Illumination

by Matthew Plampin

  ‘Calm yourself.’ Besson rose to his haunches and pinched out the candle. ‘I have an idea.’

  They were seen at forty yards. The Prussians tumbled from the low stable they’d been sitting in and formed an impromptu firing line.

  ‘Lift your hands,’ said Besson. ‘Now.’

  Clem obeyed, thrusting his arms up to their full length. He linked his thumbs to make a bird and let out a hoarse whistle. ‘Recognise it?’

  Besson ignored him; his eyes were fixed on the Prussians.

  ‘Come on, Émile old man, it’s a nightingale. A bloody nightingale. You have ’em, don’t you, here in Frog-land? Light winged Dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beechen green, and … erm … dah-da-dum, something something of summer in full-throated ease.’ Clem had never been very good at remembering poetry, to his mother’s oft-stated disappointment. It felt uncommonly important, however, to press on now. ‘Oh for a draught of vintage! that hath been—’

  ‘Keep quiet.’ Besson was impassive. ‘Remember the plan. You are English. There was field artillery. A farm girl. You need to see the front.’

  They’d burned their aérostier uniforms the previous evening, heavy boots, embroidered flying helmets and all. Clem had been too groggy and nauseous to care. Besson had added his packet of special orders to the flames – useless now, founded as they were on an impossible French victory at the Villiers Plateau. He’d then talked their way up the hierarchy of Tournan-en-Brie until they were sitting in the parlour of the village doctor. A long, very French conversation had ensued: much impassioned gesticulation with a round of handshakes and embraces at the end. Clem’s wound had been cleaned and dressed, the physician passing him a phial of clear liquid once the bandages had been pinned in place.

  ‘For the pain,’ Besson had explained.

  Clem had drunk it at once. It had no real taste, but there was a redolence of peaches – or rather of an artificial, peach-like flavour. Soon afterwards his head, so leaden and agonising, had lifted clean off his shoulders. That parlour, he’d decided, was the cosiest, most comfortable little corner he’d ever been in his life; he’d snuggled down in his armchair, wishing that he could be buried for ever among its tasselled cushions.

  Then he’d been in a bedroom, a matronly woman undressing him in the straightforward manner one undresses an invalid, replacing the smock and canvas jacket with a suit of dark green wool. He’d closed his eyes and found himself in the back of a cart, bumping along a chalky road through fields of blackened corn-stubble. A second later and he’d been sitting with Besson in a small, close wood, having their plan of action described to him in terms his addled brain could absorb. Everything had been bright, colourful, unaccountably amusing. He’d been warm as toast despite the dead white frost. All around them invisible birds had trilled in the trees; for a single instant he’d caught the sound of a choir, sliding somewhere beneath the wind. As soon as they’d got it all reasonably straight, Besson had led him over a grassy rise to the Prussians.

  One of them – a corporal or sergeant or something, with the most shockingly yellow set of stripes on his arm – stepped to the end of the stable, shouting back towards a quaint farmhouse. An officer emerged, shaving soap on his jaw, pulling on a pair of pebble spectacles. It was the funniest damned thing Clem had seen in a while; he had to bite his cheek to stop himself from laughing. In a flash, this officer was standing in front of him, brandishing a pistol rather like the one briefly entrusted to Clem in the doomed Aphrodite. The shaving foam was gone, wiped away with a handkerchief; he was round-faced and ill-tempered, with the smell of fresh bacon on his greatcoat. Clem’s eye was drawn to his belt-buckle: a huge silver eagle, fantastically detailed, literally every feather on the creature’s breast picked out. He stared at it, dumbfounded.

  The man demanded something of Clem in accented French. Besson shifted at his shoulder, waiting for him to deliver the response they’d rehearsed.

  With mammoth difficulty, Clem tore his gaze away from the eagle and lowered his arms. ‘English,’ he managed to say. ‘Ing – glish. Reporters. From a newspaper. Here.’ He took a notebook from his pocket, the pages covered with a fake narrative penned by Besson the previous night in his mechanical-looking hand. ‘That’s what we do. Write things. About you lot.’

  The Prussian relaxed a little, but remained hostile. He asked Clem a question in German – and sighed at his friendly, uncomprehending smile. ‘Namen?’

