Song of the Legions

by Michael Large

  Rzewuski and the bishop were talking in the Marble Room. They were sharing a fortifying glass of vodka beneath the far window. I peered cautiously around the door. There was a round table pushed to one side, and a stack of gilt chairs gathering dust. The old kings in the pictures glared down, as if deeply displeased with the two conspirators who skulked amongst the velvet-covered furniture.

  “Lord Potocki will be furious when he hears of this treachery!” Rzewuski said, gnashing his teeth. “He will ride here at the head of an army, to protect our ancient rights!”

  “This reckless King will ruin our country,” the Bishop agreed. “Our salvation can only come from Russia!”

  Well, this bishop was a real turncoat. Only moments before he had been congratulating the King, dousing him with Holy Water, and kissing his psalter.

  At this point we three burst in, falling over our own feet. We stared at them insolently. The Bishop put down his bottle of vodka and snatched up his mitre. Rzewuski glared back with contempt.

  “You think to frighten us, you young ponces?” he snarled. “Bishop Massalski and I shall veto this damned Constitution, if no one else has the balls to. My duty is as clear as my conscience. I am going to the voting chamber, and damned if any of you little shits will stop me.”

  I blocked their path.

  Rzewuski placed one hand on his sabre hilt.

  “Stand aside, peasant!” he roared, “I was killing Turks for Holy Russia when you were soiling your nappy and sucking your mother’s teats.”

  “My Lord,” I said angrily, “I would thank you not to mention my mother again.”

  My wrath burned like a powder fuse. All present saw it, save for Rzewuski.

  “F— you, boy,” Rzewuski spat in my face, “and f— your whore of a mother, too,” he added, for good measure. Then he hiked up his sword belt over his paunch and strode towards the door.

  I met him halfway and, without ceremony, struck him across his bald head with the butt of my gun. It was a gentle enough tap, though it knocked a few teeth from his jaw. The unfortunate senator collapsed to the floor with a crash. There he lay, groaning and crying murder and treason, blood pouring from his gaping mouth.

  My comrades stood open-mouthed and winced at the sight of this great crimson one laid low. Even they were shocked by my violence, and the alacrity with which I delivered it. Tanski whistled, impressed. I trained my gun next on the Bishop. “Your Grace, please administer the last rites to this fellow and to your Holy Self, while you’re at it. If you take one step towards this door, I shall blow out your brains!”

  The Bishop crossed himself, turned as pale as a plaster saint and prayed for deliverance. As the saying goes, the arse talks to the Bishop, but the Bishop just talks to himself!

  Thus the Constitution was passed without a veto. There were a few ‘abstentions’ though. Joy was unbounded, and all fears banished. The King proceeded to Saint John’s Church, across the square from the Wawel, to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady. There, the populace received him rapturously and acclaimed him to the rooftops. Our Holy Lord Brother, Bishop Massalski, was there again, with his ewer of holy water, anointing the crowd and the King, his loyalties swinging around like a weathervane in a storm.

  Suddenly we heard that blessed mazurka again, and young Sierawski was beating a drum, three or four simple notes, beating time to the steps of the dance. We danced in a circle around the column of old King Sigismund, up on his pillar, sword and cross in hand. From the slow elegant steps of the dance, the men gliding sidewards, and the women elegantly stamping their heels and clicking their fingers.

  Everyone was smiling, and Tanski leaned over a girl he had his arm around and said something dirty, and I found myself arm in arm with the girl from the Sejm. She smelled of apples and cinnamon, and she smiled at me, as we danced. We all seemed to float above the Wawel Square, a ring of laughing girls and soldiers, gentlemen and traitors, priests and philosophers, Jews and gentiles, magnates and madmen, over Warsaw, with poets in the cafés, and traitors in the Sejm – and our hearts soaring. We danced in that circle, where our past was full of failure and our future was full of suffering, but on that day we lit a torch to burn through the awful darkness that was to come.

