“Sire. Cavalry and advance guard by nine in the morning. Infantry a little after.”
“Eight, make it eight. Eight, Davout. By God, how well you look.”
“Ten, make it ten,” smiled Dr. Arnott. “You agree, Mitchell? Ten grams of calomel. Shortt, you agree?”
“I must protest with every breath in my body,” cried Dr. Antommarchi. “The condition of the patient is far too enfeebled for a purgative. But I see it is three to one and that the claims of clinical reason and sheer human compassion are unlikely to prevail—”
“Good then,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “we’re all agreed on ten grams of calomel. Make him excrete beautifully.”
News came in that a patrol of Austrian hussars had been driven off with ease at Zokolnitz, or just outside. “No need to wake me for that shit,” growled the Emperor. “Wake me when Savary gets back.”
Savary got back. “As you said, Sire. At least a corps round Augezd. What orders?”
“We’ll have Marshal Soult in on this,” the Emperor said, picking straw from his hair. “Slight change of emphasis necessary. No rewriting of the notes, if you understand my musical image, Savary, but the placing of a sforzando. Come. The time?”
“Three o’clock and a mist rising. Sire.”
“We’ll assume, Savary, that the corps you found there signifies a weakening of the enemy’s forces to the north—their right center. So we’ll shift our attack a bit to the north. And while we’re at it we’ll reinforce our own right with, oh, say another four thousand. I’m not too happy about getting Davout’s lot in there on time. Davout looked very weary, Savary. Exhausted, you understand.”
“Sire.”
“You said something about a mist, Savary.” He stepped out into the beautiful black (behold, gentlemen, the paradoxical etymology of our white calomel!) of the December foredawn and saw for himself the rising calomel exhalation of the frozen ground. “It should do us no harm, Savary.”
“Sire.”
“Vandamme and St. Hilaire will attack from Puntowitz, that spot to the right of my navel. Yes, that should take care of the enemy’s, ha ha, debilitated right center. Come, let us visit Soult, wake him ourselves with an imperial shake-awake, a little surprise for him, eh, Savary?”
“Sire.”
For if his body was lying at an angle northwest by southeast, then the Santon Hill nestled in his left armpit, and the Goldbach Heights were a little above his left elbow, and the stream called Golden, the Goldbach, with its tributary the Bosenitz, ran from left shoulder to down below the bottom right rib, and while his stomach was a hill with a peak called the Zurlan, his whole gloriously swollen belly was the Pratzen Heights. Puntowitz and Kobelnitz and Zokolnitz and Telnitz were moles about the silver scar of the Golden Stream, from navel down nearly to right hip bone.
“The distention is very considerable,” smiled Dr. Arnott, prodding the Pratzen Heights.
“I protest with every breath in my body at this totally unnecessary and viciously inhumane palpation while the patient is at rest—”
“Very,” agreed Dr. Mitchell, agreeing. “I agree.”
At four in the morning the mist had thickened. The first troops groaned and cursed at the come-on-out-of-them-fucking-wanking-pits, yawned, cursed, gulped raw spirits, then moved.
“Well,” he smiled from rising ground, “it is a good beginning. I would divine that the enemy is in some confusion beyond the Goldbach there, the mist intruding and hindering their formations.”
At seven he stood with his staff, all enmisted up to the waist.
“Things going badly at Telnitz, Sire.”
“Nonsense. Legrand can look after himself.” But the massive column of General Doktorov came lurching out of the mist of the dawn to join Kienmayer. The Third of the Line was being driven out of Telnitz, and Davout had to cover the retreat with his hussars and chasseurs. One village in the enemy’s hands then. The Emperor began to dance up and down, though with legs hidden in the mist. Yet his face did not show rage. He was dancing with the cold.
North, at Zokolnitz, a garrison of eighteen hundred men and six guns, Merle’s Light Brigade and Mangeron’s Tirailleurs together, could not prevail against Langeron and Przbysewski’s thirty cannon and eight thousand men and—
“Zokolnitz fallen to the enemy, Sire.”
“General Heudelet will counterattack at Telnitz, the first thing is to get Telnitz back.” But he spoke distractedly, his eyes on the Pratzen Heights. The mists were rising like a curtain to show its frosted rock and green, and towards it the Russian columns surged and frothed like a swollen river of spring. He smiled.
