Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon

by Weldon, Fay

  She must have spoken louder than she intended, for she received a sudden sharp blow across the face from Joan Lumb’s hand.

  ‘Unbelievable!’ cried Joan Lumb. ‘This is unbelievable!’ taking much the same attitude as Clausewitz, that great military tactician, when he observed the impossible actually happening; that is to say, Napoleon’s Great Army in mid-flight from Moscow in 1812 – an army which went proudly out to invade Russia, 600,000 strong, returning home with 100,000 stunned, diseased and wretched men. And that, they said, was due to the snow, the weather, the unreasonable cold, that same cold which froze solid the switch of the Shrapnel Academy’s emergency power supply, which should have cut in automatically when the mains supply failed. It was not, of course, the snow that killed so many. It was war. Had everyone stayed safely home in their beds the snow wouldn’t have mattered in the least.

  But there you are; the war was inevitable, the next step in the long march forward, initiated so long ago by Tiglath-Pileser III. Whoops, and off we go! If the right foot goes forward, so must the left. Russia had taken that step, France had to take this, to keep the balance. War kills, not weather: it kills by disease, hunger, cold, trampling, suffocation, blowing to bits, or bits off, mistaken identity, and the blunders of generals. Many, all the same, as we have already observed, prefer war to peace. Martial music, a delightful sense of togetherness, and the pride and the glory, and the achievement, and the wonder of victory and the drama of defeat, to some seems well worth the risk of death and dismemberment. Nevertheless, a good general should not spoil the fun, prick the bubble by losing 450,000 men in a forced retreat from a pointless war, as Napoleon did in 1812. But it happened, and Napoleon ceased to be the bogey man who frightened little children, and quite lost his street credibility. Unbelievable!

  ‘Unbelievable!’ said Joan Lumb, said Clausewitz. That such things can happen in a civilised world! No food, no blankets, no shoes for the troops, limbs lying everywhere, no telephone for Joan Lumb and the Wellington Lecture in danger. Clausewitz went home and wrote On War – the bible of generations of military men throughout the world. Shirley turned to Victor, weeping and saying, ‘Your sister hit me. Why did she do that, Victor?’ and Joan Lumb demanded that a party be sent down to investigate the servants’ intransigence. The General agreed that this should be done, as much to allay Joan Lumb’s fears as anything; the males of the party formed themselves into a double file, three deep – Ivor with Baf went first, as the youngest and strongest, then the General and Victor, then Sergei and Panza, who were thinkers rather than doers. Intellectuals, that is to say. Murray was nowhere to be found, and no one cared. Least of all Bella.

  Ivor put his shoulders to the green baize door, and pushed. It did not budge. Baf tried, and then the others, and then all together. It was stuck firm, and the more they pushed, the harder it seemed to stick, which was not surprising, since the door opened inwards. But you know how it is – once you have decided something is lost – like the bottle opener – there’s no finding it, although it is under your nose. Once you have decided something won’t work – like the steam iron – there is no extracting steam from it. The brain, expecting disaster, fails to find the obvious solution. No one thought to pull the door: all pushed.

  Joan Lumb did not seem so foolish now. The men looked at each other.

  ‘Hmm,’ said the General. ‘Locked out! Snowed in! In the dark! With no communications. It doesn’t look too good, does it, Baf?’

  ‘Perhaps I should bring the knife box down,’ said Baf, ‘just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Don’t even think of it, boy,’ said the General.

  The eyes of both men sparkled in the candlelight. The General looked younger and Baf older, which was what each wanted. Some people thrive on emergencies. The men still clustered around the green baize door: the women edged nearer.

  ‘Knife box, what knife box?’ demanded Joan Lumb.

  ‘The knife box,’ said Mew. ‘The secret weapon?’ It was half a joke, but she shouldn’t have made it. Joan Lumb heard.

  Victor said, ‘We’re taking this too seriously. The door may simply be jammed,’ but his voice lacked conviction, and he convinced no one. He would have fired himself, had he so spoken at the Board Room table. But it was late, he was tired, he had been more upset by Bella than he knew, and the temperature was dropping every minute. The boiler ran on oil but was sparked by electricity. Shirley ran upstairs with a candle to be with the children.