  Bells rang across the city, as far away as dirty old Praga, the seamy suburb of fleshpots across the river. My comrades and I reflected that there were sure to be a few taverns that would welcome three young heroes fresh from the Sejm, who had struck a great blow for freedom this day, this day of Our Lady the Third of May.

  Such a day! We went to Neybertowa’s Coffee House, in Wiejska Street, being the nearest coffee house to the Sejm, and one of the grandest in the whole town. We stood a few rounds of strong black Polish coffee, which we all agreed was the best in the world. Then we had a few glasses of bison grass vodka. A good many toasts were drunk and a good many songs were sung. Joy-shots rang out and wisps of powder-smoke curled up into the heavens.

  Up above us the evil old man in the moon, Pan Twardowski, drooled and cackled, as he sent down his spider on its silver string, to hear our gossip, to stir poison in our vodka, whisper sedition in our ears, and weave webs of treachery in the shadows.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE FEAST OF OUR LADY, AND THE PODOLIAN POPE

  Cyprian Godebski, the poet, invited the three of us to dine at the salon of Madame L, his inamorata. I have obscured her name from this memoir, and you will see why later.

  Madame L was a woman of legendary and disgraceful hospitality. She was an heiress and a widow, he explained, with a fine estate and a good income, wildly rich, but more importantly, a staunch patriot. She was a passionate supporter of the Constitution. She held the rank of Castellan – that is, military governor of one of our cities in the east. Perhaps I should say military governess instead of governor.

  It was rare but not unknown to find a woman Castellan in the Republic, although it was unheard of in the rest of Europe. Her duties as Castellan were onerous. She organised supply trains, ordnance, hospitals, militias, fortresses, garrisons, and a thousand other things from latrines to spying. Accordingly, she had great power. She issued orders like a general, and could have her soldiers clapped in irons, or court-martialled, if they gave her cause.

  This formidable lady kept a large rambling mansion near the old city gatehouse. Her establishment was run like a French literary salon. It was a showy place of smoke and mirrors, intrigue and amours. Godebski explained that this most martial lady was very fond of the cavalry, and cavalrymen in particular, and that we would be made most welcome, and thus it proved.

  “When a guest enters the house, God enters also,” was her greeting, in the fine traditions of the nobility. She was a dark and handsome woman, gorgeously attired in Italian silks, her bodice picked out in pearls and sundry gemstones, her unruly hair piled up on her head in the fashion of the day. She was as sharp as a backsword, with sharp eyes, and a sharp tongue to match.

  We were all much taken with her and the splendour of her household. After living for four years in spartan barracks and dingy lodgings, it seemed that we had spent a whole day in palaces – first the Wawel Castle, and now the beguiling palace of Godebski’s pretty paramour.

  Godebski was twenty-six years old, which to me, at eighteen, made him as old as Methuselah. As we sat down to eat, I caught him eyeing his grey hairs in the gilt mirrors on the walls. The poet took a drink of mead and stared glumly at the ornate wooden ceiling of Madame L’s dining hall. He wondered aloud if the ceilings of her bedchamber were of the same intricate design.

  “Lamentably, I have failed to be admitted into that sweet sanctuary, to see for myself!” he admitted, with a great pang of regret. “I have laid siege to that pretty citadel for a long while now. I have courted her in poem, in song, with gifts, and with my esteemed company. I have pledged her my undying love, and all my worldly goods. Admittedly I have no great monetary fortune to speak of, and a few trifling debts, but am I not wealthy in talent, and rich in my reputation? And ye
t, despite all this, despite my passionate advances, my fusillades of flattery, my sorties of sonnets, all my attacks have been in vain. I have made no breach in her defences!”

  Madame L always had many good ladies at her house, which was excellent, and some bad ones also, which was even better. She presented Godebski with a beautiful gold pen and a walnut writing table, and similar gifts to the rest of us. All of these we lost, gave away, or broke, in our drunken stupor.

