MOTIONLESS SOLDIER.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXI, Issue 2728, 7 December 1910, Page 3

MOTIONLESS SOLDIER.

OBSERVANCE OF MILITARY

DISCIPLINE

Russian soldiers have since the days of Peter the Great enjoyed a reputation for military stolidity, if not precision, excelled only by the Germans. Yet a

recent gatherer of curious historical anecdotes gives an instance of the admirable immobility of a soldier of the more excitable French. Nor was he one- ot the iamous Old Guard of the Great Napoleon, but instead a mere palace guard of " Napoleon the Little " in the heydey of the ephemeral brilliance ot the Second Empire. He was posted on guard in a corridor of the court, where he stood so perfectly still that the Prince Imperial, then a child, was seized with an impish desire to stir him to human behaviour, and in the hope of doing so poured the contents of a bag of sugar plums suddenly into his boot. The man never moved nor so much as lowered his eyes. When the next day the story was told the Empress she laid a wager with Colonel Verly, to whose regiment the stolid hero belonged, that she would succeed where her son had failed. The Colonel escorted her to the corridor, where she walked up to the man and endeavoured by every means except, of course, direct address, to which it would have been his duty to respond, to attract his attention. It was quite in vain. He remained unregarding, respectfully rigid, and as it turned to stone. Moreover, she observed Colonel Verly smiling at her . discomfiture. It was too much. With characteristic impetuosity she stepped close to the sentinel and boxed his ears. Not a muscle moved. The colonel had won his wager. The Empress afterwards sent the man a handsome compensation for the cuff he had received, but he refused to accept it, declaring—and there spoke the unmistakeable Frenchman after all- —that he had been already sufficiently compensated by the touch of his Sovereign lady's hand on his cheek.