He lowered the linstock, lit the charge and the cannon fired with a roar, followed by the fourth cannon and then the rest at matching intervals, while those that had already been fired were hastily reloaded in a cloud of smoke.
hadn't a name yet. Everyone had been imagining it, fearing it or contemplating it for a week, but only now had it begun in earnest.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, the inhabitants of Vienna heard the rumble of the cannonade. The most inquisitive rushed, en masse, to the city's vantage points to witness the spectacle. They perched on roofs, steeples and the ramparts' medieval crenellations, quarrelling over the best seats as if they were at the theatre. Accompanied by his German doctor, Carino - who had given in to him by saying it wouldn't do any harm to take some air - and despite shooting pains, Henri Beyle had installed himself on top of a bastion from where he could see the Danube's meandering progress and the vast green plain. He had been dragged here by the Krauss sisters and, by a stroke of good fortune, the infuriating M. Staps had not tagged along. Far away on the Marchfeld, the battalions on the march looked as harmless as miniature replicas, and the smoke from the cannon hung in the air like balls of cotton. Henri felt as if he was in a stage box, and it made him uncomfortable. There was little delight to be had from the flames rising up
from Aspern's bombarded houses. Anna was muffled in a large Egyptian shawl, as if it was cold, and she trembled slightly, her lips pinched. She undoubtedly foresaw the worst for Louis-Francois in that distant melee, but Henri, without any jealousy, simply admired the image of helpless grief she presented.
A spectacle-maker from the old town was renting out spyglasses and, with frequent glances at his watch, zealously checking that no one overran their allotted time. Using Dr Carino as an interpreter, Henri asked for one, but the fellow had been cleaned out and he replied that that fat gentleman, there, on the left, his time would soon be up; it only cost two florins, a pittance for such a high-quality performance, they'd not see the like of it again in a hurry. When Henri's turn eventually came, he pointed the spyglass towards Aspern, where a barn was in flames. A pillar of black smoke rose into the air, the house next to it was catching fire, the roof was about to collapse, but who was underneath? He turned towards the bridge where men the size of ants were scurrying back and forth. A rumour was going around, which Henri did not believe, that the Emperor had breached the large pontoon bridge to prevent a retreat and compel his soldiers to keep fighting until they were victorious. Anna stretched out her hand with a sad smile; Henri gave her his spyglass and she peered through it anxiously, but at that distance, even with such an instrument, one could only make out general movements — nothing specific, and certainly not individual faces or even familiar silhouettes. The hirer protested. His spyglasses were not for the use of more than one person at a time, they should pay an extra two florins. When Dr Carino translated this complaint for Henri, the latter leaned for-
ward, until he was face-to-face with the tradesman, and bellowed, Wow,' making the man flinch. At that moment a female voice called out, 'Henri!'
He swore through his teeth. It was Valentina. She had come to show herself on the ramparts, with the troupe of actors who were rehearsing for their performance, in the Viennese manner, of Moliere's Don Juan. They were all very elegant, the girls in cotton cambric coats, the boys in tight-fitting tailcoats and plush knee-breeches tucked into yellow top-boots. They had brought their theatre glasses and were commenting on , which did not give them a great deal of satisfaction. It was too far away for their taste. They referred to Count Waltron, a play with elaborate stage machinery, crowds of extras in costume and cavalry charges that thundered within a hair's breadth of the audience.
'Tell your friends that they can get nearer to the cannonballs, if they wish,' Henri said to Valentina.
'As charming as ever!' she said, taking offence.
'Down below, they'll see real dead, real blood, and who knows, if they're lucky enough, a charred beam might fall on their heads.'
'That's not funny, Henri!'
'No, it's not funny, you're right, because there's no reason for it to be.'
He turned baclc to the edge of the bastion where Anna had been standing anxiously, but, as Dr Carino explained, she had left with her sisters. 'And you would do well to follow their example, my poor friend. If you could see yourself . . . You've got a bad fever, I'd advise you to go back to your bed and drink some broth.' Henri left without saying goodbye to Valentina, whose friends were still
, Ram baud
holding forth on the merits of the fires burning in Aspern. They found them less realistic than the storm in The Magic Flute which they had seen at the great, and celebrated, Schikaneder open-air theatre.
