HS02 - Days of Atonement (15 page)

‘But I have been travelling for two days!’ I protested, attempting without success to keep a whining note of exasperation out of my voice. ‘Inform him of my arrival at once. I bring important news regarding the French. I have a letter . . .’

‘I’ll give it to him,’ he said, taking it from my hand.

‘I am a magistrate on official business. I represent the law in Prussia.’

‘There is only one law here,’ he replied without a trace of humour. ‘General Katowice sits in judgement from eight in the morning, seven days a week. I’ll tell him what you said, and put you on his agenda for tomorrow.’

There was something final and forbidding in his manner.

‘Where am I to sleep?’ I asked, as the reality of the situation dawned on me.

‘You’ve been snug inside that Brandenburger chariot for two days,’ the captain rejoined. ‘Another night won’t do you much harm, I think.’

For a moment I was tempted to sound the name of von Schill in support of my case, but I did not. Could I present myself in Kamenetz as a magistrate, then back up the claim with the name of a murderer, albeit a patriotic one?

‘You can drive inside the fortress, if you prefer. But shift your vehicle into that corner over there, and keep it out of the way. The garrison wakes at dawn. Goodnight to you, Herr Magistrate.’

With another perfectly executed salute, he spun on his heels and marched away.

All I could do was admire the fine cut of his coat, the perfectly aligned red folds in the tail, the sparkling silver of his spurs and scabbard.

Then I had to break the news to coachman Eis.

I was under an obligation to invite him to shelter inside the carriage on the leather bench across from my own. As I tried to conquer my shivering, his snoring began. Louder than the ‘Military Symphony’ of Papa Franz, it would persist throughout the night.

 11 

A
SCREECH SPLIT
the early morning silence.

I took it for the cry of a bird. One of those large, ugly gulls that seek refuge in Lotingen when the weather on the coast is particularly rough. An instant later, it was followed by torrential rain.

I pushed the carriage blanket from my face and opened my eyes. The light was purple. In an attempt to keep out the cold, I had pulled the plumcoloured curtains of the coach as tight as I could. The lanterns set at intervals around the parade ground of the fortress would hardly have disturbed the sleep of a man as tired as I had been.

That bird squawked out again, and the rain ceased instantly.

As slumber tiptoed from my mind, I heard what I now recognised to be a human voice. It was angrier, sharper, more penetrating than any voice that I had ever heard. It grated on my ears, screaming out a rapid sequence of words—
Left! Right! One! Two! Atten-tion!
And each order immediately prompted the disciplined pounding of feet, which seemed like a heavy downpour of rain.

I drew back the curtains, then struggled to lever up the window sash. A thick coating of ice had formed on the glass, both inside and out. The sky was a sickly leaden grey which promised nothing good. But as I looked out over Kamenetz parade ground, I saw a sight that promised far worse: Crime was marching up and down the parade ground with all the energy that a Prussian drill sergeant could bring to the event.

I quickly looked the other way.

No Prussian could ignore the consequences of Jena. One minute, subjects of our God-given sovereign, obedient to the laws and religion of his land; the next, we’d been swallowed up by an empire of atheists. After Jena, we had no Rights, no God, no King to whom we might appeal for Justice. Our legal system was swept aside, as each man scrambled to save the little that he had. Anarchy prevailed. The Treaty of Tilsit brought hostilities to an end: our king appealed to Paris for immediate implementation of the
Napoleonic Codes. I was a Prussian magistrate; those Codes should have told me what to do if one of my fellow countrymen was accused of a crime. But I had never held a copy in my hand. What was I to do? I did what I had always done. I applied the time-honoured laws of Prussia.

I sat inside the carriage, listening, wondering what to do.

When the sergeant yelled a command—to start marching, to turn left, or wheel right at the double, to present arms, or shoulder them—I heard what I took to be a well-drilled squadron of men obey at an instant.

I realised then what Count Dittersdorf had been so concerned about. No Frenchman must ever enter the fortress and see what was going on. Those troops were, without a doubt, a well-trained body of men.

Men?

With the exception of the sergeant, there was not one soldier on the parade ground who was over fifteen years of age. Marshal Lannes had ordered the Prussian standing army to be reduced in size. Soldiers were being sent home without a pension to beg for their bread, and the economy was in tatters as a result. No more Prussian troops were to be trained, the French had ordained.

But General Juri Katowice was training them.

I drew a deep, thoughtful breath.

Was any law being broken?

No
man
was being drilled in the arts of war.

Nor were these strutting boys a ‘body of
men
’, in the way that the distinctive uniform and the insignia generally identified the members of a specific regiment. Each one was dressed today as he had been dressed the day before. There must have been two hundred children out on the parade square, some wearing fine boots and well-cut jackets, others in clogs and hand-me-down rags.

Those little boys had been moulded into men-at-arms . . .

Again, the word
men
caused me to pause. Around his neck, each child wore a bright red ribbon. I myself had worn a red ribbon. Every male child in Prussia had worn one. And proudly so. Anyone who wore one was old enough to be trained in the local militia. That ribbon implied that he was ready and willing to fight and die for the Prussian fatherland. Two hundred boys were being put through their ‘traditional’ paces, and I could not fail to be impressed by the ability they displayed. Especially when the fortress bell rang seven o’clock.