  At that moment Murray came back from the Gentlemen’s Rest Room, where he had been retching up the sandwiches.

  ‘Dog,’ he said. ‘What I ate was dog. There was dog meat in the sandwiches. Only dog meat does this to me. There’s no mistaking it.’

  And that was the end of the peace; the beginning of the war.

  27

  A lasting peace! How we all want it, or think we do! Napoleon was the first one to talk about it, invading Russia in its name, and many is the war since that has been waged on its account, and many the government persuaded to part with enormous sums of money, thinking that perhaps this will be the last time, this’ll show them, this will keep them in their place! Only of course it never does. Peace may look good to governments but is only the quiet time an army needs to recover from the last war and prepare for the next. It can’t be expected to last, and perhaps it shouldn’t. Peace is good for agriculture, but bad for the economy, bad for love, and bad for civilian morale. Civil unrest, blasphemy, discontent and crime flourish in times of peace. No matter! Napoleon got all the way to Moscow, saying peace when he meant war, with the Russian army retreating before him. Sometimes they couldn’t retreat quickly enough, and the armies met up and pride demanded a battle, or an incident, as the politicians had already learned to call it. Sixty thousand Russians died in one particular incident-packed sixty-mile stretch of retreat. Clausewitz described these as ‘trifling losses’. (A matter of comparison. No one ever managed to count the Russian army, it was so very numerous.)

  A quick description of the Battle of Borodino, on the way to Moscow? You can bear it? The ins and outs of it have been fascinating owners of lead soldiers and the players of computer war games ever since. Does that tempt you? This sector against that: this wildly shifting line of artillery, that scramble up this slope, this thundering cavalry, that roar of mighty cannon? The Russians lost 58,000 men, more than one in two. The French lost a further 50,000 from their remaining 130,000. The cannons, we know, fired 120,000 times (someone had been counting) and corpses of every European nationality lay so close together it was impossible to walk without treading upon them. Ditches were overflowing with the torn bodies of horses and men. The chief surgeon of the Grand Army performed 700 amputations, and 74 per cent were successful. Not bad! And the Russian wounded, they said, didn’t let out a single groan. The French were much criticised for screaming and moaning when wounded. When darkness came these wounded and dying were abandoned. But still, but still, let us remember with Joan Lumb that the manner of living is more important than the manner of dying.

  Napoleon moved on to Moscow. He chivalrously waited at the gates for the Russian army and its refugee entourage to move out of Moscow before making his triumphal entry into the city. The times, you see, were changing. PR was important. The world must witness triumph, not carnage: and such few citizens as were left in Moscow obligingly turned out to cheer. People will always cheer soldiers, no matter what side they’re on. It was unfortunate that much of the city burned down once Napoleon was installed in the Kremlin. The Russians blamed the French for the fire. The French maintained it was Russian arson. The argument as to whose was the responsibility of the burning of Moscow continues to this day.

  Napoleon waited for an emissary from Alexander to acknowledge his victory. But no one came. What was he to do? There he was, camped with his 80,000 remaining men, all exhausted, the end of a wedge driven 120 miles into Russia, in a hostile, burning, starving city: the troops unharvested, winter coming – how was this war to be b
rought to an end? Wars must end, do end, always had ended – people parley, give in, acknowledge they were wrong. One side submits: the other goes home, victorious. Pieces of paper are signed: trumpets sound, peace reasserts itself, hands are shaken, courtesy visits exchanged. But the Russians just weren’t playing by the book.

  And the snow got nearer. The Grand Army, which was composed of Germans, Poles and Italians as well as the French, were a long way from home. They were hungry and dirty and bored: they stopped being an army and turned into a nasty rabble, and Napoleon noticed it. He tried writing to Alexander, but Alexander, safe in St Petersburg, wouldn’t even answer the letters.

  Alexander did issue a proclamation. ‘Let no one despair. Indeed, how can we lose courage when all classes of the realm are proving their courage and constancy?’ Despair, courage, constancy. They fly like a flock of noisy birds, these abstract terms, these appeals to the unreal, over smoking ruins, over legless men, over howling women and blasted children, over the clawed hands of the burned; they drop their shit, and are gone.

