War teaches us many lessons, but none more useful than that of its accidents. You will have said already that we had found the army and that nothing remained but to ride up to the outposts and raise an alarm.
Let me answer that nothing was farther from the truth. We had neither found the army nor were any of our comrades there to avenge us. When I told this story in the year 1813 in Paris I well remember the laughter it excited. A squadron of hussars saved by a flight of monks! Thus the newspapers referred to it, and such was the naked truth. The monks saved us--the monks from the monastery we had sacked.
Never have I forgotten that moment when this ridiculous turn first became apparent to us. The Cossacks, I say, were at our heels, hope gone from us, all thought of the army abandoned, when we saw the bivouac fires and rode madly up to them. "Vive l'Empereur!" was our cry. Then we learned the truth.
There were a hundred or more monks in the woods: they had kindled the fires which cheered us. The Cossacks, perceiving the fires, and being deceived as we were, waited for no verification of a fact which seemed self-evident. The French army lay encamped in that place--who else would be there in these days of war and of a mighty host upon the march? Do you wonder that the mad devils stopped as though they heard already the roar of our guns, that they wheeled about and were gone as foxes whom the moon has discovered? They would have been madmen to have done anything else. The race had been run and we were the victors. So at least they thought, and so did Fortune smile upon us in that fateful hour.
Be sure we did not linger upon an accident so remarkable. The monks appeared to have no fear of us when we rode by, and the most part of them lay sleeping. We forbore to intrude upon their dreams; and going on at our leisure, we came up with the army at dawn and there recited the details of this amazing adventure.
It remains but to say a word of the bell and the treasure.
I have often discussed it with Léon, and we have come to the conclusion that there must have been monks left in the monastery after the main body had fled, and that they sounded the alarm upon the approach of the hussars. Their situation when we sacked that dismal building must have been parlous indeed, and God alone knew where they hid from us.