The thought struck him like a blow on the head. With a shriek he leaped to his feet, seized his musket and scrambled through the trapdoor. The gold coins slipped from the rent in his waistcoat and cascaded silently into the straw of the room below. He flung himself into the street, not caring whether the village was in the hands of friend or enemy, driven only by an overwhelming desire to rub shoulders with living men again, to hear voices and shouting, to take part in fresh slaughter, to be killed if need be, but in the company of others. Anything rather than remain up there alone with a faceless thing and an amber insect that drank its blood.
He ran straight into the arms of Nicholas, who held him by his belt and screamed above the hideous din:
“Keep to the houses—the heavies are coming!”
Ten squadrons of Nansouty’s cuirassiers swept by, big men on huge horses, a torrent of steel, their crested helmets dipping left and right as their long, straight swords flickered at the last of the flying Croats, pinning them among the debris of shattered artillery wagons which the enemy infantry had been trying to erect as a barricade.
Down the winding street, where the road ran to the river’s edge, tossed the sea of horsehair plumes. The last rays of the setting sun danced on a thousand steel casques. Nothing could stem that tide, not the thrusts of squadrons of Hungarian lancers, nor wedges of white-coated grenadiers, flung in to cling to the last few houses on the edge of the plain. The Austrian columns were rolled up and hurled back on their supports, but the cuirassiers did not press the pursuit. Their charge had been a measure of desperation. A huge floating mill, set on fire by units of the enemy higher up the stream, had drifted down and crashed through the frail bridge to Lobau. What was left of the two advanced corps of the Grand Army would have to fight for fingerholds on the Austrian bank of the river.
CHAPTER THREE
Several of the houses were on fire and the shattered village was lit by the glare of flames that no one attempted to subdue.
The voltigeurs were bivouacked in the churchyard, their arms and equipment piled against the leaning stones, the men sound asleep in hollows between the turf mounds.
The south wind, blowing freshly up river, rolled clouds of yellowish wood smoke over the exhausted infantry, laid in ragged rows along the road to the bridgehead.
Nicholas sat, his back to a tombstone, sucking an empty pipe, watching the others preparing their evening meal, a piece of horseflesh hacked from the carcass of an Uhlan’s well-groomed mare. They were broiling the meat in a cuirassier’s breastplate, the communal kettle having been holed by a sharpshooter on the outskirts of the village.
Nicholas was too depressed to forage for tobacco. The pungent smell of powder, sweat-soaked uniforms, wood smoke and roasting meat made him cough and splutter. The stench sickened him, mentally more than physically, stirring anew the disgust he had long felt for his fellow men when judged en masse, opening up old wounds that had ached intermittently ever since he had slipped out of his lodging the night when old Cicero found him in Camilla’s arms.
For a moment or two he thought about Camilla—the scent of her dark hair, the sweetness of her breath on his cheek that night when he had first taken her into the little summer-house at the bottom of the garden. She had been lovely, enchanting, but not worth the price he had paid for those few stolen hours. How could she have been, when he had loved and respected her husband, for all his elderly pedantry and barbarous foreign tongue?
Nicholas had come to Cicero’s straight from university, almost penniless and without much hope of ever earning more than would be sufficient to maintain himself. The old fellow had liked him from the start, devoting hours of his time to extra tuition in the long library over pipes and brandy. Another smell came back to Nicholas, weaving through the stinging smoke of the camp-fire and burning houses, the smell of old leather and old books, a library that might have been his by this time, for Cicero had not long to live and it was unlikely that Camilla would have given him any children.
The house, the school, the beautiful inlaid Italian furniture, all would have been his. Camilla would have been eager to marry him the moment the breath was out of the old man’s body. They could have settled down there for the rest of their lives in an atmosphere of luxury, elegance and learning, Camilla indulging her fantastic whims for garden architecture, himself browsing in the library, entertaining the parents of his wealthier pupils, secure and relaxed with the best of the world at his feet. Instead he had a graveyard for a couch, shared with half a dozen courageous, easygoing boors, who were even now preparing his supper of scraps cut from a dead warhorse such as he would not have flung even to Chita, Camilla’s snuffling little bitch, in the world now closed to him forever.
