by Mike Carey
This got a cheer, despite the train of ideas being a tenuous one. What Tusimov was thinking was that this was murderous terrain from which to launch an invasion. Unless the Prussian maps were a bloody sight better than his own, a general could wander up and down these sheep runs for days and not find an actual road. And while a company could go two or three abreast at need, an army couldn’t. He defied anyone to hold a line of march through this sopping wet cunt of a country.
Tusimov liked glory, and the radiant furniture of military adventure. But he was greatly deficient in physical courage, by means of which glory is usually procured. His beguiling fantasy, in moments of leisure, was a commendation for valour won without any personal risk at all. In the absence of that, he was happy to find himself defending a position that was unlikely to be attacked.
‘We’ll give those cabbage farmers hell, my boys, just won’t we? If they drag their muddy feet across our borders, we’ll teach them manners at a bayonet’s end and make them clean up their mess before we send them home again, by gravy!’
A murmur of assent rose from around him. Buoyed up by it, Tusimov tugged hard on Dancer’s reins to make her rear – a hazardous operation on this tilted tabletop of a landscape, but he knew what a dashing figure he cut when her hooves slashed the air like that. ‘For Maria, Austria and God!’ he cried, and the men huzza’d.
That mood sustained them, for a while at least, as Tusimov led the way back down into the valley. He had abandoned the map by this time, finding that his own eyes served him better, but ironically they betrayed him when they were back on more level ground. Dancer stepped into a rabbit hole, stumbled and pitched onto her side. Fortunately the horse’s collapse was gradual enough to enable Tusimov to jump clear.
The leg seemed to be broken – or at least, Dancer was unable to right herself again, but Tusimov felt for the break and couldn’t find it. Utterly wretched, he decided to put her out of her pain but was unable to finish her off himself. He deputed Strumpfel, who in turn rapped out an order to one of the privates at the head of the line to load his musket.
Tusimov watched, dismayed, as this was done, but then cried out ‘Halt there!’ as the soldier took aim. ‘It may be she’s just hurt,’ he explained to Strumpfel. ‘I’d hate to kill her if there’s no need. I’ll wait a while and see if she rallies.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Strumpfel said. ‘As you say, sir. Orders for the men, sir? Shall I tell them to fall out?’
No, Tusimov decided, that wouldn’t do. He’d raised their spirits up on the crown of the mountain. Now they’d see him waiting, passive, unable to move or to command. That would be the image they’d carry away with them, and the thought appalled him. He ordered Strumpfel to take over and lead the men back to Pokoj himself, and once there to have another horse sent out. It might be that Dancer, recovered, would be able to trot but unable to carry his weight. Or it might be that she’d have to be shot and he’d require another mount to bring him home.
Strumpfel relayed these orders to the unit and got them moving again quickly. Some glanced back over their shoulders at their commander diminishing into the distance behind them, shipwrecked on dry land. Most were more concerned by this time about the leaks in their boots or the pains from injuries sustained in that precarious climb. All were muddied, and more than a few bloodied besides. Huzzas notwithstanding, they were not in an ebullient mood.
And Strumpfel was not assertive enough or loud enough to be an effective shepherd of the human species. In truth, he was one of the most complaisant and soft-hearted sergeants ever seen. In the presence of senior officers he could summon a halfway-effective bellow, but the men of the company knew that it was the reverberation of a bran tub rather than the voice of the thunder.
They were therefore rather more relaxed on the return journey than a good line of march required. Those most eager to get back to their billets and take a little solace in hot rum or clean clothes drew ahead of the mass. Those most debilitated by sodden boots and turned ankles fell behind.
It was in this besmirched and enfeebled state that the soldiers of Lieutenant Tusimov’s unit retraced their steps through Narutsin, an hour shy of sunset. The villagers who had watched them with resentful or fearful eyes on their outward leg watched them again now with barely concealed grins as they limped and straggled home.