  The Great Army pulled itself together, picked up all the available loot left in Moscow – silver, gold, coins, ornaments, jewellery, icons, whores – and set off relieved and singing back towards Smolensk. ‘Your hunger will finish at Smolensk,’ Napoleon told his troops. The man was an idiot. How could it? He had passed through the place before. Every last chicken had long ago had its neck wrung. Such crops as had survived in the rancid fields had rotted. How do the dead and dying achieve a harvest home? The bureaucrats who went ahead of the army sold everything and anything edible that was left and made off with the money. Oh, glorious Napoleon, great conqueror, crazed with self-esteem! Did you think Nature would slow its pace, people change their natures, for your convenience?

  As the Grand Army retreated, the Russian army now advanced. What a Pas de Deux that was! The Russians at least had food. They brought it with them from the South. Armies go less hungry than peasants. The French were, simply, starving. They ate their horses. Then they ate each other. The road to Smolensk was scattered with emaciated bodies and the limbs were gnawed away, observers said, and not by rats. The French dragged hostage prisoners with them: few survived, they were shot, bayoneted, or clubbed if they staggered or lagged behind. Russian serfs, men, women and children, were recruited to ambush, harry, hack down and exterminate the French. (They did this with alacrity, thus worrying their masters somewhat. You shouldn’t let a tiger get the taste of human blood. They were right to worry, as it turned out. Look what happened next!) The French army had long ago abandoned its loot, its baggage, its guns, its sick, its wounded. And who had the energy left for a whore? They passed through Borodino, scene of the great battle. The plain was covered with the rotting remains of horses and stiffened men half-eaten by wolves; it was littered with broken weapons, and rusty sabres. Oh magnificent Battle of Borodino!

  It was mid-November before the limping Grand Army reached Smolensk, and of course found no food. They took the hungry, icy road back to Paris. But now the snow had begun. At one point 7,800 infantrymen and 450 cavalry, together with 8,000 dispossessed non-combatants – old men, women, children, who thought they were safer with an army, any army, than anywhere else – all under General Ney, were surrounded by the Cossacks and asked to surrender.

  ‘What, me?’ asked Marshal Ney. ‘Surrender? Never!’ and chose to escape over the iced-over Neiper river. Brave Ney stepped first on to the ice (it cracked but held). On, on, he cried. And those behind cried forward and those in front cried back! And over they went! Ney made it to the other side, and so did 800 of the troops. But some 7,000 souls fell through the ice and died; and the 8,000 helpless – the sick, the wounded, the women and the babies – were left on the wrong side of the Neiper, to be slaughtered by the Cossacks. Which they were. Oh, brave General Ney, who wouldn’t surrender!

  One more river to cross. The Berezina, this time.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Clausewitz once again, when his boss, General Wittgenstein of Prussia, attacked what was left of Napoleon’s army on the snowy banks of that particular river. Ten thousand died there. Another classic battle, much played and replayed by enthusiasts. The battle plan? I could give you a map but I won’t. You’ll find accounts of it in any library, much thumbed.

  While the Battle of Berezina waged, the Great Army engineers tried to keep the bridges open for the retreat. But they were jammed up by thousands of undignified and undisciplined non-combatants pushing, struggling, screaming for a foothold, tearing, panicking. The Cossacks approached, hacking as was their fashion from their vantage point of horseback height. This one’s head, that one’s arm – and meanwhile, as cannon fire shredded men by the dozen, the bridges collapsed. Hundreds were trampled underfoot and suffocated in the blood-stained slime.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ wrote Clausewitz, but why he should have found it so I really don’t know. War was his trade, his pride. Or did he just like the troops to die more cleanly, with grace and style, and the non-combatants not getting in the way? ‘Defence,’ wrote Clausewitz, ‘is the strongest form of combat.’ Attack the best form of defence. Well yes, sometimes. Sometimes not. The sheer swing of the words gives the Clausewitzian phrase the force of gospel. Clausewitz is to the military as the Bible is to Christians and Das Kapital is to Marxists. Marx sat in the British Museum and projected a future from the past, as was the fashion at the time, and these writings, these uneven gropings towards understanding, became the law of nations, because they were so admirably, if lengthily, expounded. Writers can’t resist the heady swing of language: ceaselessly they subordinate truth to a good phrase. ‘All happy families resemble each other—’ Tolstoy. Pschew! Nonsense! Clausewitz looks over a campaign or so and says, ‘War is a continuation of policy by other means.’ And neo-Clausewitzians take it as gospel and a million missiles spring and the whole world cowers. ‘Unbelievable,’ says Clausewitz, when he looks at actual war, at the remnants of Napoleon’s Great Army. Oh, the intoxication of words, the vulnerability of flesh at the word’s mercy!