“I would say, would you not, my dear Soult, that something like let me see oh say forty thousand are massing against our right. Wait a little while, and their center will be as weak as water.”
“Sire.”
“Sire, a report has come in that the 108th Regiment has fired accidentally on General Merle’s Light Brigade, Sire. Fog, smoke, Sire. Confusion, Sire.”
“General Merde,” he said cheerfully. “Now, Soult, how long will it take you to get your divisions moved to the top of the Pratzen Heights?”
“Sire, you see their present location, or rather you do not. They’re hidden by fog and campfire smoke at the foot of the valley. I’d say thirty minutes.”
“Make it twenty.” He jammed his spyglass to his right eye, looked afar, grinned. “Two more of their columns moving south. So,” he said cheerfully, “the enemy is in control of Telnitz and Zokolnitz. Well, well, well. The time?”
“Just on nine, Sire.”
“And a very good time too. I think we may now, Soult, unleash your two divisions.”
“Sire. Pas de charge,” called Soult. And the drums thudded into it, all along the valley, ordering voices tore themselves apart, echo echo all along the valley, pas de charge.
“Ah, a gorgeous sight.” Out of the valley mists arose the two divisions, bayonets agleam in the weak winter sun, moving up to the plateau, drums drums drums drumming.
The Emperor sang his own song softly: “England! England! the paid lackeys of England! Mister Pitt will be very very sick before this day is out, gentlemen.” And then he made a kind of nursery chime-tune out of the names of the moles about the silver scar that ran from navel down nearly to right hip bone: “Puntowitz, Kobelnitz, Zokolnitz, Teeeeeelnitz.”
“Sire. General St. Hilaire has taken the village of Pratzen and is now on the summit.”
“And General Vandamme?”
“Some little trouble, Sire, at the village of Girzikowitz.”
“All these witzes and nitzes, eh? Now let us consider Blaso-witz up to the north there. Things going well?”
“Sire. There is an unsubstantiated report that the Russian Imperial Guard has taken the village.”
He saw through his spyglass the messed-up Russian column to the south, a rapid and messed-up redirecting of the march, what looked like two mere battalions reaching, far too late, the village of Pratzen.
“We have it, gentlemen. We must now concentrate on the north.”
“Nine-thirty, Sire.”
“Thank you.” An unwonted quiet courtesy. “Blasowitz, another of these damned itzes.” Soult, Bernadotte, Lannes, Murat stirred into a soup of smoke, broken eardrums, eviscerated horses, four hundred of Cafarelli’s division smashed and spattered in less than three minutes, the Seventeenth Regiment of the Line holding firm on the Santon Hill, cuirasse-flash and plume-tossing on a four-hundred-yard front as Murat’s reserve plunged into left flank of enemy cavalry.
“Ten o’clock, Sire.”
St. Hilaire’s division was being attacked from three sides. A desperate bayonet charge while Soult’s artillery reserve thudding up brought six twelve-pounder guns, Soult himself yelling orders. Vandamme, to the left of St. Hilaire, pushed like a madman at Kollowrath and Milorardovitch’s God knew how many battalions.
“Those damned itzes.”
Lochet stormed Zokolnitz with the 48th and the 111th, captur
ed it and left the 48th as garrison, tried for the castle of Zokolnitz on the east bank of the Goldbach, the enemy hit back at the village and wiped out the 48th, the 111th had to be recalled, the Russians held on to Zokolnitz except for its south fringe the French gripped unwavering.
“Noon, Sire.”
“The midday position, gentlemen. On the left and right alike the enemy seems sufficiently contained. In the center we hold the Pratzen Heights. Imperial Headquarters will now be transferred thither.”
“Sire.”
“The ten grams,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “seems not to have been in the least efficacious. I think the dose must be increased. You agree, Mitchell?”
“Oh certainly I am agreeable,” agreeing.
“I consider that the discourtesy of your continued refusal to pay attention to my strenuous objections should be set on record as a further example of Britannic treachery, and moreover—”
He looked down from the Pratzen Heights with hot coffee and a dish of beaten eggs, milk and sugar. His staff was busy about him, messages being rapidly penciled, messengers tearing off. “Masse de décision, gentlemen.”