The bedraggled troopers were well aware of this amusement. They felt it keenly, because the prevalence of dirt in and around the village made up a large part of their perceived superiority to the local population. They had joked about the nourishing meals that could be made from sheep dung, and for what price mud (depending on its purity and consistency) might sell in the regional markets. Now, carrying some of that sheep dung and mud on their own persons, they were obliged to parade themselves for the entertainment of smirking farm boys and dullard prentices. It was hard to bear.
Most quickened their pace, wanting the shame to be over with sooner. But some of the disaffected stragglers at the tail end of the line took a different tack.
‘What are you looking at, hayseed?’ Private Renke demanded of a man who was leaning on a walking stick outside an open front door (presumably his own). Renke had chosen his target with some nicety. The man was more than twice his age, overweight and dignified. He was probably a pillar of the community, so insulting him meant something.
Possibly Renke expected the man to look away or mutter an apology. Instead he laughed. ‘I was hoping you could tell me that,’ he said jocularly. ‘Something that came up out of the wetlands – fairy or changeling, maybe, for I never saw a woman’s son look so wild!’
Renke was incensed. ‘You a gleaner, grandad?’ he demanded.
‘Not in November, sonny.’
‘Well you’re going to be gleaning your fucking teeth once I spread them over the street. Look away, you old shite. Seriously, look away or I will break the fucking grain of you.’
The old man gave him a look of contempt, shook his head – and dropped his gaze to the ground. Good enough. Renke resumed the march.
He and his comrades – a round half-dozen of them – were the very last of the unit. The rest were not in sight. A number of village men were, though, and some of them appeared now to have condensed into a tight knot in the middle of the street ahead of the soldiers.
Renke was for walking right through them, and devil take the hindmost, but Private Lehmann and Private Schottenberg contrived to lead him off at an angle, avoiding a direct collision.
‘Bloody yokels,’ Renke observed, loudly enough to be heard. ‘Faces like cracks in a bloody wall.’
They walked on.
But one of the village men answered him as he passed by, ‘Well if I had a face as pretty as yours, I’d keep it indoors on weekdays, swear I would.’
It wasn’t the words that made Renke stop, it was the burst of laughter that followed them. He turned to face the little knot of men. ‘Which one of you said that?’ he demanded.
‘Piss off,’ one of the villagers replied equably, ‘you arse-faced lackwit.’
Renke took a step forward. Private Lehmann interposed himself hastily. ‘Nobody here wants a fight,’ he urged.
‘Why’d you join the fucking army then?’ one of the village men sneered. ‘Do you just like dressing up?’
Lehmann threw the first punch, and was put down by the second, his lower lip split wide open and one of his teeth rattling loose in his mouth. By the time he staggered upright again, soldiers and villagers were in a rolling ruck along the street, brawling and battling in the dirt.
Anton Hanslo was on his way back from delivering an oak doorknob to Meister Kolchek at the posthouse when he heard the shrieks and curses from the main street. He ran to the end of the path, rounded the corner and stared open-mouthed at an astonishing sight. It looked at first as though some blow from heaven had struck a dozen men at once with desperate convulsions. Then he realised that they were fighting each other. And some of them were in uniform.
‘Jesu!’ he gas
ped.
Women were keening from the sidelines as the men hurled themselves against one another, punching and cursing. In the doorway of the burgomaster’s house at the other end of the street Silkie was staring at the scene. Another soldier, an officer by his uniform, stood beside her. His mouth gaped like a fish, and he seemed rooted to the spot, one hand raised as if to begin a call for order which had frozen on his lips. Then Meister Weichorek himself barged past them and came running towards the disturbance. His wife and son were at his heels, at least at first, but Jakusch’s youth and vigour told over the distance. He arrived first.
‘Stop them!’ the burgomaster yelled. And it may be that this was Jakusch’s intention. But at the moment when he reached the skirmish, one of the soldiers was holding Matheus Vavra’s face down in the dirt and seemed to be trying to throttle him. Jakusch launched himself at the man and sent him sprawling.