Nicholas wondered if he genuinely regretted having betrayed the gentle Cicero, or whether he merely regretted his benefactor’s discovery of the sordid little intrigue. Perhaps he ought to have restrained her and insisted upon a mutual exercise of patience. Patience, with Camilla! One might as well try to reason with a squadron of Hungarian hussars bearing down on an isolated foot soldier. How could any man of flesh and blood have unlocked those long, white fingers when they twined together behind his head and pressed his mouth closer and closer to hers? How could any man but a eunuch have resisted the soft pressure of her chiffon-clad body that last night when she had come to him in his room? He was a fool to have gone on blaming himself all these years. Better to have cursed her for her stupidity and blind, possessive lust. If he had resisted, how long would it have lasted? How long before Camilla, having taken possession of him and of everything the old man left, would have gone down by moonlight to the pool at the bottom of the garden, intent upon snaring some other young fool, as he had been ensnared when she swam to him, naked and laughing, across that expanse of moonlit water the first night he held her in his arms?
Nicholas spat and jammed his cold pipe into his greatcoat pocket. What was the use of regretting? What use travelling back to a bittersweet dream of the past? It was over, finished, which was more than could be said of this criminally conceived battle that seemed likely to cost the lot of them their lives before another twenty-four hours had passed. Would any of them care if it did? Would Old Jean, who had learned by this time that violent death must find each one of them in turn when at last his luck ran out?
Nicholas glanced at the circle round the fire. Jean sat brooding about the battle and looking as if his doglike faith in the Emperor’s tactics had been shaken, as the faith of everyone in the army was being shaken by this campaign. Dominique, the half-idiot boy from a farmyard on the slopes of the Pyrenees, was already scraping out a tune on his infernal fiddle. Dominique would fight and fiddle until a charge of grapeshot sent him and his violin to hell. And there, at his elbow, leaned Claude, his face still black with powder smudges.
Nicholas wondered about Claude. How long it would be before the boy’s republican dream was shattered? What interminable arguments they had had about it in billet, garrison and bivouac. Yet Claude still insisted that Napoleon’s mission was to humble the autocracies of Europe and impose a regime of liberty, equality and fraternity on every community between Portugal and Moscow. The naïveté of the man! What did he suppose the Emperor would do with his throne when opposition was liquidated? Step down from the Imperial dais and offer it to a charming assembly of peasants’ spokesmen and ignorant artisans? Claude had been steeped in revolutionary propaganda from earliest childhood. Nicholas marvelled at the amount of blood that had flowed in front of the man’s eyes without washing his dream away. Claude’s grandfather had been hanged in Bordeaux years ago because he took a fancy to one of the de Courcey pheasants. He hadn’t even eaten the pheasant; but it had been hung beside him, with a warning to others, nailed to the gibbet. The old man’s family had enjoyed themselves for a short space when the Revolution came to the Gironde, but the boy’s father had marched off with the local deputies to build the new France in Paris and had gone to the guillotine, along with Barbaroux and the ot
her Girondists, leaving nothing but a pile of debts and a burning conviction that the Revolution, if it was to succeed, must be buttressed by reason and a whole bookful of dogma. Claude had inherited the tradition and was now fighting for it through the person of the Emperor. Claude realized that Napoleon’s patchwork Empire fell a little short of his father’s dream of an Ideal State, but he contrived to hope. One day the last foreign autocracy would crash and a new dawn would gladden the hearts of men. When he heard talk like this the savant Nicholas sneered, dismissing the man as a typical product of years of rhetorical anarchy.
The former schoolmaster began munching his ration of meat, tearing at the red gristle with white, even teeth, smearing his short brown beard with blood and wood ash, his eyes and brain busy on the two remaining members of the file, Emmanuel, the dark-skinned acrobat, and Louis, the coachman’s son from Gers.