“Ah, Sire.”
“I will have Bernadotte’s corps moved from the north sector. I want the entire Imperial Guard stationed on the left bank of the Goldbach. The only trouble, as I see it, is the presence of the Imperial Guard of Russia, which, as is clearly visible, is moving up to fill in that broken center. But, gentlemen, I have great hopes of their excessive impetuosity.” They didn’t understand what he meant. “They have been in that reserve position too long. They lack action. They will be far too eager for action.” They still didn’t understand what he meant.
They understood when the Grand Duke Ferdinand attacked with four paint-fresh battalions the near-dead troops of General Vandamme. They charged, yelling, bayonets ready to gut, from a distance of three hundred yards. They were too much out of breath to achieve the exquisite slaughter they had envisaged. They broke through the forward line but then met the hard fire of the French rear. They fell back on Krzenowitz. Vandamme, receiving the Imperial order to right incline, opened up his rear and left flank. The Grand Duke Constantine crashed the flank with fifteen squadrons of Guard cavalry, and the grenadiers, reformed, renewed their frontal charge. Vandamme moved up two battalions to cover his naked flank. The Russians—
“What in the name of Almighty God? What for Christ’s sake do those bastards think they’re—The fucking cowards I’ll have their fucking balls—” He danced, punching the air, while the unarmed and diseagled battalion of the Fourth went speeding off in retreat, crazy, panicky, panting Long Live The Emperor as though that were a cantrip solvent of crazed panic and cowardice. “Now,” he said, more quietly, the dance ended, the air unpunched, “we will have that Imperial Guard of theirs. Send Bessières with our own Imperial cavalry.”
“Sire.”
“We revert now,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “to this matter of the gubernatorial directive that the patient be fed with this thoroughly wholesome nutritive which, on Sir Hudson’s own orders, has been er delactated from thoroughly wholesome cows.”
“I have said till I am thoroughly wearied out with the effort of saying it that I cannot endorse, either as a patriot or as a practitioner of the art which you and your colleagues patently desecrate, the administering of a beverage which the digestive system of the imperial patient—”
“The epithet is inapposite and irrelevant,” smiled Dr. Arnott, indicating the brimming crock.
“Now that,” the Emperor said, “was an example of initiative which I am disinclined to reprehend.” For Bernadotte had detached General Drouet’s division to support the hard-pressed five squadrons of the Imperial Guard. “So now we order General Rapp to administer the final—Two squadrons of chasseurs and one of the fellow-countrymen of Roustam here. How would you like to be out there, eh, Roustam, shouting Allah chew their balls off and so on?”
“Sire.”
Oh, effective enough, very effective. Five hundred Russian grenadiers dead and two hundred officers of the crack and elite and nobly-born Chevaliers, personal escort of the Tsar or Czar, taken prisoner.
“Just after two o’clock, Sire.”
“Well,” smiled the Emperor, as Prince Repnine, Commander of the Holy Russian Imperial Chevalier Guard was presented to him, torn, dusty, cowed, but every inch a prince of the blood, “we gave you a run for your money, eh, my prince?” And then, brutally: “Some weeping and gnashing and so forth in St. Petersburg tonight or tomorrow, I should think. All these delectable aristocratic ladies bereft of aristocratic manly comfort. Very well, let our aristocratic guests be led away.”
“Two-thirty, Sire.”
“Very good. Final phase, I think, gentlemen.”
The great supine body was cleansed of the infesting enemy. It was sluiced down, south of the belly of the Pratzen Heights, to a region of frozen lakes and marshlands. The west was clear of enemy, and the column that retreated east towards Austerlitz was harried, battered, clawed, bitten, chewed, spat out. General Doktorov faced the north with frozen lakeland behind him. Every man for himself. Five thousand scattered, many over the iced waters.
“Bombard,” ordered the Emperor. “All available cannon.” He looked south to the white sheets, already cracking here and there under the weight of retreating gun-teams. Cannonballs stoned the ice, and the ice starred and shived and men went screaming into the black water, horses too, terrified and threshing, and the great useless guns.
“News from the north?”
“Enemy retreat under way, Sire. Just after three o’clock.”
