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by Frank J. Morlock (Translator), Adolphe D'Ennery (Author)
This historical play follows a group of young Frenchmen from 1796-1814, as they're swept up in the Napoleonic Wars. Italy, Egypt, Austria, Russia, and France are mere signposts along the way in this epic drama, with the single unifying element being a flag woven by a group of French women in the mid-1790s, and carried by the soldiers throughout the entire length of their almost twenty-year service to the French nation. Adolphe d'Ennery was a master of theatrical spectacle who had a talent for epic and spectacle that only Alexandre Dumas could equal. He's not interested in high literature, but only in the pathos of the theatre. In Scene IX he depicts the stragglers of the defeated French Army returning from Moscow through a bare, frozen landscape, separated from their loved ones on the Russian steppes. First they pass each other, but fail to recognize their comrades-in-arms. Finally they meet, with great emotion, and just as they do...the Cossacks appear! This is grand theatrical entertainment, with the same sweep as Tolstoy's War and Peace.
