, through a glass]

  "The battle strains us sorely; but resolve

  May save us even now. Our last attack

  Has failed, with fearful loss. Once more we strive."

  [A long silence in the room. Another rider is heard approaching,

  above the murmur of the gathering citizens. The second lady

  looks out.]

  SECOND LADY

  A straggler merely he.... But they decide,

  At last, to post his news, wild-winged or no.

  THIRD LADY [reading again through her glass]

  "The Duke of Brunswick, leading on a charge,

  Has met his death-doom. Schmettau, too, is slain;

  Prince William wounded. But we stand as yet,

  Engaging with the last of our reserves."

  [The agitation in the street communicates itself to the room.

  Some of the ladies weep silently as they wait, much longer this

  time. Another horseman is at length heard clattering into the

  Platz, and they lean out again with painful eagerness.]

  SECOND LADY

  An adjutant of Marshal Moellendorf's

  If I define him rightly. Read—O read!—

  Though reading draw them from their socket-holes

  Use your eyes now!

  THIRD LADY [glass up]

  As soon as 'tis affixed....

  Ah—this means much! The people's air and gait

  Too well betray disaster. [Reading.] "Berliners,

  The King has lost the battle! Bear it well.

  The foremost duty of a citizen

  Is to maintain a brave tranquillity.

  This is what I, the Governor, demand

  Of men and women now.... The King lives still."

  [They turn from the window and sit in a silence broken only by

  monosyllabic words, hearing abstractedly the dismay without

  that has followed the previous excitement and hope.

  The stagnation is ended by a cheering outside, of subdued

  emotional quality, mixed with sounds of grief. They again

  look forth. QUEEN LOUISA is leaving the city with a very

  small escort, and the populace seem overcome. They strain

  their eyes after her as she disappears. Enter fourth lady.]

  FIRST LADY

  How does she bear it? Whither does she go?

  FOURTH LADY

  She goes to join the King at Custrin, there

  To abide events—as we. Her heroism

  So schools her sense of her calamities

  As out of grief to carve new queenliness,

  And turn a mobile mien to statuesque,

  Save for a sliding tear.

  [The ladies leave the window severally.]

  SPIRIT IRONIC

  So the Will plays at flux and reflux still.

  This monarchy, one-half whose pedestal

  Is built of Polish bones, has bones home-made!

  Let the fair woman bear it. Poland did.

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Meanwhile the mighty Emperor nears apace,

  And soon will glitter at the city gates

  With palpitating drums, and breathing brass,

  And rampant joyful-jingling retinue.

  [An evening mist cloaks the scene.]

  SCENE VI

  THE SAME

  [It is a brilliant morning, with a fresh breeze, and not a cloud.

  The open Platz and the adjoining streets are filled with dense

  crowds of citizens, in whose upturned faces curiosity has

  mastered consternation and grief.

  Martial music is heard, at first faint, then louder, followed

  by a trampling of innumerable horses and a clanking of arms and

  accoutrements. Through a street on the right hand of the view

  from the windows come troops of French dragoons heralding the

  arrival of BONAPARTE.

  Re-enter the room hurriedly and cross to the windows several

  ladies as before, some in tears.]

  FIRST LADY

  The kingdom late of Prussia, can it be

  That thus it disappears?—a patriot-cry,

  A battle, bravery, ruin; and no more?

  SECOND LADY

  Thank God the Queen's gone!

  THIRD LADY

  To what sanctuary?

  From earthquake shocks there is no sheltering cell!

  —Is this what men call conquest? Must it close

  As historied conquests do, or be annulled

  By modern reason and the urbaner sense?—

  Such issue none would venture to predict,

  Yet folly 'twere to nourish foreshaped fears

  And suffer in conjecture and in deed.—

  If verily our country be dislimbed,

  Then at th
e mercy of his domination

  The face of earth will lie, and vassal kings

  Stand waiting on himself the Overking,

  Who ruling rules all; till desperateness

  Sting and excite a bonded last resistance,

  And work its own release.