Massena's cannonade had played havoc with the Austrians' ranks, but after a moment of dangerous confusion and a brief withdrawal, their artillery had gone into action. A wooden granary had gone up in flames and then, under the barrage of two hundred guns, roofs had collapsed and fires broken out all over the village which there was neither the time nor the means to put out. The first casualties had burnt like torches, desperately rolling over and over in the sand. The voltigeurs were some way off, covering the village's left flank, but they felt the heat of the inferno; sparks flew which they slapped out with their coat sleeves and a light wind blew the thick black smoke at them which stuck in their throats. Private Rondelet spat on the ground and joked half-heartedly, 'It's hardly started and we're already cooked/
Paradis grimaced as he fingered the hammer of his musket. Molitor's division hadn't changed position and after several exchanges of fire in which no one had been hurt, having nothing else to do the men had broken ranks. Their captain sheathed his sword and took out a pair of pistols from under the tails of his tunic. Sergeant-Major Roussillon calmly rallied the company. 'Come on, boys, we're going to clear the ground! Fan out! We re going on the attack!'
'What are we attacking?' Paradis had the temerity to ask.
'The Austrian inlantry is concentrating on Aspern. We have to attack them from the rear,' explained the captain.
Wrapped in thought, the officer loaded his pistols and strode forward through the grass. Three thousand men spread out over the fields and the hollows, and climbed away trom the Danube, on their guard and in some semblance of order. But the crackling of the fires hard by, the roar ot the cannon and the splintering roof Irames made it impossible to hear the squadron ot Austrian hussars who burst out at a brisk trot on their flank. The hussars bore down on them, yelling, their sabres outstretched at arm s length, the curved edge pointing at the sky to make it easier to drive downwards and skewer the infantrymen to the ground.
The earth vibrated under the stampede and a trumpet sounded, merging with the cries ot the hussars. Caught by surprise, Paradis and his comrades half-turned and instinctively levelled their muskets. With both arms held straight out in front ot him, the captain emptied his pistols, threw them to the ground and gripped his sabre. Then the voltigeurs fired at neck height, without taking aim and without waiting for orders. In the rolling horde coming to crush them, Paradis saw a horse rear; the rider was thrown under the hooves of the next horse and knocked it off balance. Another Austrian took a bullet in the forehead but his mount, carriecf forward by the impetus, kept on galloping with the trooper still in the saddle, facing backwards. Paradis drove the butt ot his gun into a mound of loose earth and gripped it with both hands, dropping his shoulders and head and tensing his body as if he was hunching over a lance; he felt his comrades shoulder to shoulder with him, so that together thev formed a harrow.
He closed his eyes. The shock came immediately. The leading horses were torn to pieces on the bayonets but they opened a way and Paradis, curled up in a ball on the grass and knocked half-senseless, his arms bruised, felt a hot, thick liquid sticking to his fingers. He must have been wounded. He pushed himself up and looked at the melee of voltigeurs and hussars around him. He shook his neighbour, then turned him onto his back; his eye
s had rolled up into their sockets. Behind him a disembowelled horse was kicking in pain and banging its hooves together; its stomach was open and intestines spilled onto the ground. On a battlefield, Paradis said to himself, there isn't a damn thing that makes any sense. Am I dead? What about this blood? No, it's not mine. Is it the horse's? Or my neighbour's whose name I can't even remember? Tsst!'
Paradis saw Rondelet lying flat on his stomach, winking at him.
'Are you hurt?' he asked him.
'No, but I can't go through that again. I'm playing dead: it's safest.'
'Watch out!'
An Austrian, who had been thrown from his horse, was coming towards them, limping. He'd heard Rondelet talking and, realizing that he was shamming, had raised his sabre. Alerted by his friend, Rondelet rolled onto his side without waiting for an explanation and Paradis threw a handful of earth in the hussar's eyes; blinded, the latter stumbled and started trying to slash them, windmilling his arms dangerously, until Sergeant-Major Roussillon, who had picked up a bayonet, drove it into his back with a hard thrust.
