It was, he said, from a sense of duty and on a cool calculation of what the public interest required that he was always at the post of danger.

The troops which he commanded had been little used to war, and shrank from a close encounter with the veteran soldiery of France.

It was necessary that their leader should show them how battles were to be won.

And in truth more than one day which had seemed hopelessly lost was retrieved by the hardihood with which he rallied his broken battalions and cut down with his own hand the cowards who set the example of flight.

Sometimes, however, it seemed that he had a strange pleasure in venturing his person.