Emmanuel had all the exuberance of the fit and the featherbrained. His supple body, which had vaulted and tumbled in every fairground between the Loire and the Mediterranean seaports, had retained its litheness in the active life of a sharpshooter during the past two years. He had Jean’s tough fibres but could dance to Dominique’s fiddle with the grace of a gipsy girl, gyrating and leaping, always with the same merry grin and backward toss of his greasy blue-black hair. He turned everything to a joke, reducing semi-starvation, intense heat, paralysing cold, death itself to terms of the absurd and ludicrous. Nicholas liked him better than any of them, saving perhaps old Jean, for whose steadfastness and skill the schoolmaster had a profound if detached admiration. Jean realized that Manny, as they affectionately termed him, was good for the file. He made them forget that life would never offer anything else but this endless marching and skirmishing towards a nameless grave on a confused battlefield. Manny had not received much beyond hard knocks and a bed under a stall, with scraps to eat when the crowd was drunk and easily amused. Here, in the army, one had licence to steal. The men were expected to live on the country and to take what they could find in the way of food and trifling valuables. He had never regretted his enlistment during a dead season at Arras.
Louis, the last of the group, was different. Louis loved horses and seldom thought of anything else. His father had driven the Orléans-Bayonne coach for more than twenty years and had often taken his son on the box beside him for a couple of stages, sending him back to their cottage by the carrier whom they passed on the return journey. For hours and hours the boy had kept his eyes fixed on the shining backs and heaving flanks of his father’s horses and had longed, above everything, to own a horse of his own. The wish remained a dream. Louis’ father had been killed in a collision with a furiously driven post-chaise outside Angers, and the family had broken up to seek livelihoods elsewhere. Louis had applied to join several regiments of cavalry, but somehow luck always went against him, and all Nicholas’s carefully written applications on his behalf were either lost or ignored. He was still trying, and even now, when he ought to have been eating his supper, Nicholas saw him staring beyond the churchyard wall, watching a party of hussars dam the muddy brook for the purpose of watering their horses.
Nicholas wiped his greasy fingers on the skirts of his coat and looked across at their latest recruit, the dreamy young man who called himself Guillame, and who said he could paint. He wondered what had happened to him earlier that day when the young fool strayed from the company, and was left behind in the counter-attack. The boy had looked almost happy when they set out that morning, marching down the street behind Manny, who had been playing drum-major with his musket. Later he had seemed to face the granary bombardment bravely enough, although that was by no means the worst he could expect in a voltigeur company. Then he had disappeared for an hour or two and when Nicholas found him, during the cavalry charge, he looked as though he had been gazing at some unutterable horror. He wasn’t eating either; his portion of broiled horseflesh lay untouched on his tin plate.
Nicholas yawned and stretched his big limbs. Ah, well, he’d learn, no doubt, as they’d all had to learn. Killing was a trade. Anyone could acquire the art if he could manage to stay alive for a week or two.
Dominique was playing one of his wild, freakish tunes and nobody saw a group of officers leave the church tower and stroll towards the group. A short, thickset man in a loose-fitting riding coat came forward and stood at the edge of the group, listening. For a moment nobody took any notice of him; only Nicholas glanced up sourly and looked quickly away again.
Presently the little man said: “Play ‘Watch Over the Safety of the Empire.”’
Dominique complied and Nicholas noticed that, as he began, some of the men round the fire made an attempt to struggle to their feet, but were motioned to be still by a swift, nervous gesture. On each side of them the chatter of men round the fires subsided to a mutter. The moon sailed out from behind a bank of cloud and helped the flickering fires to light the scene. As the tune wailed on, the Emperor’s hands, stretched behind his back, beat a nervous tattoo one upon the other.
When Dominique came to the final bar he let fall the fiddle, overcome by sudden embarrassment. With the same jerky movement a plump hand plucked at the pocket of the white kerseymere waistcoat and emerged with finger and thumb holding a gold piece. The coin spun into the farm hand’s lap and Dominique, a peasant’s avarice sweeping away his shyness, groped for it, bit it and thrust it hurriedly into his knapsack pouch.
The pale face seemed to glow for a moment. There was absolute stillness. Then the Emperor said: “Anyone here from Egypt?”
Nicholas saw Jean’s face light up. The sergeant sprang to his feet.
“The Pyramids and Acre, sire!”
“And before that?”
