engage in any decisive battle, not to allow themselves to be trapped into that, but to stand on the defensive, to hold the River Seine, to retreat foot by foot, if pressed, to take advantage of every cover, to hold the enemy in check, to contest every foot of the way, to assume a strength which they did not have. 

 He promised that so soon as he had fallen upon Blücher he would send the news and see that it got to Schwarzenberg and the allied monarchs who were with him. Reverses which he hoped to inflict on the Prussian Field Marshal would increase the Austrian hesitation. The Emperor believed that the pressure by Oudinot and Victor would be effective. They would draw in their columns and concentrate. 

 After he had finished with Blücher and his army, he intended to retrace his steps and do the same thing with Schwarzenberg. Of course, if he failed with Blücher it was all over. He was the last hope of France—he and his army. If his magnificent dash at the Prussians and Russians was not successful, nothing could delay the end. Napoleon was staking all on the throw, taking the gambler's chance, taking it recklessly, accepting the hazard, but neglecting no means to insure the winning of the game. 

 The Emperor flung a screen of cavalry in front of Marmont, to patrol every village, to control every farmhouse, to see that no news of his advance came to the unsuspecting old Prussian. And then he himself stayed back in Nogent to see his own orders carried out. He personally inspected every division, as it marched to the front through the waning night, the cheerless dawn, the gray dark day. It cut him to the heart to see his soldiers go so silently and so sullenly. Here and there a regiment did cry: "Vive l'Empereur"; here and there a voice sounded it, but in the main the men marched dumbly, doggedly. It was only the old guard that gave him the imperial salute in full voice in the old way. 

 Nothing indicated to the Emperor more thoroughly the temper of the soldiers than that open indifference. Why, even in Russia, ere their stiffened lips froze into silence, they had breathed out the old acclaim. The Emperor remembered that grenadier who, when told by the surgeon that he feared to probe for a ball that had pierced his breast because he did not know what he would find, "If you probe deep enough to reach my heart," said the soldier with his dying breath, "you will find the Emperor." 

 Grave-faced and frowning, shivering from time to time in the fierce, raw cold, the Emperor watched the troops march by. Well, the day after 

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