“Why do they call it that then?” asked Private Slodge, with the timidity which he considered that his sergeant might deem proper considering the gulf between their ranks. As for his mode of utterance, the meat of words, so to speak, to which his manner was but a bland sort of gravy, he had a habit of running his vocables together with great speed, as if speech was a painful process and had to be got over with in maximum haste. But to render his statement as veracity would require, would entail the setting down of some such monster of utterance as: “Wydthcawitaten?”, which might weary the reader and would certainly fatigue the author.
“Why?” says Sergeant Trouncer. “Why you asks? You might well ask why I am called of Trouncer and you of Slodge, though to me you looks not unlike a Slodge, whatever a Slodge might be.” As there seemed no adequate reply to this statement, he of the alleged nominal aptness merely awaited further communication from his superior officer. This was at once forthcoming. “When I says,” said the sergeant, “them boots has marched, I would not have you believe that they has marched of their own accord.” The private soldier shook his head many times, as if very anxious to be acquitted of the suspicion that he might so have believed, though he had a sudden very clear picture of a pair of boots vigorously marching across a map of Europe, and would be ready enough to envisage a whole army of such tenantless footgear raising dust from Portugal to Egypt. “No,” the sergeant elucidated, “them boots has had me inside of ‘em, or rather they has had that portion of me which is called, and kindly correct me if I am in herror, by the name of feet.” And he nodded twice, one nod for each of the anatomical portions mentioned. He then said: “Whiles we are on this topic, what could be better by way of a supper of a cold December evening than pig’s feet done in a Dutch oven with a bit of toasted cheese as a side dish? I remember,” he went on, and his mustache blew about as in a jig of joyful memory of the occasion, “it was that what I was eating of when the news was brought as how we was to be shipped here. Which,” he added with exceptional force, “is not natural, young un.”
“What’s not natural, sergeant?” asked young Slodge, who was engaged, with a somewhat inadequate cleansing agent of spittle and a thumbnail, in removing a mustard-stain from the cuff of his tunic.
“Here,” said his sergeant. “Here is not natural. There is stars in the sky here,” he confided, “as was not seen by Hadam nor by Heve in the Garden of Heden. There is midsummer at Christmas, a season when by all human rights and by the talons of what is decent should have snow on the ground and skating on the ponds, as also, which is not demanding too much of a unreasonable favor, brandy served hot in the public houses. I have wept,” he confided further, “I have wept bitter to see the sun shining on the plum pudding. There,” he added, in a tone which indicated that he had spread before his young colleague a veritable banquet of unreason, “what have you to say about that, young un?” But before the young soldier could drum up his brains to an appropriate response, his sergeant said, “I’m not a-going about denying that it is hard for him too, him not wishing to be here not no more than what we are or are not, as the case may be. And there is no denying of it, if the truth is told, whatever you or anybody else may be proned to say or to not say.”
“You mean old Bony?” said Private Slodge with a sort of awe. “Old Nap, that is?”
“I am much of the opinion,” pronounced Sergeant Trouncer, who was now peeling off his socks with a solemn motion, “that He is Not Well. He is being starved deliberate and I mentions no names, except to say that one of his names begins with a Haitch and the other with a Hell, and he is a Sir. And there is wholesome or wholesale deliberate starvation being issued with the rations, or rather the lack of. It is Ate, young un, and Ate is a ateful thing in a officer, carry he His Britannic Majesty’s commission or, like me that you see lying here, not carry it, being more of a Non-Commissioned Officer, as you well know, and sometimes to your cost, eh, eh, eh?” He laughed raucously, as at the memory which he knew the young private must share of some transgression of the latter’s which had been duly and Non-Commissionedly punished. And, to compound his merriment, he threw one of his socks at Slodge, so that it sailed through the lamplit air like a dispirited and elongated gray owlet.
