They are brave men and they will fight.' 'There would be no use their doing that, for the Emperor is going over himself,' said he; and in the simple answer I understood for the first time the absolute trust and confidence which these soldiers had in their leader.

Their feeling for him was fanaticism, and its strength was religion, and never did Mahomet nerve the arms of his believers and strengthen them against pain and death more absolutely than this little grey-coated idol did to those who worshipped him.

If he had chosen--and he was more than once upon the point of it--to assert that he was indeed above humanity he would have found millions to grant his claim.
You who have heard of him as a stout gentleman in a straw hat, as he was in his later days, may find it hard to understand it, but if you had seen his mangled soldiers still with their dying breath crying out to him, and turning their livid faces towards him as he passed, you would have realised the hold which he had over the minds of men.
'You have been over there ?' asked the lieutenant presently, jerking his thumb towards the distant cloud upon the water.
'Yes, I have spent my life there.' 'But why did you stay there when there was such good fighting to be had in the French service ?' 'My father was driven out of the country as an aristocrat.

It was only after his death that I could offer my sword to the Emperor.' 'You have missed a great deal, but I have no doubt that we shall still have plenty of fine wars.

And you think that the English will offer us battle ?' 'I have no doubt of it.' 'We feared that when they understood that it was the Emperor in person who had come they would throw down their arms.