  ‘What ghastly scenes have I witnessed here,’ he wrote home to his wife, after Berezina. ‘If my feelings had not been hardened, it would have sent me mad... I saw only a small fraction of the famous retreat, but in this fraction all the horrors of the movement were accumulated. A man crawled to the broken bridges, the red stumps of his legs leaving two red trails in the snow: a woman who had fallen half through the ice had frozen there, one of her arms half-severed, the other clutching a breathing, suckling baby.’ Reader, I know it isn’t easy. But if I can write it, you can read it. It is important to consider the detail of these things from time to time, and still take seriously Joan Lumb’s premise that the manner of living is more important than the manner of dying. The man with the stumps may well have had a glorious war until that moment. Who are we soft liberals, readers and writers, to deny it to him? If Clausewitz himself, while experiencing horror at the carnage, did not turn his back on it, but went on to enjoy it, and make a system out of it, and manage it, so shall we. Destruction is liberating to the spirit, both of the destroyer and the destroyed, and there’s the nub of it. Turn over the stone of disgust and a little bright, shining, mystical insect crawls away. It is the soul. If there is no reality left, no houses, no bridges, no bags of flour; if all the people are mashed into pulpy shreds only then can there be the pure energy of being left, the soul, and that soul is heroic—

  Would you like a verse from Homer’s Iliad, in the Richmond Lattimore translation? Joan Lumb hasn’t read it: she doesn’t read poetry. But most of the young students who attend the Shrapnel Academy have been brought up to admire it, and understand very well what Homer says.

  ‘So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it? Patroklus also is dead, who was better by far than you are. Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a no
ontime when some man in the fighting will take the life from me, also, either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring.’ So he spoke, and in the other the knees and the inward heart went slack. He let go of the spear and sat back, spreading wide with both hands; but Achilles drawing his sharp sword struck him beside the neck at the collar-bone, and the double-edged sword plunged full length inside. He dropped to the ground face downward, and lay at length, and the black blood flowed, and the ground was soaked with it.

  But I don’t suppose the dead young woman with the severed arm and the still living suckling baby had read the Iliad or could take much comfort from Homer. I wonder if the baby lived? Unlikely, with the temperature as low as it was. But you never know. Perhaps Clausewitz himself took pity on it, and waded through the icy torrent to rescue it, and it was a little girl, and she grew up to be a Mills & Boon heroine? Oh, you never know. And the mother’s misfortune the baby’s good fortune? Such things happen.

  Napoleon managed to get 80,000 people over the river: but 40,000 of these perished in the next stretch of road, from cold. Frostbite removed hands, feet, noses, ears. Skin turned purple, then blue-brown, then black, as it rotted from living bodies. Fingers and toes snapped like dead twigs. No food was so rotten or disgusting as not to find someone to relish it. No fallen horse remained uneaten: no dog, no cat, no carrion, nor indeed the corpses of those that died of cold or hunger. Men even gnawed at their own famished bodies. Some went insane. Some just lapsed into lethargy, known as the Moscow Depression.

  The Russians, pursuing, suffered as much as the French. The temperature fell to 40° below zero. Napoleon tried to turn and rally his men, but a further 12,000 had perished by then, and what good were those who were left? Gunmen with their hands frozen off! Infantrymen with no feet! Weapons are a great deal more reliable than people: the lesson was learned. Progress, progress! More and better weapons, of a non-labour-intensive kind, that’s what’s needed in modern warfare, that’s what we’ve got today, not human flesh with its propensity to rot and disintegrate. It took six miserable men to fire a single Gaundeval 12-pounder cannon, with its lethality index of 940. And only six brave but (at the time) happy men to drop one 120 KT bomb over Hiroshima, with its lethality index of 4,908,600. Mind you, these latter six were well-educated and highly trained, and their aircraft kept warm for them.