They were called to attention, and formed smartly into ranks which were four rows deep. Then, the double gate at the farthest end of the parade ground swung open. Positioned as I was in the coach, I seemed to be sitting in the grandstand. A trill of shrill notes were blown by a cornet, a drumroll
exploded in a thunderous cascade, and a group of officers came trotting into the arena on horseback. There were five animals, a white stallion and four blacks. I caught my breath. This was the military excellence of a past generation, and all for the benefit of an audience of motley-dressed boys with shaven heads and spotty faces!

The officers wore waisted tailcoats of Prussian blue with upturned scarlet collars, matching facings interlaced with white stripes across the chest, and white pantaloons with a scarlet stripe along the seam tucked into black boots which buttoned up above the knee. And if his officers were immaculate, which adjective could hope to capture the essence of General Katowice?

I had met him in Königsberg Castle in 1804. On that occasion, he had warned me of the imminent danger of a French invasion, and I had chosen not to take his prophetic words seriously. Yet, within the course of three short years he had been proved correct. Three years? It might have been three aeons, so much had changed. I sometimes thought the azure sky of Prussia had been transmuted for ever to a leaden weighty grey. Despite his splendid uniform and martial demeanour, General Katowice had been marked by Time. His right hand had gone, chopped off above the wrist in some battle—the defence of Königsberg, perhaps, which had been a long and fierce struggle. His rugged face was an ordnance map of age-lines and deeply sculpted wrinkles, which scarred his brow and carved deep channels in his cheeks from his hooked nose down to his square chin.

But his most characteristic feature—the one I remembered him by, long after the exact memory of his physiognomy had faded from my mind—had been defiled beyond recognition. By which I mean his hair. Like many another senior officer in the Prussian army, the general sported a style that had been popularised in the 1770s by the great King Frederick—a long rope of braided hair tied up at the end with a wide black ribbon. As I recalled, the snow-white tail of General Katowice’s dressed mane reached down his back and fell beneath his waist. Every caprice or change of mood of that fiery gentleman could be interpreted by his restless braid. It would dangle on his shoulder, or settle on his broad chest like a serpent lying in wait. With a sudden flick, he would send it flying out around his head; I had personally seen many brave men in Königsberg Castle shaken from their normal composure as they ducked, or stood back quickly, to avoid being lashed by it. That braid had disappeared. Roughly hacked away. Katowice wore his shame upon his person, like a scar that he wished to flaunt.

What could he want from this army of infants?

The general pulled his white charger up before the ranks, dominating the beast with his knees, gazing out earnestly over the sea of upturned infant
faces. His hollow cheeks were red and raw that cold morning, his nose a crooked beak as sharp and curved as any screeching seagull’s, poised to snap and tear at any creature who dared to outface him.

‘Men!’ he thundered, and the boys seemed to stretch and grow before my eyes as they strained to match his generous description. ‘You have been in Kamenetz fortress for three weeks now. Today you will be leaving. It warms my cold heart to see you.’

Each sentence was an exclamation, short, sharp, essential.

‘Our nation has been wounded. The Prussian eagle’s wings have been clipped. But the offence is not mortal. Thanks to you! Return to your homes, but sleep with one eye open. The call to arms will come. One day, it will come! When it does, I’ll hear you hammering at my door. No Prussian warrior will be left outside. We are subject to a foreign power. How long can
he
hold us in chains? We’ll wash our wounds in Gallic blood before too long!’

He thrust his crippled wrist straight up into the air, and a great cry rose from the mouth of every child. The mounted officers swept their gleaming swords from their scabbards and waved them in the air, crying boldly: ‘Prussia! Prussia! Sword in hand!’

As the shout resounded all around, General Katowice jerked hard at the reins of his charger and jabbed with his spurs; the massive white stallion whipped smartly around, and the general galloped away through the gate, all eyes following his departure.

It was a fine piece of theatre, I thought.

At a shouted command the parade broke up. Suddenly released from the thrall of military duty, the boys shook each other by the hand, some of them embraced, and they began to make their way off the parade ground arm in arm. I watched in silent awe. I might have been attending a service in a Protestant cathedral: there was such weight, such solemnity in the proceedings.

A knock sounded on the carriage door.

‘He’ll see you now, sir.’

The stern young captain who had ordered me to sleep in the coach the night before was staring up at me, impressively turned out in full dress uniform. The silver stripes sewn across his chest looked disconcertingly like ribs. I climbed down, and fell into step beside this skeletal officer. He did not say a word as we made our way quickly on foot in the wake of the departing boy soldiers.

Five minutes later, at the end of a long, dank corridor, we entered a room so dark and dingy that it must always have been lit by candlelight, whatever the hour of the day or night. Three desks had been placed along three of
the walls, with two tall cupboards and a long set of drawers in between. Two young officers were busily at work with files and documents, though they immediately dropped what they were doing and jumped to attention.

‘Wait here,’ he said to me brusquely.

Then he turned away and knocked softly on the only other door in the room.

The two junior officers picked up their quills and returned to their paperwork without a word. I took the opportunity to look around me. Some moments passed in silence, broken only by the scratching of nibs and the rustling of papers, when I realised that somebody was watching me. That is, a scraped bony scalp, the tips of two pointed ears, and a pair of small, close-set reddish eyes were glaring in my direction from behind the farthest desk. I took a step forward, and spotted a boy there. He was kneeling on the stone floor with a rag in his hand. A pair of long leather riding boots and a tin of beeswax were set out in front of him. He did not look away, but continued to stare fixedly at me as he raised the boot to his lips and spat.