Song of the Legions

by Michael Large

  “What about me?” said the cowardly sailor.

  “You were absolutely right, sir,” I said to him, with a wicked grin. “Raise the white flag, and lower the sails.”

  The Turk quailed, and ran off, hastening to raise the traitor flag, and save his skin. I gathered the men. My men.

  “Comrades!” I said, “Silence! No one must cheer, or shout, for such noises carry far across the water. Commanding that ship is Szymon Korczak, a Targowica man, and now a Captain in the Russian army. He has been sent to kill us. He will offer no quarter. Neither will we.”

  I took out my mother’s ring. I had nothing else. I showed them the rubies, the diamonds, the gold.

  “This ring is worth a hundred ducats. I will give it to the man who takes Szymon Korczak. Dead or alive.”

  Then the white flag snaked up the mast, and the men stared at me angrily. I held up a hand. “The white flag is a ruse. Otherwise they will turn their cannon on us, for they have four guns, and we have none. In a moment we will be boarded, and I will raise the red flag. Then, under our flag, our own dear flag, the old red and white, we will fight to the death.”

  The men grinned, and went about their business. I touched the ruby and diamond ring to my lips for luck.

  A roar of cannon, a shot across the bows. Roundshot churned the depths. I ordered us to stop and weigh anchor. I gripped my rosary under my shirt. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Had I miscalculated? We would find soon out.

  “Surrender or die!” came the cry.

  Szymon’s galley drew near. The man himself stood by a second cannon. He was swathed in a black cloak that flapped in the wind like a vulture’s wing. He held a lit cigar in hand, and with a wild, melodramatic gesture, put it to the touch-hole. The blast blew out a section of our rail, hurling wood splinters and debris in all directions, cutting a man in two. Then grappling hooks and lines flew through the air, like fishing lines. Pirates, rough handed Algerians, with burnished skins, and Russian marines in blue capes, swarmed across the decks of the pirate ship.

  “Surrender or die!” Szymon roared.

  “Will our lives be spared if we surrender?” I yelled back through the bullhorn.

  “They will,” he lied.

  “Have I your word of honour?” I asked, grinning at Birnbaum.

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Then we surrender!” I replied, “You have my word of honour, too!”

  Szymon looked sceptical, but his hired men relaxed, and stared at our white flag. Some fools even sheathed their weapons.

  “Prepare to be boarded!” came the shout. Our ships clashed together with a violent crash, and a great spray of water flew up from between them. Bearded figures with silk scarves around their faces, armed with scimitars, pikes, axes and cutlasses vaulted over the sides, their bodies casting demonic shadows on the water.

  “Now raise the red flag!” I called, and Birnbaum hauled up the colours. There, under the old red and white, my men drew heart. They met the pirates with a good volley, then fixed their bayonets and moved in for the kill. They were poor stuff indeed, these pirates. Although we were outnumbered, it was by the barest of margins. We made short work of them all, for their stock in trade was killing innocent sailors, and women and children. They were rapists and murderers, not soldiers. Rarely have I killed so many men in my life at one time, nor took such pleasure in it. After mere moments, the deck awash with their blood, the pirates were on the run.

  “Mercy!” said one of them, a young lad barely sixteen, falling to his knees, hands clasped in prayer.

  “God will have mercy, for I will not,” I replied, cleaving his head from his shoulders. Barely had I done so, than I turned on the next man. Brushing aside his feeble guard, I knocked his sword from his grasp, and dispatched him with my bloody sabre. Only the Russian marines, of whom there were but half a dozen, put up much of a fight, killing two of my men before they were butchered and bayoneted to death. Birnbaum lead the charge. He ran amok, blasting a group of fleeing scum with his blunderbuss, then swinging his scimitar wildly. Heads and limbs rolled across the decks. Since he had run out of men to kill on our ship, grabbing a rope, he swung over to the pirate vessel.

