A Soldiers Sketches Under Fire | Page 4

and the chief Mediterranean seaport. Its history teems with exciting incidents of plague, fire, sacking, siege, and hand-to-hand fighting, so it is quite in keeping that it should take so important a part in the present conflict. It was here Monte Cristo was hurled from the Chateau d'If in the sack from which he cut his escape. Francis the First besieged it in vain, and it prospered under King Rene. In the French Revolution it figured so conspicuously as to give the title to the national hymn of the French.
THE STORY OF "THE MARSEILLAISE."
Is it too late to tell again the story of the origin of "The Marseillaise"?
[Illustration: ON THE QUAYHEAD AT MARSEILLES.]
Its author and composer (or it might be more correct to say composer and author, for in this case music preceded words), Rouget de Lisle--a young aristocrat and an artillery officer--had as a friend a citizen of Strasbourg, to whose house, in the early days of the Revolution, he came on a visit one evening. The tired guest was cordially welcomed by the citizen and his wife and daughter. To celebrate the occasion his friend sent the daughter into the cellar to bring up wine. Exhausted as he was, de Lisle drank freely, and, sitting up late with his host, did not trouble to go to bed. He had been amusing the family by playing some of his original compositions on the spinnet. When the host retired for the night he left de Lisle asleep with his head resting on the instrument. In the early hours of the morning the young officer awoke, and running through his head was a melody which, in his semi-drunken state the evening before, he had been attempting to extemporise. It seemed to haunt him, and, piecing it together as it came back to his memory, he played it over. Then, feeling inspired, he immediately set words to it. When the family came down he played and sang it to them, and his host was so moved by it that he became quite excited and called in the neighbours. The instrument was wheeled out into the garden, and in the open air young de Lisle sang the song that was to become the national air of his country to this local audience. The effect upon them was "terrific," and from that moment the song became the rage. It seemed to embody the whole spirit of the Revolutionists, and spread like wildfire throughout France. It was to this song that the unbridled spirits of Marseilles marched to Paris, hence its name, "The Marseillaise." Shortly after this, de Lisle received a letter from his mother, the Baroness, dated from her chateau, saying, "What is this dreadful song we hear?" Fearing that his own life might be in danger, he being an aristocrat and a suspect, he had before long to take flight across the mountains. As he went from valley to crag, and crag to valley, he time after time heard the populace singing his song, frequently having to hide behind rocks lest they discovered him. It sounded to him like a requiem, for he knew that many of his friends were being marched to the scaffold to his own impassioned strains.
[Illustration: QUAYSIDE, MARSEILLES.]

CHAPTER III.
FROM MARSEILLES TO ARMENTI��RES.
The incidents of the railway journey from Marseilles to Etaples, en route to Armenti��res, told in detail, would fill a book. It was made in ordinary cattle trucks, in which, packed forty to a truck, we spent four days and a half at one stretch. Yet was it a bright and merry trip, for our spirits were raised to the highest by the thought that we were going into action, and we were at all sorts of expedients to make ourselves comfortable. For instance, before we started the Stationmaster's Office was ransacked, and every available nail pulled out to make coat and hat pegs of in the cattle trucks. We had to sleep on the floor. Our corporal, who was an old soldier of many campaigns, of iron physique and a perfect Goliath, and the life and soul of our party, was so tired when he got aboard the train, after strenuous efforts, that he fell dead asleep on the floor, and there was so little available space, and his massive form took up so much of what there was, that no fewer than nine men, as they became tired and dropped down from the walls of the truck, fell on him and went to sleep on the top of him. However, that corporal slept the sleep of the just for four or five hours, and even then did not awaken until, the train halting and somebody mentioning wine, there was a scuffle, and another man stepped on his head, whereupon he flung him off and made a