Note 131 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal (continued 2)

I find this from the pen of a hero of the First Empire: ‘I was afraid of feeling pleasure’ (the author himself underlines the word) ‘in killing with my own hand some of these scoundrels’ (he is speaking of some Germans who murdered French prisoners after the battle of Leipzic). ‘I therefore sheathed my sabre and left the extermination of these assassins to the troopers.’ (Memoirs of General Marbot, tome iii, page 344.) There is a condemnation of the joy of killing which would be scorned by many a contemporary writer. In France the glorification of warlike instincts is much less common among the soldiers than among the authors. Marbot is far less bloody-minded than Barrès.