  SECOND LADY

  He comes even now

  From sacrilege. I learn that, since the fight,

  In marching here by Potsdam yesterday,

  Sans-Souci Palace drew his curious feet,

  Where even great Frederick's tomb was bared to him.

  FOURTH LADY

  All objects on the Palace—cared for, kept

  Even as they were when our arch-monarch died—

  The books, the chair, the inkhorn, and the pen

  He quizzed with flippant curiosity;

  And entering where our hero's bones are urned

  He seized the sword and standards treasured there,

  And with a mixed effrontery and regard

  Declared they should be all dispatched to Paris

  As gifts to the Hotel des Invalides.

  THIRD LADY

  Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it!

  [A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoleon's staff, now enters the

  Platz immediately before the windows. In the midst rides the

  EMPEROR himself. The ladies are silent. The procession passes

  along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace.

  At the door NAPOLEON descends from his horse and goes into the

  building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the

  silence of the crowd.]

  SECOND LADY [impressed]

  O why does such a man debase himself

  By countenancing loud scurrility

  Against a queen who cannot make reprise!

  A power so ponderous needs no littleness—

  The last resort of feeble desperates!

  [Enter fifth lady.]

  FIFTH LADY [breathlessly]

  Humiliation grows acuter still.

  He placards rhetoric to his soldiery

  On their distress of us and our allies,

  Declaring he'll not stack away his arms

  Till he has choked the remaining foes of France

  In their own gainful glut.—Whom means he, think you?

  FIRST LADY

  Us?

  THIRD LADY

  Russia? Austria?

  FIFTH LADY

  Neither: England.—Yea,

  Her he still holds the master mischief-mind,

  And marrer of the countries' quietude,

  By exercising untold tyranny

  Over all the ports and seas.

  SECOND LADY

  Then England's doomed!

  When he has overturned the Russian rule,

  England comes next for wrack. They say that know!...

  Look—he has entered by the Royal doors

  And makes the Palace his.—Now let us go!—

  Our course, alas! is—whither?

  [Exeunt ladies. The curtain drops temporarily.]

  SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music]

  Deeming himself omnipotent

  With the Kings of the Christian continent,

  To warden the waves was his further bent.

  SEMICHORUS II

  But the weaving Will from eternity,

  [Hemming them in by a circling sea]

  Evolved the fleet of the Englishry.

  SEMICHORUS I

  The wane of his armaments ill-advised,

  At Trafalgar, to a force despised,

  Was a wound which never has cicatrized.

  SEMICHORUS II

  This, O this is the cramp that grips!

  And freezes the Emperor's finger-tips

  From signing a peace with the Land of Ships.

  CHORUS

  The Universal-empire plot

  Demands the rule of that wave-walled spot;

  And peace with England cometh not!

  THE SCENE REOPENS

  [A lurid gloom now envelops the Platz and city; and Bonaparte

  is heard as from the Palace:

  VOICE OF NAPOLEON

  These monstrous violations being in train

  Of law and national integrities

  By English arrogance in things marine,

  [Which dares to capture simple merchant-craft,

  In honest quest of harmless merchandize,

  For crime of kinship to a hostile power]

  Our vast, effectual, and majestic strokes

  In this unmatched campaign, enable me

  To bar from commerce with the Continent

  All keels of English frame. Hence I decree:—

  SPIRIT OF RUMOUR

  This outlines his renowned "Berlin Decree."

  Maybe he meditates its scheme in sleep,

  Or hints it to his suite, or syllables it

  While shaping, to his scribes.

  VOICE OF NAPOLEON

  All England's ports to suffer strict blockade;

  All traffic with that land to cease forthwith;

  All natives of her isles, wherever met,

  To be detained as windfalls of the war.

  All chattels of her make, material, mould,

  To be good prize wherever pounced upon:

  And never a bottom hailing from her shores

  But shall be barred from every haven here.

  This for her monstrous harms to human rights,

  And shameless sauciness to neighbour powers!

  SPIRIT SINISTER

  I spell herein that our excellently high-coloured drama is not

  played out yet!

  SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

  Nor will it be for many a month of moans,

  And summer shocks, and winter-whitened bones.

  [The night gets darker, and the Palace outlines are lost.]