'Wounded or not, on your feet!' the Sergeant-Major commanded. 'They're going to come back.'
'Have they left, then 2 ' sighed Rondelet. The Sergeant-Major seized him by the fleshy part of the arm and pulled him to his feet. 'You didn't even get a hoof in the face. What about you?'
'It's blood, that's for sure,' Paradis answered, 'but I don't know whose.'
'Regroup behind the sunken lane, at the double!'
Those who by some miracle had survived, stood up, dazed and unsteady on their feet.
'And pick up the cartridge pouches,' Sergeant-Major Roussillon harangued them, 'musn't waste the cartridges.'
At the other end of the field the hussars in their green uniforms were re-forming for a fresh attack. The two voltigeurs obeyed immediately, without looking too closely at the real corpses.
After the fourth murderous cavalry charge, General Molitor decided on a retreat towards the village where he thought they'd find more protection. Sword in hand, he was steadying his terrified horse to organize a withdrawal just as a further assault, the fifth, dashed itself against the sunken lane. Thinking they were hurdling a gentle rise, the hussars crashed into the lane as if into a ravine: they broke their necks, and ended up either bayoneted or with their brains blown out at point-blank range. The voltigeurs gave ground but they took with them a mass of kit they'd collected from the dead; one had a carbine under his arm and another slung over his shoulder, another had picked up a black leather cross-belt into which he had slid the bare
blade of a sabre; Paradis, his chest crisscrossed with cartridge pouches, had put on an Austrian's red shako. They pulled back towards the outlying houses of Aspern, stepping over the great brown chargers, which lay whinnying where they had fallen, dying slowly, but there was no question of putting them out of agony — the cartridges were too precious and had to be saved for men, ideally aimed at the head and the stomach.
By a quirk of perception, the fire was less spectacular close to. Most of the houses on the high street, along which the herd of soldiers were advancing, were practically intact, because Baron Hiller's cannon eventually had fallen silent and the flames blazing violently a while before were now dying down for lack of fuel. All around, men were trying to put out the fires by throwing earth on them. Ruined, blackened beams smoked and cracked, sometimes falling to the ground in great sections and raising clouds of ash. Suffocated by the belching smoke, voltigeurs were tearing strips off their shirts and clamping them over their faces. The heat of the embers was becoming unbearable.
On the immense terrace in front of Aspern's church, gunpowder was adding to the thick black smog of the fires, since the artillerymen, without being able to see a thing through the dense smoke, were still firing. With blackened faces and dry lips, they picked up the enemy's cannonballs to fire them back at their lines. The square bell tower of the church had been blown up by a shell and, as it fell, the bronze bell had smashed the stairwell. Wounded soldiers, who had been kept under cover in a shed spared by the bombardment, crowded onto the platform of a wagon. They were going to be evacuated to the bridgehead on the
island of Lobau, where Dr Percy was setting up his first ambulance. Legs or arms bandaged in strips of uniform, they groaned, limping or crawling along like devils, and the least hurt carried the most seriously wounded in their greatcoats.
Massena was standing in the church square. With the priest's stole wrapped round his neck like a scarf, he was holding a loaded musket and bellowing orders in a hoarse voice, 'Two cannon in enfilade in the second street!'
As the artillerymen limbered up the guns, Molitor approached the marshal, leading his horse by the bridle.
'Many dead, General?'
'A hundred, two hundred, Your Grace - perhaps more.' 'Wounded?'
'At least as many, I think.'
'Around me,' said Massena, 'the rest of your division will have suffered similar losses. And there's another thing . . .'
The marshal pushed Molitor towards Aspern's second main street in order to show him, through a haze of fog, the yellow flags emblazoned with black eagles that were three hundred metres away.
'You're coming in at one end of the village, Molitor, and the Austrians at the other. I can hold them with cannon, but we're going to run out of powder soon. Gather together your freshest men and let them have it!'
'Even the freshest are not that fresh, Your Grace.'
'Molitor, you've beaten the Tyrolese, the Russians, even the Archduke himself at Caldiero! All I'm asking is that you do the same again.'