“My two colleagues here,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “are in total agreement with me on this matter. It would constitute a helpful conciliatory gesture towards Sir Hudson who, as you will know, has been rendered extremely despondent by the intransigent attitude of his prisoner.” And he gestured towards the brimming crock.
“I am of a mind,” cried Dr. Antommarchi, “to dash it to the ground.”
“Tut,” tutted Dr. Mitchell. “That is a typically southern attitude, far from helpful, I would say, and certainly, I would say, denotative of a somewhat unprofessional attitude of mind.”
“So,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “shall we agree to administer to the patient this bland and candid nutritive donated by Sir Hudson?” And he once more.
Cease fire sounded at five. Tentative figures were totted. 11,000 Russians dead. 4,000 Austrians dead. 12,000 from both forces taken prisoner. 1,300 French dead. 6,940 wounded. 573 taken prisoner.
“Let us revert,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “to this question of a more efficient purgative. The ten grams of calomel have, as my colleagues will agree, proved totally inefficacious. I prescribe another ten grams.”
“I must protest, protest and protest again. Britannic treachery.”
Roll up that map, etc. My country, my country, how I leave my, etc. The patient, unheard, chuckled. Nitzes and witzes and litzes. No. Only one litz.
The tempest that visited the island on the fourth day of May was of a violence unwonted even in those latitudes. Poets and demiphilosophers nurtured in the temperate zones, who make of Dame Nature a smiling and wholly benevolent mother, must be accounted guilty of building their fanciful systems, the law following the observation of phenomena, on an insufficiency of data, the mild matron of the Gulf Stream transforming herself in the Tropics to a harpy, a valkyr, a shrieking and essentially female embodiment of the eternal principle of destruction. The firmament of that tropical island, horrid with the swirling and shifting of unearthly colors, resembled nothing so much as the bubbling of oils of varying degrees of luridity in some vast witches’ cauldron. The skies were cracked and shattered ever and again by lightning-knouts of immense length and terrifying contour, while thunders opposed each other from every point of the compass, as though whole army corps, composed merely of kettle-drummers, were cached in valleys over an infinitely large terrain. The rain fell passionately without respite, converting the air into an infi
nite lamination of vertical lakes, and the winds howled and screamed as though the entire sack of Aeolus had in malice been emptied upon the lower heavens. Many of the superstitious islanders believed that they had in their midst, in impending demise as it was bruited, a demon or else a demigod who was intent on speaking the puissance of the celestial or infernal abode whence he had come and whither he was returning, in a final flourish before quitting his terrestrial lodging forever, or until his next incarnation. They crossed themselves, chid each other with a variety of sins for which punishment now seemed imminent, and murmured prayers for the remission of this visitation, which prayers were slow in being answered. Meantime the demigod or demon, revealed to the watchers and weepers as all too human, lay still or in the convulsions of sudden spasms of agony, his pale visage—grown, as many remarked in wonder, young and comely again—intermittently lighted by the fires that flashed from the heavens.
The force of the winds and the rains was such that chaos seemed to have come again, and by what, to those who held to the demonic or demidivine persuasion, seemed an anomaly, it was that expanse of tamed Nature known as the Imperial Garden which was quickest to revert to a swamped and blasted wilderness. Another variety of superstition naturally spoke of the gods bellowing their ultimate rage at Prometheus, while it was left to the few coolly rational to remark on the Pathetic Fallacy. Nevertheless, it is an observed and well-attested fact that all the vegetative life started by his own hands or under his imperial orders was uprooted by rain and wind, while the great willow tree beneath whose shade he had been accustomed to savor a coolness in heat that reached its most agonizing intensity (by an irony to be pondered on by our specialists in sentimental exploitation of the feast) at Christmas, was, by those same two vindictive elements, gleefully plucked up and hurled away with horrific and insolent ease. A solitary gum tree for which he had an especial affection seemed likely to withstand the tempestuous disruption, but that too was at length deradicated and sent wildly hurling and thrashing like a dog maddened with the pain of the whip. Of all that he had made of green and grateful, of all that Nature, in her more complaisant dispositions, had afforded him of the same, nothing was to be left. There seemed to some to be a lesson here, and it was that a man may not make even a garden with impunity.
Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Page 35
