Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (48 page)

“We have it, gentlemen. We must now concentrate on the north.”

“Nine-thirty, Sire.”

“Thank you.” An unwonted quiet courtesy. “Blasowitz, another of these damned itzes.” Soult, Bernadotte, Lannes, Murat stirred into a soup of smoke, broken eardrums, eviscerated horses, four hundred of Cafarelli’s division smashed and spattered in less than three minutes, the Seventeenth Regiment of the Line holding firm on the Santon Hill, cuirasse-flash and plume-tossing on a four-hundred-yard front as Murat’s reserve plunged into left flank of enemy cavalry.

“Ten o’clock, Sire.”

St. Hilaire’s division was being attacked from three sides. A desperate bayonet charge while Soult’s artillery reserve thudding up brought six twelve-pounder guns, Soult himself yelling orders. Vandamme, to the left of St. Hilaire, pushed like a madman at Kollowrath and Milorardovitch’s God knew how many battalions.

“Those damned itzes.”

Lochet stormed Zokolnitz with the 48th and the 111th, captured it and left the 48th as garrison, tried for the castle of Zokolnitz on the east bank of the Goldbach, the enemy hit back at the village and wiped out the 48th, the 111th had to be recalled, the Russians held on to Zokolnitz except for its south fringe the French gripped unwavering.

“Noon, Sire.”

“The midday position, gentlemen. On the left and right alike the enemy seems sufficiently contained. In the center we hold the Pratzen Heights. Imperial Headquarters will now be transferred thither.”

“Sire.”

“The ten grams,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “seems not to have been in the least efficacious. I think the dose must be increased. You agree, Mitchell?”

“Oh certainly I am agreeable,” agreeing.

“I consider that the discourtesy of your continued refusal to pay attention to my strenuous objections should be set on record as a further example of Britannic treachery, and moreover—”

He looked down from the Pratzen Heights with hot coffee and a dish of beaten eggs, milk and sugar. His staff was busy about him, messages being rapidly penciled, messengers tearing off. “Masse de décision, gentlemen.”

“Ah, Sire.”

“I will have Bernadotte’s corps moved from the north sector. I want the entire Imperial Guard stationed on the left bank of the Goldbach. The only trouble, as I see it, is the presence of the Imperial Guard of Russia, which, as is clearly visible, is moving up to fill in that broken center. But, gentlemen, I have great hopes of their excessive impetuosity.” They didn’t understand what he meant. “They have been in that reserve position too long. They lack action. They will be far too eager for action.” They still didn’t understand what he meant.

They understood when the Grand Duke Ferdinand attacked with four paint-fresh battalions the near-dead troops of General Vandamme. They charged, yelling, bayonets ready to gut, from a distance of three hundred yards. They were too much out of breath to achieve the exquisite slaughter they had envisaged. They broke through the forward line but then met the hard fire of the French rear. They fell back on Krzenowitz. Vandamme, receiving the Imperial order to right incline, opened up his rear and left flank. The Grand Duke Constantine crashed the flank with fifteen squadrons of Guard cavalry, and the grenadiers, reformed, renewed their frontal charge. Vandamme moved up two battalions to cover his naked flank. The Russians—

“What in the name of Almighty God? What for Christ’s sake do those bastards think they’re—The fucking cowards I’ll have their fucking balls—” He danced, punching the air, while the unarmed and diseagled battalion of the Fourth went speeding off in retreat, crazy, panicky, panting Long Live The Emperor as though that were a cantrip solvent of crazed panic and cowardice. “Now,” he said, more quietly, the dance ended, the air unpunched, “we will have that Imperial Guard of theirs. Send Bessières with our own Imperial cavalry.”

“Sire.”

“We revert now,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “to this matter of the gubernatorial directive that the patient be fed with this thoroughly wholesome nutritive which, on Sir Hudson’s own orders, has been er delactated from thoroughly wholesome cows.”

“I have said till I am thoroughly wearied out with the effort of saying it that I cannot endorse, either as a patriot or as a practitioner of the art which you and your colleagues patently desecrate, the administering of a beverage which the digestive system of the imperial patient—”

“The epithet is inapposite and irrelevant,” smiled Dr. Arnott, indicating the brimming crock.

“Now that,” the Emperor said, “was an example of initiative which I am disinclined to reprehend.” For Bernadotte had detached General Drouet’s division to support the hard-pressed five squadrons of the Imperial Guard. “So now we order General Rapp to administer the final—Two squadrons of chasseurs and one of the fellow-countrymen of Roustam here. How would you like to be out there, eh, Roustam, shouting
Allah chew their balls off
and so on?”