'My voltigeurs are very young, they're afraid, they are
,
not accustomed to war as we are, nor do they feel the same contempt.'
'Because they haven't seen enough dead! Or because they think too much!'
'This is not really the place to lecture them/
'True, General. Give them wine! Get those whipper-snappers drunk and show them the regimental colours!'
Colonel Lejeune came charging into the square and made his horse rear in front ot Massena. "Your Grace, His Majesty requests you to stand firm until nightfall/
'I need gunpowder/
'Impossible. The large bridge will not be passable until this evening.'
'Well, then, we'll fight with batons!'
Massena carelessly turned his back on the colonel and picked up the thread of his interrupted conversation with Molitor.
'Wine, General. The nave is full of it. I had it unloaded trom those commissariat wagons which are evacuating our wounded.'
Lejeune was already galloping back to Essling and the Emperor, over terrain crisscrossed with hedges and fences, by the time the compulsory drinking bout got underway. The enemy shells had so far overlooked the root of the church and about a hundred stout barrels were stacked up inside, which Molitor ordered to be rolled out under the elms. With the heat of that particular May, which was doubled by that of the burning ruins, and the clouds of smoke drying out their throats, the appearance of the casks caused a stampede. Approximately two thousand exhausted voltigeurs barged forward to have their metal mess tins filled to the brim, drained them in one, as if they were
quenching their thirst, and then went back for more. Whilst not transforming boys who wanted to escape death more than they wanted to kill into staunch warriors, the wine did make them less aware ot their situation and better able to confront it. Drunk, or at least with a spring in their step, they encouraged each other by mocking the Austri-ans, whom Massena kept on cannonading to keep at a distance. Every explosion provoked crude or vengeful rejoinders and when their morale had revived. Molitor lined the voltigeurs up in something resembling ranks and brandished the tricoloured flag on which the name of the regiment was embroidered in yellow. They set off after him, boldy marching towards Baron Hiller's intantrv. which had appeared at the other end ot the High Street. After coming under an opening round ot tire and seeing some ot his comrades fall to the grou
nd, whom he blamed tor their bad luck. Private Paradis, as drunk as the rest ot them, fired straight ahead. Then, on a command, his bayonet levelled at stomach height, he started running to break through the crowd ot white uniforms, which looked slightly blurred.
The Emperor, on horseback beside Lannes, was waiting in front of Essling on the edge of the plain, surrounded by grenadiers in the 1 blue uniforms and tur caps of the 24th Light Infantry Regiment. 'Well?' he asked Lejeune.
'The Duke of Rivoli has sworn that he will hold his ground.'
'Then he will hold it.'
The Emperor bent his head, a disgruntled look on his
face. He was paying little attention to the Austrian cannon, which were now pouring the same barrage of fire into Essling as Aspern, but a roundshot came and struck the haunch of his horse; with a whinny it shook its mane and tell to the ground, taking its rider with it. Lannes and Lejeune leapt out of the saddle; officers helped the Emperor to his feet, while Roustan, the Mameluke, picked up his hat.
'It's nothing,' the Emperor said, brushing his riding coat with his hands, but they all remembered the recent incident at Ratisbon, when a Tyrolese skirmisher's bullet had hit him in the heel. He had had to sit on a drum and have his wound dressed before he was able to remount.
A general in a hat covered with plumes threw his sword onto the grass and shouted, 'Down arms it the Emperor does not retire!"
'It you do not leave here,' another yelled, 'I will have my men remove you!'
'A cavalloF said Napoleon, putting his hat back on.
As his Mamelukes finished off the wounded horse with their daggers, Caulaincourt led another forward which Lannes helped the Emperor to mount. Berthier, who hadn't moved, asked Lejeune to accompany His Majesty to the island and devise a lookout post trom which he could survev operations without being exposed. Surrounded by an escort and in absolute silence, the Emperor rode at a jog-trot back through Essling and a large, thick wood which lay between the village and the Danube. The troop followed the river as far as the little bridge, which they went over at a walk, an equerry holding the Emperor's horse by the bridle for the short crossing. Once on Lobau, the latter flew into a rage. He insulted Caulaincourt in
The Battle Page 10
