Evil in a Mask rb-9

by Dennis Wheatley

  'I'm glad to have an old soldier with me. Who is our com­panion?'

  Another, younger voice came feebly out of the darkness, speaking French but with a German accent. 'I'm Hans Hoff­man, Colonel, a Private in the 2nd Nassau Regiment of Foot.'

  In the next few minutes Roger learned that the Sergeant had a shattered knee-cap and the Private a bullet wound in the thigh. Both were in considerable pain, but thought themselves lucky to have been saved from freezing to death. Roger did, too, and greatly as he disliked the idea of having become a prisoner of war, felt that he had been fortunate to be picked up by Prussians rather than Russians.

  A few minutes later a fourth body was bundled into the wagon. He turned out to be a French Corporal of Chasseurs. In one of Murat's charges, he had had the big toe of his right foot shot away and been thrown from his horse. He, too, was in considerable pain, and had no sooner settled himself than he began to mutter an unending flow of curses on his ill-for­tune. His name, they learned, was Francois Vitu and he came from Marseilles.

  Two of the bear-like figures who had rescued them clam­bered into the back of the wagon, then it set off. The journey seemed interminable and every jolt of the unwieldy vehicle caused the wounded men to give groans of pain.

  At last the pale light of dawn enabled them vaguely to see one another and, half an hour later, die wagon came to a halt. The four prisoners were unceremoniously pulled out of it and promptly collapsed in the snow.

  Looking round they saw that they were in a clearing of the forest, at one end of which there reared up a small, grim-looking castle. From both sides of it there ran out tall, thatched barns and stables. Roger was a little surprised not to find himself in the usual type of prisoner-of-war camp, but he supposed that the castle had been taken over for that purpose.

  Pulled and pushed, the wounded men were dragged not to the castle, but to one of the barns. In the centre of its earth floor there was a circular depression in which large, red-hot stones were glowing. At cither end of the barn, cattle were stall-v. cd. Above one end there was a loft stacked with bales of hay.

  At an order from the giant leader, one of his men threw an armful of branches on the glowing stones, and the new wood swiftly flared up. Grateful for the warmth it gave out, the four wounded men huddled round it.

  Two women then appeared. One was a big, coarse-featured blonde, with huge, jutting breasts; the other a wrinkled har­ridan. With them they brought basins of water and a supply of coarse bandages. Between them they washed and bound up the wounds of Roger and his companions. The giant's men then carried them one after the other up to the loft, broke open some bales of sweet-smelling hay, and laid them on couches of it.

  Roger was greatly puzzled. During the terrible battle, many others of Napoleon's troops must have been captured; but there were none here. And when, on entering the barn, the tall leader of their rescuers and his men had thrown open their voluminous furs, beneath them they wore no sort of uniform. Still wondering vaguely and with some apprehension about what the future held for him, he fell asleep.

  He, and those with him, did not wake until late in the after­noon. They were aroused by the big man and the fair woman with the huge breasts coming up the ladder to the loft.

  The man no longer wore furs, and was dressed in a kaftan. He was broad-shouldered as well as tall. His head was crowned by an unruly mop of flaxen hair, and he had a smooth, aggressive chin. Looking down on them, he gave a laugh, slapped the woman on the backside and said in his heavy German:

  'I am Baron Herman von Znamensk, and this is my wife Freda. She will look to your wounds, so that in time you will be able men again. That may take a few weeks; but no matter. By then either your army will be deep in the heart of Russia, or the Czar will have driven it back in confusion. Either way, it will be too distant for there to be any chance of your being rescued by one of its columns.'

  For a moment he paused, then, his steel-blue eyes flashing hatred, he snarled, 'You French swine and your self-styled Emperor have torn my country apart. Without cause or justi­fication you have descended like a swarm of locusts to devour our means of livelihood. Every head of cattle, every quintal of wheat has been stolen by you from my outlying farms. But the four of you shall pay me for that. Henceforth you are my serfs, and shall labour for the rest of your lives, under the whip of my overseer, making good the damage that your upstart Emperor has done me and mine.'

  An Appalling Future

  It was a sentence too terrible to contemplate. To have become a prisoner of war, however unfortunate, was one thing; to have become the chattel of this blond giant for an indefinite period quite another.