“Sire.”

Oh, effective enough, very effective. Five hundred Russian grenadiers dead and two hundred officers of the crack and elite and nobly-born Chevaliers, personal escort of the Tsar or Czar, taken prisoner.

“Just after two o’clock, Sire.”

“Well,” smiled the Emperor, as Prince Repnine, Commander of the Holy Russian Imperial Chevalier Guard was presented to him, torn, dusty, cowed, but every inch a prince of the blood, “we gave you a run for your money, eh, my prince?” And then, brutally: “Some weeping and gnashing and so forth in St. Petersburg tonight or tomorrow, I should think. All these delectable aristocratic ladies bereft of aristocratic manly comfort. Very well, let our aristocratic guests be led away.”

“Two-thirty, Sire.”

“Very good. Final phase, I think, gentlemen.”

The great supine body was cleansed of the infesting enemy. It was sluiced down, south of the belly of the Pratzen Heights, to a region of frozen lakes and marshlands. The west was clear of enemy, and the column that retreated east towards Austerlitz was harried, battered, clawed, bitten, chewed, spat out. General Doktorov faced the north with frozen lakeland behind him. Every man for himself. Five thousand scattered, many over the iced waters.

“Bombard,” ordered the Emperor. “All available cannon.” He looked south to the white sheets, already cracking here and there under the weight of retreating gun-teams. Cannonballs stoned the ice, and the ice starred and shived and men went screaming into the black water, horses too, terrified and threshing, and the great useless guns.

“News from the north?”

“Enemy retreat under way, Sire. Just after three o’clock.”

“My two colleagues here,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “are in total agreement with me on this matter. It would constitute a helpful conciliatory gesture towards Sir Hudson who, as you will know, has been rendered extremely despondent by the intransigent attitude of his prisoner.” And he gestured towards the brimming crock.

“I am of a mind,” cried Dr. Antommarchi, “to dash it to the ground.”

“Tut,” tutted Dr. Mitchell. “That is a typically southern attitude, far from helpful, I would say, and certainly, I would say, denotative of a somewhat unprofessional attitude of mind.”

“So,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “shall we agree to administer to the patient this bland and candid nutritive donated by Sir Hudson?” And he once more.

Cease fire sounded at five. Tentative figures were totted. 11,000 Russians dead. 4,000 Austrians dead. 12,000 from both forces taken prisoner. 1,300 French dead. 6,940 wounded. 573 taken prisoner.

“Let us revert,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “to this question of a more efficient purgative. The ten grams of calomel have, as my colleagues will agree, proved totally inefficacious. I prescribe another ten grams.”

“I must protest, protest and protest again. Britannic treachery.”

Roll up that map, etc. My country, my country, how I leave my, etc. The patient, unheard, chuckled. Nitzes and witzes and litzes. No. Only one litz.

T
he tempest that visited the island on the fourth day of May was of a violence unwonted even in those latitudes. Poets and demiphilosophers nurtured in the temperate zones, who make of Dame Nature a smiling and wholly benevolent mother, must be accounted guilty of building their fanciful systems, the law following the observation of phenomena, on an insufficiency of data, the mild matron of the Gulf Stream transforming herself in the Tropics to a harpy, a valkyr, a shrieking and essentially female embodiment of the eternal principle of destruction. The firmament of that tropical island, horrid with the swirling and shifting of unearthly colors, resembled nothing so much as the bubbling of oils of varying degrees of luridity in some vast witches’ cauldron. The skies were cracked and shattered ever and again by lightning-knouts of immense length and terrifying contour, while thunders opposed each other from every point of the compass, as though whole army corps, composed merely of kettle-drummers, were cached in valleys over an infinitely large terrain. The rain fell passionately without respite, converting the air into an infinite lamination of vertical lakes, and the winds howled and screamed as though the entire sack of Aeolus had in malice been emptied upon the lower heavens. Many of the superstitious islanders believed that they had in their midst, in impending demise as it was bruited, a demon or else a demigod who was intent on speaking the puissance of the celestial or infernal abode whence he had come and whither he was returning, in a final flourish before quitting his terrestrial lodging forever, or until his next incarnation. They crossed themselves, chid each other with a variety of sins for which punishment now seemed imminent, and murmured prayers for the remission of this visitation, which prayers were slow in being answered. Meantime the demigod or demon, revealed to the watchers and weepers as all too human, lay still or in the convulsions of sudden spasms of agony, his pale visage—grown, as many remarked in wonder, young and comely again—intermittently lighted by the fires that flashed from the heavens.