  Our fame – or notoriety – had spread far and wide in the shortest possible space of time. We drank copiously to that, and to the health of our fair hostess, and her fair company. We shrewdly imagined that it should dissipate quite as quickly, too, for a guest is like a fish, and stinks after three days. Thus ensconced, we caroused and raised Cain. We knew not night from day.

  Madame was certainly enamoured of the cavalry, for within some hours a young galloper, a lieutenant named Elias Tremo, came to call. With him was the faithful old warrior Jozef Wybicki, who I had already seen in the Sejm. Senator Wybicki and the lady embraced like old comrades, and they laughed and cried for joy.

  Godebski reddened with anger as Elias Tremo stooped to kiss the lady’s hand. Tremo grinned up at the lady through his cavalry moustaches. She did not smile with her lips, which were painted as red as our cavalry breeches, but her eyes flashed like spearpoints.

  “Gentlemen! Ladies!” she clapped her hands and servants brought us drinks, tray after tray, glass upon glass, bottle following bottle, “a toast! To The Glorious Third of May!”

  We all cheered and drank. Madame and this fine gentleman, their pale skin flushed with Spanish wine, began to talk nostalgically of the past, as the long dark evening shadows drew in around us.

  Jozef was a good few years older than any of us, even Madame, and had been through a good deal more. We asked him about the Thursday dinners at the Wawel Castle, of which everyone had heard, but which had not been held for these ten years now. Thus discoursing, we took a further drink or two.

  “The Thursday Dinners were held in the Marble Room,” Wybicki recalled. “It is a grand round room, the very same room where you lads persuaded Lord Rzewuski how to vote, by appealing to his conscience with oratory, to his intellect with rhetoric, and to his skull with a musket butt.”

  Although we laughed heartily at this, by now it had begun to dawn on me that I had not heard the last of that bald-headed beast Rzewuski.

  Jozef lit his pipe. “King Stanislaus-August would invite artists, scientists, poets, intellectuals and politicians to dinner on Thursdays, at the Wawel Castle. The wisest, the most learned, the most respected. I had the honour to be invited regularly – before the King and I had our small disagreement, of course,” he chuckled. “We talked for hours,” Jozef frowned slightly, “or, rather, come to think of it, the King talked for hours, and we listened to him blathering on.”

  I nodded, impatiently, in my cups. “Yes, yes, we know all that. What we want to know is, what did you have to eat?”

  “Ah! The dishes!” Jozef waxed. “There were no sickly sugarloaves, oily Russian caviar, or liver-rotting Parisian champagne. None of that expensive foreign rubbish.”

  “The Bullock probably couldn’t afford it,” I butted in, for our army pay was in arrears again. Jozef ignored this.

  “We ate simple country food,” Jozef told us, “beef in horseradish sauce, game, mushrooms, poppy seed cakes, fruit, nuts, and white cheese.”

  Young Lieutenant Tremo, who had been lounging on a couch, spoke to the rest of us, to impress Madame. He was plainly Godebski’s rival for her affections.

  “I was at those glorious dinners!” he confessed, boastfully.

  At this Godebski leaped up, as if stung. “Damned lies!” he roared, reaching for his sword. Swords were not put aside at dinner, or any other time, for that matter. Indeed we wore them to the privy.

  “To sword, Sir! A pipsqueak like you would not have dined with those great and learned lords!”

  Poor Cyprian Godebski, you will rightly gather, had never been invited to the Thursday dinners.

  The young officer stood his ground. “I demand your apology, comrade! In fact I attended many of the Thursday dinners as a young boy. Indeed, I helped prepare them.”

  “Calumny! Lies upon lies!” Godebski was in uproar.

  “Stay your hand!” Jozef intervened. “The lad speaks the truth, for this is young Lieutenant Elias Tremo, son of the father, Pawel Tremo, the King’s Chef, and the finest chef in all Europe, back in those days.”

  Godebski was not happy, but when Elias offered to prepare one of these fine dishes for us, so that we might dine in imitation of the King and his Thursday guests, the uproar subsided.

  “If you were at these dinners, Comrade Tremo,” Tanski put in slyly, “then you can settle a question of mine. Never mind the food – what about the women?”