  The rope swung back across. I gazed for a moment down into the deep dark depths, running black with blood, churning with foam like gnashing teeth. For a moment my stomach heaved as the deck lurched beneath my feet. Then the rope was in my hand, and I was swinging through the void. Szymon, my quarry, was but yards away.

  As you know, I am a heavy man. As I swung, a line snapped, or a spar broke, with a crack like a knout. My momentum carried me across the water, and I landed heavily on deck. My ankle cracked. The wound in my leg seemed to tear open. But I had made it, with sword in hand, and a great length of rope in the other. I fell to the deck in a heap as Szymon ran for the other deck, Birnbaum hard on his heels. A Russian stepped between Birnbaum and his cowardly quarry, but I drew my pistol and shot him down from where I sat on my arse. We heard a splash from the other side of the boat. Birnbaum cursed, leaned over the side, and drew his pistol.

  All was quiet. It seemed as if everyone was dead except for our men, and Szymon. And indeed, they were. No quarter. We were true to our word. I limped over to the opposite side of the boat next to Birnbaum. Down below was a pathetic lifeboat, a coracle, a dinghy, with oars no longer than lances. We were a hundred miles from land. The dinghy was still tethered to the pirate ship by a rope, which Birnbaum was reeling in, like a fishing line. Szymon Korczak sat in it, desperately and pathetically pulling on the oars. I turned to Birnbaum.

  “This is yours, comrade,” I said, taking off my ring.

  “Nonsense. It was your mother’s,” Birnbaum replied, immediately returning it to me. A hundred ducats!

  Sitting in the dinghy, soaked and terrified, was the traitor Szymon. He had drawn a knife, and was attempting to cut through the rope.

  “Put up that knife, and fear thee not, Szymon.” I said. “He who swings cannot drown.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  TWO DEATHS, MILAN, 13 FEBRUARY 1798

  “So the war is over?” I said, aghast. We had discharged our mission, and handed the old flag over at headquarters. No one even said as much as thank you. I was given a receipt, and a boot up the arse. We sat in the barracks, penniless, unrewarded, and unremarked.

  We had ridden our old nags from Genoa to Milan. In Milan we discovered that we had missed the whole damned war with the Austrians. In October of the preceding year, 1797, Napoleon had signed the peace of Campo Formio. France was, damn it all, at peace with Austria, Prussia, and Russia. We cursed our ill-luck.

  In December, Bonaparte, as if to oblige us, started a new war. This time it was with the Pope, of all people. We missed the best of that, too, for by the time we arrived, Dabrowski’s men had stormed the Pope’s prison fortress at San Leo. Thereby he had broken the Pontiff’s earthly power, if not his spiritual influence.

  When we arrived in Milan everyone was drunk and happy, for it was nearly Christmas and we had all heard that the Tsarina had died, in carnal congress, copulating with a horse. It was the talk of all Europe, and an occasion of great rejoicing in all civilised lands.

  Birnbaum and I found a garret in Milan and every day petitioned headquarters for commissions. The weather in Italy was new to us. There we shivered through the blackbird days of January, and the short and accursed month of February, and waited for orders. Every day we watched as the legion grew. A trickle of men quickening to a flood.

  Both of us spoke Latin, which is the mother tongue of Italian, so we found the language easy enough. Birnbaum prevailed on the Jewish merchants of the local ghetto for charity. I did likewise with the Church, the local priest apparently ignorant of the Legion’s disagreement with his chief, the Vicar of Rome. So we made the best of it. We caulked up our draughty attic room and the leaking roof. We repaired our uniforms and weapons so that, despite our lowly status, we l
ooked like cavaliers.

  We received our zoldu regularly throughout. Dabrowski was a damn good provider, it had to be said. Regular pay was a novelty I had never known before, not even in the Bullock’s army. Even so, it was not much to live on. I was still a warrant officer and Birnbaum a private soldier.

  It would all have been easier had the Italians not insisted on living on lettuce leaves, like rabbits. Where was the meat? we wailed, as our landlady fed us soups clogged with greens, macaroni, and watered wine. She took a good few solidi for it, too. The meat fell off our bones and we stayed as lean as winter wolves.