The force of the winds and the rains was such that chaos seemed to have come again, and by what, to those who held to the demonic or demidivine persuasion, seemed an anomaly, it was that expanse of tamed Nature known as the Imperial Garden which was quickest to revert to a swamped and blasted wilderness. Another variety of superstition naturally spoke of the gods bellowing their ultimate rage at Prometheus, while it was left to the few coolly rational to remark on the Pathetic Fallacy. Nevertheless, it is an observed and well-attested fact that all the vegetative life started by his own hands or under his imperial orders was uprooted by rain and wind, while the great willow tree beneath whose shade he had been accustomed to savor a coolness in heat that reached its most agonizing intensity (by an irony to be pondered on by our specialists in sentimental exploitation of the feast) at Christmas, was, by those same two vindictive elements, gleefully plucked up and hurled away with horrific and insolent ease. A solitary gum tree for which he had an especial affection seemed likely to withstand the tempestuous disruption, but that too was at length deradicated and sent wildly hurling and thrashing like a dog maddened with the pain of the whip. Of all that he had made of green and grateful, of all that Nature, in her more complaisant dispositions, had afforded him of the same, nothing was to be left. There seemed to some to be a lesson here, and it was that a man may not make even a garden with impunity.

Impunity—I marked the word

Negate the fires of human dawn,

Ring out above the sleeves of lawn

In pomp but pity uninferred.

Is man and all his striving thus

Not but by moral terms assessed,

Reward and benison impressed

Implacably on each of us

Impelled to make what must be made,

Nor seeing in those forms of Good

Raw evidence of Shall and Should

In rusty moral arms arrayed?

I watched with lidless eyes that night,

Nailed to the all too punitive,

Racked on that gift to all who give,

Inching with him to dark or light.

In final sense his voice awoke,

Not babbling, kingly strong again;

Regal the words, the words were twain;

In pain I shook to what he spoke.

HEAD

ARMY

H
e spoke no more to those outside the garden and now considered that he was, if that term had any meaning in this given situation, free to walk through it and take pleasure in what, that year, seemed a singularly fine display of roses, while there was a curiously sensuous
élan
to be experienced in the yield of the plushy sward beneath his, so it came to him, sentient bootsole. Very beautiful was the melancholy that suffused him, of an autumnal old gold that belied the season of the roses but was altogether fitting to the season of his own life as he now, in a rapid conscient flash, recognized it to be. With a smile he looked down on his attire, a totally civilian “get-up,” of a sobriety proper to his newly observed silver age, silver but for jubilee, yet nothing of the jubilant in the decent subfuse of the clothes, the broad-brimmed hat he carried in one hand while with a slender cane in the other he eased his way about the rosebeds. Brute beauty and valor and act here buckled with joints that, he knew with no great measure of regret, were now unmeet for straddling the charger or striding the conference room. It, he knew as well as he knew his name, whatever his name was—was the cognomen to be restored to the daily use of self-introduction or the filling in of forms or the signing of letters, together with a totally unpretentious honorific?—was all done with; he was, in a word,
hors de combat
.

The lady he saw approaching him, bearing a basket, was so light, was so fair that men, he thought, must wonder as she passed, as he now, in a very curious transport of not unpleasurable agitation, wondered, as also at the basket that she bore, which was charged with the glory of blooms of a really astonishing magnificence and none of them, very strangely as it seemed to him, at all represented in the garden where they both were. It was difficult, as it was also perhaps ungallant, to wish to speculate as to her age, half-hidden as her face was in the sieve of the straw of her plaited summer bonnet, but such considerations were after all not very much to the purpose. The liquid waist bespoke youth, and the broth of flue, sometimes goldish, sometimes dusky according to her passage through the pied summer light, which breathed round her bare arms, strangely recalled a visual notation of his early boyhood, when he had admired, with none of the admixture of
carnality
that would have hit him in a later and more intense phase of susceptibility, a similar delicacy of filament on the arms of his sister Pauline. He stood, smiling, somewhat undecided as to whether to give greeting, considering the niceties of behavior relevant to such chance, but none the less pleasant for that, garden encounters. It seemed to him that he would, in a word, decide to leave it to her.