Weichorek was now at the outer fringes of the fight himself, but he stopped dead when he got there, unable to find a place into which to insert his authority. ‘For the love of God!’ he pleaded. ‘Stop them, somebody! Separate them!’
The anguish in that cry galvanised Hanslo. He sprinted across the street and laid hands on the first man he could reach, a villager, hauling him away from his opponent by main force. Other men were running too, from the houses all around. A few seemed to want to get their own blows in but most, like Hanslo, were trying to stop the fight. If the soldiers took a few more buffets in the process, so did the village men they were battling with.
And now women were intervening too, with greater effect. Two opponents pulled out of each other’s reach would try to find each other again as soon as they were released. But where a woman stood in the way, weeping and wringing her hands, they were hindered as they tried to find a way around her – and then as often as not some sense of themselves and of their surroundings would come back to them and they would lower their hands, abashed.
Like oil stirred into water, the melee gradually separated out again into its two distinct ingredients. All the men were battered and filthy, and all were still furious, but for the moment neither moved against the other. They only stood and panted and eyed each other with defiance and hatred.
In another moment the battle would surely have flared again around some real or imagined insult. But fortunately the officer – a lieutenant – intervened at this point and with a string of shouted orders made the soldiers back away from their former enemies into a tighter group. And Meister Weichorek was in his proper element now. He knew how to handle truculence and block-headedness. It was only violence that baffled him.
‘Now by Christ,’ he said in ringing tones, ‘I am ashamed to be a Schliesener! If this is what we breed, I had rather have been born a Turk!’
He let his gaze sweep one man after another, full of stern reproach. ‘Aye, you may hang your head, Sivet Ulsner. Jan Puszin. Martek Luse. Is this how you were taught? Piek Lauvener, how would it grieve your mother to see you brawling and biting like a dog in the street?’
‘I’m right here, Berthold Weichorek,’ Dame Lauvener said from behind him. ‘And I can tell you it grieves me a fair deal!’
Her tone as she said this was so ferocious that her son Piek actually hid from her behind another man. A ripple of laughter ran through the village men, sheepish and in a way relieved. A mother telling off her son put this violent outburst into another perspective. It made them feel like children, whose faults might be pardoned, rather than like men who had broken the civil peace.
Berthold Weichorek was not so sanguine about this, but he knew that sometimes the best way to save your salt is to throw just a little of it in the devil’s eye.
‘You may be sure, Lieutenant Klaes,’ he said, turning to the officer by his side, ‘that all here will be sorry for this day’s work. I wasn’t appointed burgomaster to see my village descend into chaos and licence. Nor I will not stand for it. There will be punishment and shame for all who took part in this disgraceful riot.’
He was grimly determined to be as good as his word, knowing that a great deal might depend on it. He sent a boy to fetch the priest, who in the absence of a clerk could be relied on to write down the names of all involved.
Father Kazen, looking very unhappy to be performing in this civic arena, solemnly recorded on the inside back cover of a hymnal the given and the family names of every man who had taken part in the fight. This took a long time, during which the malefactors might easily have slipped away, but they stood by patiently and endured the shame.
The soldiers, meanwhile, fell in behind their officer and limped away with many backward glances and dark threats. They had given as good as they got, but the accounting in such affairs is seldom to the complete satisfaction of anyone concerned.
21
The tail end of Tusimov’s unit returned from their manoeuvres in a dishevelled enough state that their arrival at Pokoj provoked a flurry of concerned activity. Wives and doxies ran to their husbands and lovers, exclaiming in dismay over their bloodied faces. Sarai, who acted as an unofficial nurse among the camp followers, hurried to wash their cuts and prepare poultices of arnica for their bruises. Lehmann, Renke and the rest were led to their tents with tender pity.
Once the news of the fight had spread through the camp, however, that pity swiftly turned to laughter.