“He don’t look to be starved,” said Private Slodge, catching the sock and then, in deference, carrying it over to his sergeant rather than throwing it back to him. “Not him he don’t.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant sapiently, “happearances is not all, young un, and I would thank you to bear in mind that little ominy. I had a aunt that was twenty-five stone have her due poids if she was a fluid ounce troy weight. Aunt Flora she was called by all and sundry, that being her name, and had a tortoise-shell cat named Tiddles, besides being fond of the Hobitary Columns which she read every night with a stick of cinnamon in her hand. Well, that lady, young un, was plagued by a most cruel lack of appetite as you never saw. For breakfast, dinner, tea, supper and even Christmas Day it was always the same: one slice of bread and butter you could see through as if it was glass, being that thin to the eyes, and one cup of tea that you could count the number of stalks in if you was so minded. Fancied nothing more, and even a slice of somebody else’s bacon at breakfast would turn her stomach with the mere sight of it. On the other hand, not to make too much of a song and dance of it, there was Mr. Creaklamb as kept the grocery in Rochester when I was a boy, and he was that thin he would have served as a lamppost, especially being very shining bald under a full moon, not that street lighting is needed then. Now that man, young un, would eat a roast ox for his breakfast and not turn an hair. All day they was pouring victuals into him for fear he’d starve, and that’s why he was in the grocery, as there was dry goods on the spot and the butcher and the baker either side. I seen him,” and Sergeant Trouncer’s eyes turned somewhat glassy at the reminiscence, “I seen him eat for his dinner what you and I would be turned to stone to by the mere look of. He began with ten or twelve pork chops with tomato sauce in which he dipped his bread, a whole quartern loaf and of that day’s batch too, and then he had a oyster stew with cowheels in for the thickening, then it was a cushion of veal very brown with potatoes done under, then two brace of Sussex fowl that he tore at with his teeth, these being strong, young un, as you will well imagine with the constant exercise of, like muscle as it were, and sucking the marry out of the bones for good measure, then he must have his bit of beef, as he called it, this being a fair round of topside with onions and cabbage with plenty of pepper, and he never sneezed no matter what the quantity what he shook from the pot, and then it was custards and jellies and crab-apple jelly tart, that being more of a jam than a jelly, then they’d bring the Stilton on for him, very maggoty as he liked it, and then bless and blow us all if he wasn’t crying out for a cold leg of lamb which he would eat with his hands, dipping it into a big basin of mint sauce as he went along. Always left that till last, as his name was Creaklamb, and it was like putting his signature to it as he put it, being a laughing man in spite of his thinness. There’s no food called Creak, or he would have had that along with it, him being a stickler.”
Private Slodge’s only comment was a noise indicative of awe that, indeed, sounded not unlike the word itself.
“Died, of course,” said Sergeant Trouncer. “Died of starvation, if you can believe it. Couldn’t earn enough to keep him in victuals, what with eating the shop-stock too. So as there’s a great lesson in that, young un, and I hopes you’ll hold that little ominy to art.”
“Is He going to die?” Private Slodge nearly winded himself with the special effort of emphatic aspiration.
“We’re all going to die someday,” was the sagacious reply, “but He, as you call him, is not long for this world. If ever I see the Hand of Death in a man’s face, in his I see it. Liver, I’d say it is, that being first to crumble when it’s starvation. You see the yellow in him as it might be a Eathen Chinee. Liver, that is. Peck peck peck at it, goes Sir Haitch Hell, like any pecking bird that I see.”
“Suppose,” said the young private, “suppose he’d won. Just suppose.”
“Old Nosey did for him, right enough,” commented the sergeant, now absently tearing great strips of hard skin, like Nature’s own bungling attempt at a sort of vegetable bootsole, from the underside of his left foot. “I wasn’t there, but I heard all about it. Well, if he’d won it’d be Frenchies in Buckingham Palace and the Ouse of Lords, but it’s Germans now, so what’s the odds? It never makes but little difference,” he said, surveying a strip of leathery foot-skin held on the palm of his hand, “to the likes of you and me, young un. But when he dies,” he concluded, “and it won’t be long, then it’ll be back to Nature for you and me, lad, and proper stars in the sky, not these Happaritions, and snow and sliding at Christmas, and chestnuts popping on the fire, and hot rum, and no unnatural sun naming on the plum pudding.”