  SCENE VII

  TILSIT AND THE RIVER NIEMEN

  [The scene is viewed from the windows of BONAPARTE'S temporary

  quarters. Some sub-officers of his suite are looking out upon

  it.

  It is the day after midsummer, about one o'clock. A multitude

  of soldiery and spectators lines each bank of the broad river

  which, stealing slowly north-west, bears almost exactly in its

  midst a moored raft of bonded timber. On this as a floor stands

  a gorgeous pavilion of draped woodwork, having at each side,

  facing the respective banks of the stream, a round-headed doorway

  richly festooned. The cumbersome erection acquires from the

  current a rhythmical movement, as if it were breathing, and the

  breeze now and then produces a shiver on the face of the stream.]

  DUMB SHOW

  On the south-west or Prussian side rides the EMPEROR NAPOLEON

  in uniform, attended by the GRAND DUKE OF BERG, the PRINCE OF

  NEUFCHATEL, MARSHAL BESSIERES, DUROC Marshal of the Palace, and

  CAULAINCOURT Master of the Horse. The EMPEROR looks well, but is

  growing fat. They embark on an ornamental barge in front of them,

  which immediately puts off. It is now apparent to the watchers

  that a precisely similar enactment has simultaneously taken place

  on the opposite or Russian bank, the chief figure being the

  EMPEROR ALEXANDER—a graceful, flexible man of thirty, with a

  courteous manner and good-natured face. He has come out from

  an inn on that side accompanied by the GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE,

  GENERAL BENNIGSEN, GENERAL OUWAROFF, PRINCE LABANOFF, and ADJUTANT-

  GENERAL COUNT LIEVEN.

  The two barges draw towards the raft, reaching the opposite sides

  of it about the same time, amidst discharges of cannon. Each

  Emperor enters the door that faces him, and meeting in the centre

  of t
he pavilion they formally embrace each other. They retire

  together to the screened interior, the suite of each remaining in

  the outer half of the pavilion.

  More than an hour passes while they are thus invisible. The French

  officers who have observed the scene from the lodging of NAPOLEON

  walk about idly, and ever and anon go curiously to the windows,

  again to watch the raft.

  CHORUS OF THE YEARS [aerial music]

  The prelude to this smooth scene—mark well!—were the shocks

  whereof the times gave token

  Vaguely to us ere last year's snows shut over Lithuanian pine

  and pool,

  Which we told at the fall of the faded leaf, when the pride of

  Prussia was bruised and broken,

  And the Man of Adventure sat in the seat of the Man of Method

  and rigid Rule.

  SEMICHORUS I OF THE PITIES

  Snows incarnadined were thine, O Eylau, field of the wide white

  spaces,

  And frozen lakes, and frozen limbs, and blood iced hard as it left

  the veins:

  Steel-cased squadrons swathed in cloud-drift, plunging to doom

  through pathless places,

  And forty thousand dead and near dead, strewing the early-lighted

  plains.

  Friedland to these adds its tale of victims, its midnight marches

  and hot collisions,

  Its plunge, at his word, on the enemy hooped by the bended river

  and famed Mill stream,

  As he shatters the moves of the loose-knit nations to curb his

  exploitful soul's ambitions,

  And their great Confederacy dissolves like the diorama of a dream.

  DUMB SHOW [continues]

  NAPOLEON and ALEXANDER emerge from their seclusion, and each is

  beheld talking to the suite of his companion apparently in

  flattering compliment. An effusive parting, which signifies

  itself to be but temporary, is followed by their return to the

  river shores amid the cheers of the spectators.

  NAPOLEON and his marshals arrive at the door of his quarters and

  enter, and pass out of sight to other rooms than that of the

  foreground in which the observers are loitering. Dumb show ends.

  [A murmured conversation grows audible, carried on by two persons

  in the crowd beneath the open windows. Their dress being the

  native one, and their tongue unfamiliar, they seem to the officers

  to be merely inhabitants gossiping; and their voices continue

  unheeded.]

  FIRST ENGLISH SPY [below]

  Did you get much for me to send on?

  SECOND ENGLISH SPY

 

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