‘The archduchess’s finest beaten by a bunch of farmers,’ Libush chuckled. ‘What’ll they do when the Prussians get here?’
Drozde found that she could not join in the general merriment. Her mind kept drifting to Anton, and each time she thought of him it was with a growing sense of anxiety. None of the accounts of the fight she had heard mentioned the villagers involved by name, but it was generally agreed that a goodly proportion of the young men of Narutsin had taken part. Surely he had more sense than to join in a brawl? But Drozde thought of his naivety, how openly he displayed his feelings, and she was not so sure.
The talk in the camp that night was all of the fight. A cluster of privates sat around a fire, cheering and hooting while some of Tusimov’s men recounted again the glorious tale of the pounding they had given those hayseeds down in Narutsin. A short distance away Ottilie and Alis and some of the other girls giggled at how ill the men’s account tallied with their torn uniforms and black eyes. Drozde wanted no part of any of it. They might be quartered here until the spring, and a fight had broken out less than a fortnight after they’d arrived! Tensions between the camp and the village had been bad enough before this – now the soldiers probably wouldn’t even be able to visit Narutsin on market day without some sort of a scuffle. ‘What will you make of this in your next show, Drozde?’ one of the privates called out to her as she passed by. I’ll show it as the pissing match it was, Drozde thought, but she made no reply.
She was angry, and somehow her concern over Anton nettled her and made her anger worse. If he had been hurt in the fight then it was his own fault! The camp was not somewhere that she wanted to be right now, she decided, but neither did the thought of walking into the village appeal to her. So she went to see the ghosts, in whose company she could hide from the follies of soldiers and Narutsiners alike.
The ballroom was starting to feel as familiar to Drozde as Molebacher’s kitchen, and a good deal more welcoming. The ghosts smiled to see her, but they did not cluster around her as they usually did. Their unaccountable instincts seemed to tell them before she had even arrived that she was in no mood for a lively welcome.
Magda touched Drozde’s arm. ‘The fight is stupid, isn’t it? I wish they could all be friends, like us.’
Thea smiled sadly. ‘I wish that too, my love. But some people are only happy when there’s a quarrel. Look at my family: all the men ever did was fight.’ She spoke to Magda, but the look she gave Drozde was full of understanding.
‘Let’s have a peaceful story tonight,’ Drozde suggested. She had heard more than enough of violence for one evening.
The ghosts shifted and murmured for
a moment, and then a young man stepped forward. Drozde recognised him as the handsome soldier in the unfamiliar uniform, the one who had spoken up after Arinak’s tale.
‘My story ends in war, as do so many others,’ he began, ‘but that is not its subject. It would be a short one else. I was seventeen when I went for a soldier, and nineteen when I died.’
I counted my age in summers, because summer was my favourite time. The winters on a farm are desperate bad. You wake up in the dark and work in the dark for hours and hours, pulling at the cows’ teats with fingers almost breaking off from cold, your body so numb it’s like you’re already dead. You have to look at your hands all the time because you can’t feel them. The only way to know what they’re doing is to squint your eyes and watch them as though they were someone else’s.
Then when the sun comes up, it’s not any better. It doesn’t bring warmth with it, only light to see by. And what you see is just grey on grey, frost and dead grass and weathered wood, everywhere and everywhere, until you feel like you might drown in it.
But in the summer the sky is like a bucket, pouring hotness down on you, and the fields are painted in so many colours you can’t count them or name them. It’s warm enough to think. And it’s warm enough to love.
This was in Janowo, which is in Majki, which is in the east of Prussia. I know that now, because when you go to be a soldier you see things outside what you knew. And that means you learn where the things you knew really stand in the world. But back then it was just Janowo, and not even Janowo really (because when did I ever walk into the village?) but my father’s farm three miles outside Janowo. I lived in a tiny world, though of course I didn’t know it until later. All worlds are the same size when you live in them.