  “Gentlemen,” said Elias Tremo, with great solemnity, “I can assure you, there were none. The Senator has told me that no ladies – and certainly no ‘women’, for there is a difference – were ever present at the Thursday dinners.”

  All eyes turned to Senator Jozef Wybicki. Madame arched her eyebrows wickedly.

  Flustered, the lawyer said hastily. “Um, ah, er, why, yes, the boy is absolutely right. None at all.”

  We all laughed, for when a lawyer denies a fact, one knows it for God’s own truth! Then Elias Tremo repaired to the kitchen, to supervise Madame L’s servants and cooks in preparing our dinner.

  “The lad has his feet well under the table,” I remarked to Godebski, “I fear you have a rival.”

  The poet bristled with rage. “Damn it! Damn that fickle woman!” he ranted.

  In a short while, the dinner was served, under the direction of Tremo, the son of the father. Verily, the apple did not fall far from the tree, and it was excellent. We commenced with our traditional Polish soup – borsch with uszka, which are small dumplings shaped like ears – followed by roast hazel grouse, larded with a delicate sauce made from onion and pork fat. This was followed in turn by mutton and vegetables.

  “At the Thursday dinners,” Jozef reminisced, “we drank excellent Spanish wines, Hungarian Tokay and Polish mead, much as we are enjoying now from our gracious hostess. The King quenched his thirst with spring water. He does not drink and neither does he smoke.”

  “A man who doesn’t drink or smoke, is good for nothing, as the proverb says,” I observed, drunkenly.

  “Indeed! Damn right! Damned Bullock,” Jozef agreed, drinking a small glass of vodka to aid his digestion and smoking his pipe. The vodka was chasing the wine around the table. Years before, Jozef had of course fallen out with the King and his mood soured as he remembered it. He grumbled over his dessert. It was plums – just as it always was at the Thursday Dinners.

  “The damned King always ate plums for dessert, plums, plums, always bloody plums, even in the dead of winter,” Jozef recollected, bitterly.

  “Why so many plums?” I asked.

  “Because the King is full of shit!” Jozef roared, laughing but still angry. “Who are you, anyway, you great big oaf?” he demanded, turning on me with suspicion.

  “Why, I am Angela Blumer’s son, Ignatius,” I replied. “My dear mother, God rest her soul, knew you.”

  He peered at me and then slowly began to smile.

  “By God! So you are!” he took off his spectacles and shook my hand, delighted.

  “Who is this old fool, Blumer? A friend of yours?” Tanski, bored, hissed at me from behind his hand.

  “Senator Jozef Wybicki here was a Confederate of Bar in the last war,” I told him. The others immediately fawned around him, impressed. He was no longer a drunken old fogey in a wig, but a warrior of legend.

  “You fought the Russians?” Sierawski said.

  “Indeed I did!” Jozef said, growing misty eyed, “and we lost!”

  We listened as the old warrior remembered his glory days.

  “It was in 1768 when the Russians invaded, on some prete
xt or other. The Bullock surrendered without firing a shot, the damned coward! It was a disgusting act of cowardly treachery. My comrades and I declared our Confederacy against him at Bar, and we fought on, for four years, against both the Bullock and his damned Russian mistress. Ha! That was one hell of a boundary dispute!” he cried, his eyes gleaming with nostalgia.

  “Bar, of course, is in Podolia,” he continued, “a good place to hide out. So there we hid, and from there we would ride out in sorties and raid the enemy. But I fear that even Podolia is lost to us now!”

  Young Tanski, who was drunk, took the offensive against Podolia and Podolians, both of which he thoroughly detested. “Esteemed Sir,” Tanski said loudly, so I could hear, “naught grows in the black earth of Podolia but weeds and stones. As for the Podolians themselves, they are a bastard race of dogheads, heretics, Jews, Tartars, traitors, sodomites, blackamoors, Cossacks and Irishmen. The loss of Podolia is no loss at all. The Austrians are welcome to it!”