Two soldiers hurriedly shoveled out a shallow grave. The boy was quickly lowered in, for isolated random shots could again be heard. The lantern flickered and the wind gusted from time to time. The clouds dispersed, the moon rose, and the night was clear, cold, and cruel. Small as the little corpse was, it did not fit properly into the hastily prepared grave. The Emperor stood there, silent and livid, while behind his back his white horse whinnied inconsolably. It was like a deep sigh, sounding a bit like a human lament and a bit like a human curse. The Emperor remained still. Dirt was heaved back in over the tiny corpse. The soldier raised his lantern. He presented it like a gun.
Then the Emperor drew his sword and lowered it over the fresh, shallow grave. “For all of them,” he was heard to murmur. “For all.” His adjutant, the General who was standing behind the Emperor, had no weapon. He instead raised his hat. Suddenly other generals of the Emperor’s — Gourgaud, la Bédoyère, and Drouot — were there. They had been watching him from a distance, and they now approached, respectfully but embarrassed and confused.
“The horse!” ordered the Emperor.
They rode in silence, the Emperor leading. At five o’clock in the morning, when it was already quite light and a delicate blue-tinged fog was rising slowly from the lush dark-green grass, he ordered a halt. He was shivering. “Fire!” he ordered, and a pitiful little fire was kindled. It burned, yellow and weak in the silvery-blue glimmer of the early dawn. The Emperor tirelessly fanned the weak yellow flames. He looked at the soldiers, his soldiers. They fled on all sides, passing the little fire — infantry, artillery, and horsemen. Now and then, the Emperor lifted his head. Some of the passing soldiers recognized him. They saluted silently. They no longer cried “Long live the Emperor!” Ever paler was the fire and ever stronger the morning light. A formidable silence enveloped the Emperor. The silence seemed to burn stronger than the fire. It seemed to the Emperor that the retreating soldiers of his army were making ever-larger detours around him. A great stillness descended upon the meadow. And the soldiers who went past and saluted him so silently — the officers with their sabres, the men with their fixed gaze — seemed no longer to be living soldiers. They were the fallen and the dead. That was why they were silent. That was why they were voiceless.
The little fire went out. The day broke triumphantly. The Emperor sat down on a stone at the roadside. They brought him ham and goat cheese. He ate hastily and mindlessly, as was his way. More and more fleeing soldiers passed by. The Emperor stood. “Onward!” he commanded.
He mounted his steed. Behind him he heard the galloping of his generals’ horses and from a distance the occasional sound of his coach’s rolling wheels, following further back. And he closed his eyes.
He fell asleep in the saddle.
II
To Paris! This was the only clear goal for the Emperor. One of the generals was riding close behind him. Although his entire retinue already knew that he had decided to return to Paris, the Emperor said once again: “On to Paris, General!”
“As you wish, Your Majesty!” said the officer.
The Emperor was silent for a while. The young morning foretold a glorious, triumphant day to come. Out of the blue heavens came the carefree jubilation of unseen larks and from a distance the faint muffled echo of marching soldiers. There was a melancholy clanking of weapons, a yearning weary neighing of horses, the rising and then dying murmur of human voices, and here and there a loud and quickly subsiding shout or rather curse. To the left and right, and through field and meadow the disorderly troops stomped along. The Emperor lowered his head. He forced himself to see only the undulating silvery mane of his animal and the yellowish-gray strip of road along which he rode. He became engrossed in them. But against his will all the miserable sounds forced themselves upon him from both sides, and it was as if his army’s weapons were whimpering pitifully, as if the fine, strong, defeated, ashamed, and humiliated weapons were weeping. He knew that even if he had a hundred more years to live he would never forget this sobbing of the weapons and horses or the whining and moaning of the wagons. He could avert his gaze from the retreating soldiers. The clinking whimper of the weapons, however, pierced his heart. In order to fool himself and the others into believing that he was nevertheless planning some further undertaking, he ordered that guards be posted to look for deserters and arrest and punish anyone who strayed from the road, yet even as he was so busy issuing them his mind was not on the superfluous orders. He thought of Paris, of his Minister of Police, of the deputies, of all his true enemies who at this point seem to him more dangerous even than the Prussians or the English. Twice he ordered a halt for he had decided to arrive at night.