“Ah,” said the young private, “well then, with no hard feelings and every kind of proper respect, as is only right and is required, let him get on with it and get it all over.”
K. N. V. S.
KLEBA? NIEMA. VOTA?
SANA.
I. N. R. I.
Is there any bread?
None whatsoever.
River water, spring water, stagnant water, water?
If there is, it must be looked for.
KI. NN. V. R. SI.
In profound fever and tortured by heat, thirst unquenchable, surrounded by the skeletons and hides of sucked shriveled lemons, he lay and transported himself to Poland. He lay naked in snow and kicked about in it until he shivered for sheer healthy animal want of heat: O let me be taken to some such torrid clime as that of the island of the cross that is named after the great woman who found the cross. He encased himself in an ice coffin and yelled to be hacked out of it and then be rushed to a roaring log fire in the barbaric hall of the hunting lodge of the Walewskas. He ate all the snow of the entire winter waste that stretched all about him in uncountable hectares, he crunched up the frozen ponds and rivers that a whole detail of the Imperial Guard hacked to crystalline gobbets with specially issued (Form GS59/AN237) hatchets. And then, cooled somewhat and his thirst partially slaked, he was able to give time to the smiling snow princess beside him, for they had suddenly become close-seated companions on a horse-sleigh, she with the reins and the whip, managing as well as any man, a single fur spread over their laps and lower limbs, whistle and creak and neigh and whinny, breath-smoke and laughter, over the lovely limitless snow wastes, now restored to the winter earth after his monstrous meal of them. But he was well again now and young again, and she was gold-locked and beautiful, and her voice that sang such charming Slavic French was wine-hued velvet to the white velvet over which they sped.
“Kleba niema vota sana,” he laughed. “All the Polish the troops know, and God knows I know no more myself. I would that I could talk of love in the language of your people.”
“The French tongue will do well enough,” she smiled, and she, in her sudden concentration at keeping the bay steeds on the path, if path it could be called, protruded a millimeter of pink Polish tongue. And then she said: “So. Your army has suffered. No bread, no water. But now they have enough of both and more. My people are glad. And grateful.”
“They were most reluctant to cross the Vistula,” he mused. “But now it is crossed and they begin to be aware of my purpose.”
“A noble purpose. My country has been too long a cake for Russia and Austria and Prussia to bite at. And now you will restore the ancient kingdom.” She swiftly leaned sideways and, her lovely face glowing against his, swiftly kissed his own heated cheek. “I love you,” she said.
“Ah, how I love you too, heart of my heart.” But he did not tell her that the remaking of Poland’s old glory was not at all his purpose. It was instead a matter of securing the eastern limits of the Empire. The Austrians and the Prussians were alike tremulous, but there remained Russia. And in the spring, with the Imperial Army secure in Warsaw, there would come the definitive thrust that would bring Prussia finally to her (very much her, oh how ironic) knees, frighten off her Russian ally, hold all Europe down, from Atlantic to the Niemen, in the salutary grip of the Continental System. The enemy of mankind would break at last, her Orders in Council dispersed in the gale, like the worthless mass of scrap paper they were, and the Empire rest secure forever. Meantime it was winter, and Warsaw was all light and music. As for the Poles, they must be turned into soldiers first and learn of their duty to the Imperial Concept; their rights, if they had any, could come later.
“Heart of my heart,” he repeated. “My love is as candidly pure as this snow we speed across, as naked as the trees, and yet it howls with somewhat of savagery like those wolves we hear behind us.”