  ‘My name? Mr Inglis. I, my dear fellow, am the English Inglis. English the Inglisman.’ Clem glanced at Besson. Be unashamed, the aérostier had instructed him; be assertive. That is what they will expect. ‘I am Montague Inglis of the Sentinel and I want my bloody breakfast.’

  A runner was sent off down a lane to another position. Clem looked between the farm buildings towards Paris. Smoke was trailing from unseen fires, melting into the overcast sky; and another Prussian officer was before him, a man who could speak his language. He had a quieter manner than the shaving-soap chap, along with a light beard and large, faintly amphibian eyes. His uniform, too, was different – less bellicose, lacking all the spikes and eagles that festooned the others. This, Clem reckoned, was a species of intelligence officer. He delivered the explanation drilled into him in the wood: they’d been covering the sortie until some French field artillery had fired on them, forcing a retreat into the countryside. Now, having finally found their way back, they were eager to see the results of the battle for their paper, the Sentinel.

  The Prussian was flipping through the notebook, reading Besson’s work. ‘What happened to your head, Herr Inglis?’

  ‘Farm girl,’ Clem answered promptly. ‘Approached this plump Juno for directions, didn’t I. Some mistake that was – the prim young madam mistook my intentions and pushed me into a ditch.’ He touched the bandages that wound around his crown, under one of the doctor’s hats; he could feel the dampness of blood beneath them, but no pain at all. ‘A deuced rocky ditch, as it turned out. If it hadn’t been for Graves here I’d have been done for.’

  The Prussian returned the notebook, smiling dryly. He plainly had no trouble believing the violent tendencies of French farm girls – or that Clem was a bumbling cad. I’m quite the liar, Clem reflected, when I apply myself to it; that all came out as smooth as bloody silk.

  ‘This man is your servant, I take it?’

  Besson was dressed in brown tweed. The village doctor had been closer to Clem’s size; the aérostier’s trousers bunched on top of his shoes, and his coat hung emptily around his shoulders. He’d shaved himself clean in an effort to seem more English, and the removal of his beard had altered his appearance quite profoundly. He looked younger and paler, as people always did; and the revelation of a slight fall to his lower lip lent him a studious, cerebral aspect. He resembled a professor more than any kind of servant – but damn it all, Clem thought, we must work with what we are given. We are a pair of survivors, Émile Besson and I. We are like brothers.

  ‘My clerk, yes. Mr Graves – and never did a chap have a more apt moniker. Oh yes! No more words from Mr Graves than are strictly necessary.’

  The Prussian kept on smiling. Clem decided that they could be fast friends. If only they could sit down for a proper chinwag – a bit of schnapps, perhaps, with some roast chicken or duck. It occurred to him that he was perishingly hungry.

  ‘And you want to see the front line?’

  ‘Indeed we do, sir, and post-haste. Got to keep the blasted editor off my back, you understand. Can’t afford to dilly-dally. It has to be current.’

  This was at the heart of their plan. Back in the wood, Besson had explained to him that the Prussians would be keen to get reports of Parisian defeats into neutral newspapers – papers that would be sure to find their way through the blockade and weaken the defenders’ morale. They would surely want to help an unlucky English reporter get to his story; and Clem was so very English that no Prussian could possibly doubt that he was what he claimed to be.

  ‘
You are a good distance from the Villiers Plateau,’ their officer told them, ‘but the French were also crushed at Choisy-le-Roi – just over there, where I am stationed. My name is Major Hempf. I will escort you, and will endeavour to answer any questions you might have for your report.’

  The major shook their hands and guided them across a field. It seemed to spring beneath Clem’s feet like a fluffy sponge cake, the cracking frost a drizzle of lemon icing. He was about to remark on this to Hempf – thinking it a rather diverting observation – when the word crushed suddenly registered. The French had been crushed. Han had been crushed. Struggling to keep his voice casual and his bouncing boots under control, he asked about the sortie. In short, economical sentences, Hempf told him that the French had been allowed to advance a certain distance out of the Marne valley – where they’d been halted, contained and soundly beaten, before finally being allowed to crawl back again. Something dark awoke within Clem and started trying frantically to scratch its way out. Hempf offered him a cigarette; he accepted with gratitude. Besson had prepared him for this. I can do nothing for her, he recited inwardly, sucking down smoke. We are going to Paris as swiftly as we can. We will learn everything then; we will help her then. We must stay focused on our goal.