  As for the girls, though, they were a delight. We glimpsed angels, but their men folk kept them tight behind doors. As we soon discovered, their chaperones were armed with daggers. Many a night we had to leap from a bedroom window or a balcony for our very lives, laughing furiously, pursued by some formidable old black-clad Italian babcia, with no teeth in her head but clutching a stiletto in her hand. By the Devil’s horns, the women of Constantinople’s seraglios were less tightly guarded! Our wealthy officers had no trouble making the acquaintance of high-born ladies, though, at the theatre, in the gaming houses, or in church. This gave us hope for the future.

  “Just you wait until we are Captains,” I told Birnbaum.

  “When hell freezes over, then,” he retorted.

  In short, we needed advancement, a regiment, and funds. March, the Italians say, is crazy. The weather changes from day to day and hour to hour. One day we sweated like pigs on the butcher’s block, the next, our hands were studded with chilblains. So we changed our tactics and swallowed our pride. I begged an old friend for help.

  “This is my only friend at headquarters, and our last hope,” I told Birnbaum. “If this doesn’t work, we will be back to Turkey to fight for the Sultan!”

  Thus we spent another stultifying day in suffocating corridors, waiting. Our boots shone like mirrors, our brass buttons gleamed like brilliant stars, and our hair glowed with powder and oil. We waited all day. By the time we were let in to see the General, we had wilted like winter straw.

  Before us sat General Jozef Wybicki – rebel, warrior, and judge. We had first met on my mother’s farm, when I was but a lad, and last seen each other on the Third of May, at Madame’s celebration dinner. His hair was white now, not grey, and his face was flushed red with the sun, and lined with deep creases.

  “General Wybicki, Sir!” we shouted, saluting, bowing, scraping and all but licking his boots!

  “We meet again, lad,” he said, shaking my hand. He sat in a dusty office, surrounded by overflowing piles of parchment wrapped in red ribbons, great heavy books of accounts, pots of ink and quill pens. “Move some of those papers out of the way and sit down, comrades. So much paper! I have to organise everything from the latrines to the Courts Martial,” he complained. “It wasn’t like this in the good old days,” he said to us sadly, looking at the bulging piles of paperwork, “Back then I was a fighting general, not a glorified clerk! I might as well be back in my law office in Warsaw. All I’m good for nowadays is jawing and paperwork. Ah, well, tempus fugit, I suppose,” he grumbled.

  Too old for fighting, Wybicki still worked tirelessly for our cause, organising the Legions. He was Dabrowski’s right-hand man and assistant, and he kept the wheels of our Legion turning as best he could. He had hundreds of things to do and organise. Amongst his many duties was handing out officers’ commissions. This was why we went to him.

  “Now then, what can I do for you lads?” Wybicki asked pleasantly.

  “General Wybicki, Sir! We humbly request a commission, and a regiment! We want to fight, Sir!” I toadied shamelessly. Birnbaum and I sat down, and leaned forward eagerly, like anxious schoolboys. “We have been kicking our heels in Milan for months, Sir!” I added.

  “My dear Blumer, there’s no need for all this “Sir” business, do call me Jozef!” Wybicki insisted, “we’ve known each other, what, twenty years now?” he took out a pipe, and offered it to us.

  “Aye,” I said, sensing an opening, “twenty years since you hid in my mother’s barn. And how long since we last met, on the Third of May?”

  “Good God, my boy!” he exclaimed, as we shared the pipe. “Almost seven years! Seven years next month since the Third of May! How time passes!” he exclaimed. Those hard years were writ on his face. On ours, too.

  “You’ve a fine record, Blumer,” Wybicki said. “Zielence, Dubienka, Markuszem, Raclawice, Wola, that damned Denisko business...”

  “Seven years is a damned long time to still be a warrant officer,” I reminded him.