  For a moment Roger remained silent. To show angry re­sentment would, he knew, prove futile; so, in a quiet voice he began:

  'Herr Baron, I appreciate your feelings at the losses you have suffered during this campaign; but there is a better way to recoup them than by detaining us here to labour on your land. I am an officer, and...'

  'You were,' sneered the woman. 'But now you are no bet­ter than any other man and, when your ankle is mended, you shall plough and hoe for us.'

  'Gnadige Frau.' Roger forced a smile. 'I am not only an officer. I am an aide-de-camp, and the personal friend of the Emperor. I pray you, send word to him that I am here. I have no doubt at all that he will ransom me, and the three men you have taken prisoner with me, for a much greater sum than you could make from ten years of our labour.'

  The Baron gave a harsh laugh. 'Send a message to your bloody-minded, war-mongering Emperor? And what then? A squadron of Hussars would arrive here overnight, rape the women, drive off the cattle, hang me and burn the castle to the ground. Is it likely? No, my fine cock sparrow, you are staying here and when your ankle is mended we'll measure out the amount of turnip soup you are given each night in proportion to the sweat you have exuded during the day.'

  Obviously for the moment there was no more to be said.

  While the Baron looked on, Freda of the wobbling breasts redressed their wounds. As she finished with the last of them, one of the Baron's men came up the ladder with a big basin of the vegetable soup. When he had ladled it out into tin pannikins, all four of the prisoners ate of it ravenously des­pite its indifferent flavour.

  Looking on at them, the Baron smacked his man cheer­fully on the back and said with a smile, 'This is Kutzie, my overseer. You will obey him as you would myself, or it will be the worse for you.'

  Kutzie was a small, thickset man. He had an oafish grin which displayed a gap in his front teeth where two of them had been knocked out in a brawl. In his belt he carried a knout with a long leather thong. Drawing it, he playfully flicked each of the prisoners in turn. Roger felt the sting of the lash on his calf and could hardly suppress a cry. The Ser­geant took it stoically. Young Hans Hoffman let out a groan, Corporal Vitu responded with a spate of curses.

  The Baron and Baroness laughed heartily; then, accom­panied by Kutzie, they descended the ladder and made their way back to the castle.

  German was Hoffman's native tongue and, during the cam­paign, Fournier and Vitu had picked up enough of it to have got the gist of what the Baron had said. When their captors had disappeared, the Sergeant rumbled, 'May all the devils in hell take them. What are we to do, Colonel?'

  'Plan a way to escape,' replied Roger grimly.

  'It's all very well for Your High and Mightiness to say that,' sneered Vitu. 'Hopelessly lamed by our wounds as we are, how can we?'

  'Shut your trap!' bellowed the Sergeant. 'Or when we get back, I'll crime you for disrespect to an officer.'

  Temporarily Roger ignored the Corporal's insolence and said, 'We shall have to be patient; wait until our wounds are healed. Meanwhile our best policy will be to give these people no trouble and allow them to believe that we are resigned to our fate. It is getting dark again, and the more sleep we get, the sooner we'll recover. We'll talk things over in the morn­ing.'

  With no more said, but mostly gloomy thoughts, they wrig­gl
ed down into the hay and made themselves as comfortable as they could for the night.

  They all woke early. For the first time Roger took careful stock of his companions, and asked them about themselves.

  Sergeant Fournier was a typical old soldier, with one ear shot away and a thick, drooping moustache. As a ragged sans calotte he had been with Kellermann at Valmay, that most extraordinary turning point in history, where the French, merely by standing fast and firing their cannon, had broken the Austrian attack, caused consternation in their aged com­mander and led him to abandon the attempt to invade France. Fournier had then served under Lannes in the glorious cam­paign in Italy in '96, been transferred to the Army of the Rhine, distinguished himself in General Moreau's great victory at Hohenlinden, later been promoted to the Consular—now the Imperial—Guard and had since been present at all Napoleon's battles. He was forty-two, but his lined face made him look much older. He had been wounded seven times and been decorated with the Legion d'Honneur. He was a Revolution­ary of the old school, yet regarded the Emperor as his God, and his own Commander of the Imperial Guard, young Mar­shal Bessieres, with admiring awe. Roger knew that in him at least he had one man he could rely on.