In Laon, before the tiny post office, stood a crowd — officials, officers of the Garde Nationale, and curious villagers with their good-tempered peasant faces. It was quite still and the sky was becoming noticeably darker. The hitched horses before the station neighed, happy about the oats they were being fed, a flock of geese honked busily home to their pen and in the distance could be heard the peaceful lowing of cows, the cheerful crackle of a herdsman’s whip and a sweet fragrance of lilac and chestnut mixed in with the acrid odor of dung, hay, and manure. In the low room of the post office it was already getting dark. Someone lit the solitary three-candled lantern. It seemed to the Emperor only to intensify the darkness in the room. Four additional lanterns with protective glass were brought inside. Four soldiers positioned themselves in the corners of the room and held the lanterns steady. The wide double door was fully open and directly opposite sat the Emperor on the smooth-planed bench that was intended for travelers awaiting the next arriving coach. So there he sat, legs spread, in his dirty and stained white breeches and mud-spattered boots, hands pressed down on his chubby thighs, and head lowered. The light fell on him from all four sides and from the lantern in the center. He was sitting directly opposite the open door and all the inhabitants of Laon stood outside and were watching him with an unwavering gaze. He felt like he was sitting on the defendant’s bench and they stood in silent, terrifying judgment over him. They would soon deliver their verdict, an unnervingly quiet one, and they were already deliberating silent and voiceless over this deaf, dumb, and awful verdict. He stared for some time at the strip of floor between his boots, at the two narrow planks of wood. He thought of Paris and his Police Minister and suddenly recalled the broken crucifix that he had brushed to the ground in his palace. The two dirty gray planks at his feet transformed themselves into the narrow golden-brown strip of inlaid flooring in his room, the Minister Fouché was announced, and a boot hid the fragments of the ivory cross. The Emperor stood up, for he could sit no longer. He began to walk back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the small low room of the station. No sound issued from the throng of people outside the open door, yet he waited to hear some human voice. This silence was frightful; he waited for a single word, not a shout, not a cheer, but only a word, just a single human word. But nothing came. He walked up and down, acting like he did not know that the people at the door were watching him, yet it hurt him to know that they were staring. The deadly silence that these people emitted, their immobility, their undying and unwavering patience, their quiet eyes, and their immeasurable sorrow filled him with a previously unknown horror. The silent, limping general, his adjutant, his shadow, had risen with him. The adjutant hobbled exactly three steps behind. Suddenly the Emperor turned to the open door. He stood for a brief moment as if awaiting the customary cry of “Long live the Emperor!” — the cry that his ear so loved, the cry that so softly caressed his heart. The Emperor stepped to the threshold. The lanterns in the room illuminated his back, so the crowd outside could not make out his face. The people outside saw only the light behind his back. He was facing them and his countenance was lost within the blue-black darkness of the quickly descending summer night. The already silent people seemed to become even more still. The nocturnal crickets cheeped at full volume in the surrounding fields. Already had the stars begun to twinkle in the sky, kindly and silver. The Emperor stood in the open double doorway. He waited. He waited for some word. He was used to shouts, to cries of “Long live the Emperor!” Now the black dumbness of these people and the night washed over him and even the pleasant silver stars seemed sullen and hostile. Directly in front of him, in the first row, a bareheaded peasant spoke. His simple face was made clearly visible by the bright night as he said aloud to his neighbor: “That’s not the Emperor Napoleon! He’s Job. He isn’t the Emperor!” Immediately, the Emperor turned. “Onward! Forward!” he said to General Gourgaud.