“Lodi and Rivoli, five wounds.”
The plump hand reached forward and gently tugged the sergeant’s ear.
“Look after the children tomorrow, they need you as much as I do!”
There was a swift step on the loose gravel of the path and Napoleon rejoined his officers.
Deep in the shadow Nicholas ground his teeth. “That’s how he does it,” he hissed to himself, “a gold piece, an assumed interest, a small avalanche of accurate detail. Suppose he had stood in my shoes three years ago, would he have had Camilla, house, property and all, without being discovered in bed with the woman?”
Before he settled himself in the grassy trough between the graves, Nicholas looked at the recruit once again and found that his expression had changed. The tense, strained look had gone. The boy was staring after the Emperor with an expression of alert intelligence in his eyes. Nicholas thought: “He’ll go the same way. Another Jean in the making; but he won’t survive as long as Jean if he lets himself be overrun by counter-attacks.”
A drowsy silence settled in the bivouacs. Here and there a man groaned in his sleep. Over at Ebersdorf a solitary gun barked off at the shattered bridge. The clump-clump of the engineers’ hammers was its sole accompaniment.
CHAPTER FOUR
The remains of the two corps limped back across the bridge to Lobau, leaving two-thirds of their number dead or prisoners on the right bank of the river.
All the next day they had fought. Aspern had been retaken five times, Essling six. Marshal Lannes was among the mortally wounded, and Jean Ticquet, who had been distributing the last ammunition within a pistol shot of the marshal when the ricochetting three-pounder struck him in the knees, had helped to carry the marshal to the bridgehead on a litter of boughs and muskets.
The Gascon marshal had forbidden his stretcher-bearers to use the blood-stained cloak of his old friend, Major-General Pouzet, who had been killed shortly before Lannes received his own agonizing wound. There were tears in Jean’s eyes when he glanced at the bloody pulp of the marshal’s legs. He did not need a surgeon to tell him that Lannes would never fight again.
Jean helped one of the marshal’s aides-de-camp to strain some of the brackish Danube water through a silk shirt and give the sufferer a drink. With the maiming of Lannes al
l Jean’s forebodings returned to him.
Shortly afterwards they received the order to retire and crossed to the island. The veteran sergeant was disgusted to witness grenadiers of the Guard throwing their busbies into the water, convinced as they were that the tall bearskins drew enemy fire. Jean found it another sign of rot setting in, but he said nothing and shepherded his little flock back to the glade they had occupied before the battle. After all, he had grounds for personal satisfaction. In the two days’ struggle he had not lost a man.
Just before the voltigeurs passed over, a short string of wagons had edged its way across the bridge. In the last of them was Old Carla, the cantinière of the Second Battalion. The wagon was driven by her sixteen-year-old daughter, Nicholette.
Old Carla was dying, dying of her pain.
Carla’s pain was the subject of ribald jokes in the Eighty-seventh. It was as famous as Murat’s coxcombry or Massena’s avarice. She had been attached to the regiment for nearly nine years now, and veterans like Jean could remember the pain for as long as they could remember Carla. She often talked about it, describing and boasting about it, telling them that one day it would kill her. She was fond of speculating on its cause. Was it the stone of a date or the pip of an orange that remained in her stomach and was gradually sealing her bowels? Or was it a delayed poison administered by one of her long-dead husbands, slowly moving towards her heart? It came on her suddenly and nearly always at an inconvenient time, just before or during a battle, when she was particularly busy preparing her cart for bivouac-time. It gripped her stomach like the pincers of a giant crab and squeezed until the moisture ran from her eyes and she had to fight for breath. Sometimes it lasted for hours and sometimes for hardly more than a few moments. In the beginning it had come at rare intervals, but lately, particularly since her return from Spain, its visitation had been alarmingly frequent. Since crossing the Danube three or four days ago it had been practically continuous and was only eased according to the amount of brandy she swallowed. She lay back on a bed of looted cavalry cloaks and gasped with rage and frustration, for Nicholette, despite the girl’s shrewdness, was too inexperienced to run the canteen as it should be run if steady profits were to be made. The pain had already robbed them of a thousand francs in this campaign.
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