  Hans Hoffman was a nonentity. He was one of the many thousands of teenagers from the Rhineland whom Napoleon had forced the minor sovereigns, who had perforce become his allies, to conscript and send to aid him in his campaign. Secretly Hoffman loathed the French and, given the oppor­tunity, would have deserted; but lacked the courage.

  Corporal Vitu was a very different type. The son of a law­yer who had been prominent in the early days of the Revolu­tion, he was a well-educated man in his late twenties; married and with one son. Even so, he had not been able to escape the call-up by which, now ahead of schedule, the Emperor was compelled to recruit fresh levies to make good the losses of his armies. Vitu had a thin, bitter mouth and a long nose. He was fluent, knowledgeable and aggressive; and Roger soon sized him up as a born trouble-maker.

  When they talked over their situation, Vitu said, 'I'll take a chance and attempt to escape when the time is ripe. But I'll not return to the Army.'

  'You will,' Fournier declared hotly. 'It's your duty, and I'll see to it that you do it.'

  'Duty be damned,' the Corporal declared. 'If it were to defend France, I'd fight again, as you did at Jemappes and Wattignies. But here, in this outlandish place, why the hell should I?'

  'Them Prussians would be across the Rhine again if we hadn't given them a licking at Jena; and the Russians with them. Only a fool would rather wait till he had to fight battles in his own country, instead of in the enemy's.'

  'Nonsense! Neither of them would have attacked us. What had they to gain by going to war? Nothing! Not since '99 has France been in the least danger. We have been the victims of Bonaparte's crazy ambitions ever since. He's dragged us from our homes to march, starve and fight all over Europe, solely for his own glory, and I've had enough of it.'

  Roger knew that the Corporal was expressing the views of a great part of the rank and file of the Army; but, as a senior officer, he could not let such remarks pass, so he said, 'That's quite enough, Corporal. Prussia and Russia are both mon­archies. They would impose a King on us again if they could. If we are to retain our liberties, they have got to be defeated.'

  'Liberties!' sneered Vitu. 'You must have been asleep for the past ten years, Colonel. The days of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" are as far behind us as the Dark Ages. Every law the Convention made has been annulled or altered, and the new Constitution of the Year XII, that Bonaparte gave us soon after he crowned himself in Notre Dame, has turned us into a race of slaves. As for Equality, if the men who won it for us in '93 could sec things as they are now, they'd turn in their graves. The people's representative has made himself an Emperor and his brothers Kings. His hangers-on are grand dignitaries, Princes, Dukes and the like. They doll them­selves up in gold braid, jewels and feathers, cat off the fat of the land, and get themselves fortunes by looting every country they invade; while we poor devils are paid only a few francs a day and driven to risk our lives so that they can further en­rich themselves.'

  'You've got something there,' the Sergeant acknowledged. 'Nevertheless, I'm for the Emperor body and soul. He knows what's best for France, and never lets his men down.'

  'All the same,' young Hoffman put in, 'I don't think it's fair that he should force men from other countries to fight his battles. Where I come from we had no quarrel with any­one; neither had the Dutch, the Italians and the Bavarians, yet there are thousands of us here who have been marching and fighting for years, when we might have been working happily in our farms or vineyards, with a good wife and bring­ing up a family.'

  'Yes, that's hard luck,' Roger agreed. 'But remember, France has liberated you from the old feudal system by which all but your nobility were virtually chattels of your hereditary Princes. France has paid dearly for that in the loss, for over fifteen years, of a great part of her young manpower. To make good these losses, the Emperor has no alternative but to draw upon his allies.'

  'That was fair enough in the old days,' Vitu argued. 'Then we needed every man we could get to fight in Italy and on the Moselle. But that is so no longer. What has the Rhineland or the Netherlands to gain by helping to conquer Poland? And what a campaign it's been! Staggering about in the mud, our uniforms worn to tatters, losing our way in blizzards. It's all very well for you, Colonel, and the rest of the gilded staff. You billet yourselves in the best houses in the towns, keep for yourselves the pick of every convoy of food and wine that comes up from the rear, attend splendid balls, then play chase me round the bed-posts with all the prettiest women. But meantime we have to act like fiends to the wretched peasants to get enough food to stop our bellies from rumbling and sleep in barns so cold that it is not unusual to find that by morning some of our comrades have frozen to death.'