  They arrived in Choisy-le-Roi. Signs of savage fighting were everywhere. Twenty or so dead Prussians lay in a back garden, awaiting burial by a dilapidated clapboard fence. Clem coughed and looked away.

  ‘The French lost far more,’ Hempf assured him. ‘Over one thousand shot down in this engagement alone – and it was merely a diversion. The main sortie was a massacre. A farce. Is that the word, in English? A stupid performance – a debacle?’

  ‘Yes,’ Clem replied, dropping his cigarette. ‘Yes, that is a farce.’

  ‘Marshal Moltke felt obliged to declare a cease-fire so they could come out to collect their dead and wounded. Although I must tell you that their orderlies were more interested in digging up cabbages and potatoes from abandoned vegetable gardens than removing their fallen comrades.’ There was disgust on Hempf’s face. ‘I saw men ignoring the injured to strip the carcass of a dead horse. No Prussian would ever behave with such dishonour.’

  ‘Where?’ said Besson, his voice lowered to disguise his accent.

  ‘Er, yes,’ Clem added. ‘Where indeed. Show us, major, if you’d be so kind. We’d like to see where the Frenchies advanced, poor devils.’

  Hempf led them to the northern edge of town, past bare backstreets, burned-out houses, a ruined church and some of the most gob-smacking artillery Clem had ever laid eyes on. The black guns seemed otherworldly – engines of hell transported to the outskirts of Paris. The shells alone were the size of beer barrels. He slowed, gaping; it took several sharp prods from Besson to move him on. Those Prussian soldiers not at the guns or in the trenches were sitting around fires, feeding on fried eggs and mutton cutlets. Clem watched them enviously, a loud growl rising from within the doctor’s green waistcoat. There was nothing like that where they were headed.

  Paris and her forts were hidden in the morning mist. The fields before the city were dotted with figures and carts, trailing around with little visible purpose. Besson tugged Clem’s sleeve, offering him a pencil to remind him who and what he was supposed to be. Gamely, Clem attempted to make an entry in the notebook, but his hand was not quite his own. His letters resembled those of a small child, huge and misshapen. Hempf looked over; he quickly turned the page.

  ‘The fabled franc-tireurs tried to get by us there,’ the major told him, pointing eastwards, ‘down by the river. Their abilities, we found, have been rather exaggerated. Come, I will show you.’

  They left the main roads, starting along a mean, rutted lane. Besson was hanging back a step or two; something was about to happen. Clem felt sick behind his amiable smile. Hempf was chatting away about the progress of the siege, how it couldn’t possibly go on for much longer now and the men were hoping that they would be home by the year’s end – and then he was groaning on the ground, his cap knocked off, writhing in the frozen mud. Besson crouched over him, a brick in his hand, striking him again at the top of his neck. There was a wet crunch; Hempf’s movements stopped abruptly.

  The aérostier took Clem’s arm and dragged him across a rubble-filled yard, out through a gate, towards the sloping bank of the Seine. Above was a raised section of railway, running parallel to the river. They passed underneath it, going to the waterside.

  ‘What – what did you do?’ Clem stammered. ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘He was a Prussian. My enemy.’

  ‘Yes. I know that. He just – seemed like a decent sort …’

  ‘Do not waste any more thought on it. You did well,’ Besson glanced around, ‘given the circumstances.’

  Clem was about to thank him when he slipped, flopping through leathery reeds into a bed of silt. It was soft as custard and not at all cold; its rich, rotten odour rushed up his nostrils as he floundered onto his back. He began to laugh.

  Shouts came from Choisy-le-Roi; the alarm was being raised. Major Hempf had been discovered.

  Besson’s hands hooked under his shoulders. ‘Come on, Pardy,’ the aérostier hissed as he started to pull. ‘Come on.’

  The Grand’s heavy glass doors had been replaced with canvas curtains, in order to assist the constant passage of stretchers. The lobby beyond, that luxurious lobby with its columns and glass dome and patterned marble, was a gaslit abattoir, glaringly bright after the dull boulevard; the screams, the pleading, the sound of bloody sawing, was past nightmares. Clem went directly to the stairs, Besson half a stride behind him.