  “Well, there are not many places, you know,” he vacillated, for he was still a lawyer, after all. “We have so many officers like you, exiles, and so few men to go around. Too many Tsars, not enough Cossacks! Five captains for every dragoon, as they say! Not that we have any cavalry yet – it’s all artillery and infantry. General Bonaparte started his career in the artillery, don’t you know?”

  “I’ll do anything, General. Put me in the grenadiers, or even the artillery,” I said quietly, “anything except the engineers, obviously. A gentleman must have some standards.”

  “Good God, no! Quite right too,” Wybicki agreed.

  I changed tack. “A lot of good officers are volunteering on ten per cent of their zoldu, and running here and there as gallopers. Let me do that, Sir, I implore you.”

  Wybicki shifted uneasily in his chair. I was losing him. “Have you heard the news?” the kindly Wybicki said, changing the subject. “The Bullock is dead.”

  “Good bloody riddance,” I snarled. “Damned traitor!”

  On 12 February 1798 the Bullock, the Tsarina’s former lover, and her prisoner, had died in St Petersburg, shortly after the Great Whore herself. He passed away without mourning. Nobody loves a traitor.

  “Is there any word of Pepi – I mean the Prince Poniatowski?” I asked. Wybicki shrugged. “The nephew follows the uncle. Living drunk and dissolute in exile, a typical idle princeling, the last I heard.”

  Pepi, years later, went on to redeem himself. Of course, we had no way of knowing that then. By God, that was a dark time! I was desperate now. In a moment Wybicki would usher us out, empty handed, and we would be back to our dreary purgatory in our dingy lodgings.

  “I have heard that the Commander is to be pardoned soon, and will join us,” I said, staking on one last turn of the cards, for I had been struck by an idea.

  “Ah!” Wybicki exclaimed, his face brightening up, “God grant us Kosciuszko!”

  “Indeed!” I said, “Did you know, Sir, that the Commander himself made me a Lieutenant of foot, during the Uprising, in Krakow, before Raclawice?” I suddenly remembered it, with a jolt of triumph. “If we are all in the infantry now, perhaps I might have that rank back, at least?”

  Of course, I had no papers to prove this, they had all been lost, but Wybicki took my word for it as a gentleman.

  “Why the Devil didn’t you say so!” Wybicki beamed. “Of course! If the Commander ordered it, then who am I to gainsay him? I shall write out the commission forthwith. I can give you a platoon, but you’ll have to find yourself a sergeant.”

  “There he is,” I said, quick as a flash, pointing at Birnbaum. Wybicki nodded and smiled and wrote it all out. He cared not a jot that Birnbaum was a Jew.

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant Blumer, Sergeant Birnbaum,” Wybicki said, shaking our hands. He offered us cigars, and lit them with a match. This was a new invention, and a marvel of the age. Fascinated, we watched him strike it. We sat back and puffed on the cigars until a fug of companionable smoke filled the room, and drank a small toast.

  “We were speaking of the Commander,” I said to Wybicki. “Are the rumours true?”

  “They are! Since the Tsarina’s death, and the Peace Treaty with the French,” Wybicki told me, “The new Tsar, Paul, has pardoned the Commander and given him parole. General Dabrowski hopes that the Commander will join us soon – he is talking to Bonaparte about i
t.”

  “Excellent news indeed!” we rejoiced. Falsely, as it turned out.

  “Tsar Paul has proved himself a wise, kind, and merciful ruler,” Wybicki went on. “He rarely executes anyone, and has never even ordered a pogrom,” he nodded at Birnbaum, who was as stunned as I was by this revelation.

  “Are you sure, Jozef?” I asked, wondering if the General had become senile. “This Paul sounds an unlikely Tsar to me,” I said dubiously. “I bet the Russians hate him, at least.”

  “Naturally the Russians hate him,” General Wybicki agreed. “They call him ‘Paul the Mad’, and are spoiling to murder him.” We shook our heads, bemused. Not long after that the Russians did indeed murder ‘Paul the Mad’ as a punishment for his singular failure to execute, torture, rape, imprison, massacre, or persecute anyone at all, which are all the things one expects of a normal Tsar.