times thick-headed, hardly of the mental calibre of his confrères. Yet Bessières is an ideal leader of Horse on the battlefield; as reckless as a lion at bay: you should see him head a charge sword in hand! One of Napoleon’s pets is he and the only man in the Army who sticks to his queue. Bessières flatly refused to cut it off when the order was given last June for everybody to copy “Le petit tondu” (“The little shorn one”), as the men call the Emperor, and it hangs halfway down his back. That dark, sleek-faced, heavy-eyed man is Jourdan, Commander-in-Chief once of the Army of the Revolution. “The Anvil,” some call him, he has been so often soundly beaten. But, all the same, he was too popular with the Army for Napoleon to pass him over. Jourdan it was who invented the conscription system. He started in life as a linen-draper at Grenoble. There is of course, too, Brune, who isn’t here to-day: but he doesn’t count for much. A minor-poet and a journalist was he once upon a time. He’s another of the clever-tongued Jacobins the Emperor gave the bâton to as a sop. [Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S RIGHT-HAND MAN] Look near the Emperor, at that neat athletic figure, of middle height: that is “Old Berthier.” He is from ten to fifteen years older than most of the other marshals; or, in fact, than the Emperor himself. Berthier, in fact, is old enough to have been a captain in the Army of the _ancien régime_, and can remember how he first smelt powder fighting under Lafayette and Washington against the British in America. He was a staff officer when Napoleon first came to the Ecole Militaire here from Brienne, as a boy gentleman-cadet. A heaven-born Chief of the Staff is Marshal Berthier, and the Emperor without him in a campaign would be like a man without his right hand. Every detail goes like clockwork with Berthier at the head of the Etat-Major.