  Roger knew all this to be true, but he also knew that his best hope of escape lay in having his three companions will­ingly accept his leadership; so he tactfully agreed that the Army had recently had a terribly hard time, although he maintained that was no fault of the Emperor's, but due to the exceptionally bleak and sparsely-populated country over which they were fighting.

  During the days that followed, the unlovely Baroness Freda came regularly to dress their wounds, and Kutzie twice a day with a big bowl of stew, in which there were pieces of meat that, from its sweetish flavour, Roger guessed to be horse­flesh. As the intense cold would have prevented the dead animals from putrefying, he had little doubt that the peasants for miles round, and the survivors of whichever army had kept the field, were gorging themselves upon it.

  On their third day in the loft, it was found that young Hoff­man's thigh wound had become gangrenous. No surgeon be­ing available, nothing could be done about it. For some hours he babbled deliriously in German and, on the fourth day, died.

  For most of the time while their wounds were healing, they talked of the campaigns in which they had fought, and the Marshals under whom they had served. All of them admired Lannes, Ney and Augereau, who invariably led their troops into battle in full uniform, their chests blazing with stars and decorations.

  Lannes was unquestionably the finest assault leader of the Army. He had been wounded a dozen times, yet, given a for­tress to capture, waving his sword he was still the first man up a scaling ladder on to the enemy ramparts.

  The red-headed Ney was not only the most capable tac­tician, but had no ambition other than to win glory and, to achieve it, he led every major attack in person.

  Augereau, the tall, unscrupulous gamin raised from the gut­ter by the Revolution, and a duellist whom no man any longer dared challenge, was a law unto himself, and led a corps that adored him. He and Lannes were still dyed-in-the-wood Re­volutionists. Their language was foul, they took scant pains to conceal their disapproval of Bonaparte's having made him­self as Emperor; yet, as leaders of troops, they were too valu­able for him to
dispense with.

  About the tall Gascon, Bernadotte, who refused to comply with the new fashion and still wore his dark hair long, opinion was divided. He was the only senior General who had refused to support Bonaparte at the time of the coup d'etat. And, from the days of the Italian campaign tbey had heartily disliked each other. In the present campaign he had several times been tardy in bringing his corps into action; but he was unquestion­ably a very able soldier, and he was greatly beloved by both his officers and men for the care he took of them.

  For Davoust neither Fournier nor Vitu had a good word to say. He was a cold, hard man, and the harshest disciplin­arian in the Army. His one pleasure, when opportunity offered, was waltzing; for the rest of the time he employed himself hanging suspected spies and dealing out brutal punishments to anyone, particularly senior officers, who had in any way contravened his regulations.

  For a short period Roger had suffered at Davoust's hands; so had personal cause to dislike him. Even so, he respected and admired this most unpopular of the Marshals. However competent and fanatically brave the others might be, Roger had come to the conclusion that the only advantage they had over the Austrian and Prussian Generals they had defeated was their youth and vigour. Davoust had proved an excep­tion. Not only was he utterly loyal to the Emperor, but he had made an exhaustive study of Napoleon's new methods of waging war, absorbed and applied them.

  The Emperor, ever jealous of his subordinates' triumphs, had, in his despatch to Paris, written off Auersuldt as merely a flanking operation during the battle of Jena. But Roger knew the facts. Although completely isolated, Davoust, by brilliant handling of his corps, had defeated one half of the Prussian Army. And he had since further demonstrated his great abilities as an administrator and a soldier.

  About the flamboyant Murat, Fournier and Vitu agreed. The uniforms that the recently created Grand Duke of Berg designed for himself might be outre in the extreme but, smoth­ered in gold braid and with tall plumes waving from his head, he never hesitated to lead his hordes of horsemen against either massed infantry or concentrated batteries of cannon. He had been wounded on several occasions, but never seriously enough not to press home charges that had led many times to Napol­eon's victories.