  They reached the sixth floor and crossed the landing to Elizabeth’s suite. Clem paused to recover his breath. The narcotic glow imparted by the doctor’s solution was almost gone. Textures had changed; that which had been smooth and shiny was now coarse as a whetstone. Greyness was seeping into everything. Pain bloomed once more in the seat of his skull, gripping the stem of his brain and buzzing in his ears. His clothes, so comfortable that morning, were like ill-fitting sackcloth, encrusted with mud that reeked of the river.

  Besson was regarding him with concern. ‘Are you well?’ he asked. ‘Do you—’

  ‘Wait here, old man,’ Clem muttered. ‘I’ll be out again as soon as I know what’s what.’

  Elizabeth’s sitting room was dark. Only a single candle had been lit against the evening, standing on a round table between the two windows. His mother sat on one side of the tiny flame; and on the other was Jean-Jacques Allix, huge and still, dressed as usual in one of his spotless black suits. Their hands were linked, resting before the candle. Clem saw that Elizabeth had been weeping. He didn’t know whether she’d heard he was leaving in the Aphrodite, but she showed no surprise at his return. She sat up straight, attending to a loose curl. Without releasing Allix’s fingers, she turned a part of the way towards him, her face directed at the carpet.

  ‘Clement,’ she said in a voice three hundred years old, ‘your sister is dead.’

  IV

  Laure had got herself a small handcart from somewhere, of the sort used by flower-girls or lemonade sellers, upon which she’d mounted a cask of brandy. In a basket underneath were a dozen loaves of indigestible municipal-issue bread; God only knew how she’d managed to get her hands on so much of the stuff. It was a symbol, this cart – a demonstration of Laure’s commitment to the 197th. Hannah found it equally admirable and irritating. The wheels were a touch narrow, designed for short shunts along the Champs-Elysées rather than cross-city marches. The cart kept coming to jarring halts against even the lowest kerbstones; and then, no more than a hundred yards or so from the Porte de Charenton, it became firmly wedged in a drain grate. The battle-group, now part of a column of National Guardsmen several thousand strong, carried on into the earthworks of the Bois de Vincennes. Their vivandières were being left behind.

  ‘Here,’ said Hannah, going to the cart’s other side, ‘let me help.’

  Laure didn
’t look at her. ‘If I needed any damned help I’d ask someone else.’

  Hannah put her hands on her hips. ‘And who else is there, precisely? The battalion’s marching out the damned gate!’

  Laure fought with the cart for a second, but to no avail. She turned around. ‘Well, how about this fine gentleman?’ she cried, suddenly friendly. ‘How about it, colonel? Lend a girl those strong arms of yours, will you?’

  Chomet was walking towards them. He did not reply or smile. Unlike the majority of his men, the 197th’s colonel was completely sober; his wide face was ashen and his voice, when he spoke, was tissue-thin. He looked exactly like a man who three months ago had stood behind the counter of an apothecary’s shop – yet this morning somehow found himself going out to face the Prussian army.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, ‘but you must wait for us here, inside the wall. Word has just arrived – General Ducrot’s specific orders. A condition of the National Guard participating in the sortie. No women on the field of battle.’

  Laure slammed down the handles of her cart. ‘Now they say! Now they damned well say! Look at this here – all this bread! Do you think it dropped from a damned cloud? Do you, Chomet, you fat worm?’

  She’s overdoing it, Hannah thought; in truth she’s relieved. ‘What about our friends, colonel? We haven’t even wished them goodbye.’

  ‘It’s not my decision, Mademoiselle Pardy. There’s nothing I can do.’ Chomet started after his troops. ‘Be thankful. Believe me, it’s a real piece of luck.’

  This was no comfort. What point would there be to staying safe and well if Jean-Jacques was to receive another crippling injury, or to die? He was at the head of the National Guard column, dressed in black: the deadly Leopard of Montmartre. During the march he’d walked back to see how Hannah was faring. There had been a short conversation; an arrangement to meet at the shed later; the briefest touch of hands. That, she supposed, would have to serve as their farewell. She remembered the night in the windmill – the way he’d deflected her declaration of love. Jean-Jacques would hardly want an emotional leave-taking. Besides, he didn’t share Chomet’s apprehension about the coming battle. He’d told Hannah that the Prussian positions to the south-east were scattered, undermanned and uncoordinated; he’d patrolled around there extensively and was confident that a path could even be found between them, with a bit of good fortune. The fighting of which so much was being made would not be very severe.