“Far behind us,” she smiled. “Nature’s Cossacks.” Her face darkened then, remembering those whooping forays, the bearded manic leers, the greasy barbaric tunics braided with looted gold thread, looted gold coins in their belts, the reek of goat, it was their pride never to wash, and her sudden vomiting that had made the lout desist, and her husband the prince, jeered at for his age, filthy old one canst do it canst thrust it in, then lashed with a knout stroke on the proud lined face that did not flinch, the burning of the ancestral portraits in a fire they made on the carpet, the floods of urine to loud laughter, anything to defile, and then, sick or not, they would have taken her had they not heard the clop of arriving cavalry without, Polish cavalry, and one beast tardy in leaving because he was defecating in the face of a stunned and supine manservant and could not in his stupidity decide between the claim of an emptying gut and the need to take horse, the horses were all there in the hall, fodder dragged in from the stables… .
“Far behind us, far far far.”
He thought, but not for long, of a cuckolded prince. He had no pity for cuckolds, he, the most cuckolded man alive. But all in the past, true, and he was sure there was a faithful Empress in Mainz, anxious to join him in Warsaw, perhaps already having heard something, women were quick to scent other women, but he had written. “Your grief at our separation crucifies me with pain, but circumstances compel us both to a continuing agony of privation. Mainz is too far from Warsaw, the roads are wretched, the snow lies deep and blizzards howl, Paris calls you, Paris needs you, the Empress, you have duties to your people, Our Lady of Victories. Oh, how I chafe at our continued separation, oh, how I long to fold you in my arms, to warm and be warmed, giving and taking love, in these endless winter nights that endlessly continue, spring so far, your springlike beauty lost to me, Persephone Persephone.” A good, he considered, and persuasive letter.
“Heart of my heart of my heart of my.” He panted, riding hard, the goal in sight. Marie and he writhed naked in a tumble of bear-rugs before the great pine-fire of the lodge. “My kleba, my vota.” And that was right: it was pure and honest water, which a man could drink without fear, in which a man could be cleansed, that mattered more than the wine. Deceitful wine that turned to vinegar. It was vinegar on a sponge they had handed up to him when it was the final kiss of his own element he had, in his final agony, begged. But not the sea, never that. All about their sanctuary of fire, where they rode in the act of life, the snow lay, vota turned to manna, a universal fall of white bread.
“Love of my.”
Riding, riding. And at last the goal reached, the horses reined, the miracle of the gush that he knew, in the very revelation of the instant, not the imposed fancy of the later knowledge, to be ready to be transubstantiated to the bread of life. They slept, and he awoke to her kisses, her yellow hair all about him, as though it were he who was Danae. He smiled, blinked, saw through the casement no snow, only sun-roasted earth and the sea beyond. This was Elba, and she had come to him in Elba, the bread and water of life, and their son was playing outside, calling in Italian: “Cattivo cattivo.”
“What is that word he calls?” she said.
“It is the first word often a child will use when he comes to a pla
ce that speaks Italian. The Italian children say it to him and he learns to say it to them. Cattivo. It means bad.” He sighed. “But its older meaning is prisoner. Captive. He who is in chains and has lost everything—such a one is bad, bad. It is a very cruel kind of morality. I, my love, am bad.”
“Well then,” she smiled, and kissed him swiftly on his left eyebrow, “it is time for you to be good again. You are not in chains and you have not lost everything.”
“I have lost everything except you. That means there is a little good left in me.” He smiled, then his eyes grew sternly soft in passion, and the kiss he gave her was neither light nor swift. They writhed, their bodies dewed by the heat of the Elban afternoon, and then the child’s voice from outside called:
“Buono buono buono.”
They desisted, laughing. She knew what that word meant.
“Bon, bon, bon.” They were in a horse-sleigh again, furred and rugged, riding embraced, the reins and whip this time in the hands of a Walewska coachman, snow in uncountable hectares all about, and the two of them were harrying Russia together.
Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Page 33
