Текст книги "Officer's Prey"

Автор книги: Armand Cabasson

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CHAPTER 9

MARCHING on and on – there was no end to the marching. For days the Russians had been falling back, abandoning large tracts of territory. A stray voltigeur, his musket slung over his shoulder and munching an apple, could inadvertently capture a whole village, or rather what was left of it, because the enemy was employing a scorched-earth policy. The Russian soldiers and peasants were setting fire to everything: fields, dwellings, stables, barns … and all this with the blessing of the Orthodox priests, who were setting their own churches alight. The population would then take refuge in the forests or follow the retreating troops.

The consequences for the Grande Armée were catastrophic. Until then the French had been able to live off the villagers during their campaigns. Italian, Austrian, Prussian or Polish peasants had welcomed them with varying degrees of enthusiasm, according to the country. In Russia, the French could rely only on military supplies but these supplies were too far behind. Napoleon led one forced march after another in his attempt to catch up with the Russians, and the heavy wagons laden with food and forage were lagging far behind, bogged down and jammed together. Thousands of men and horses were stricken with hunger, exhaustion and disease. Deserters, marauders, wanderers and stragglers hovered around the army in their tens of thousands, more on the look-out for chickens than for Russians, even though they came across the latter more often and were massacred in ambushes. A quarter of the army had been lost in this way but, despite the suffering, the morale of the troops remained high because they did not question the Emperor’s genius. They grumbled but kept advancing.

Everyone in the Grande Armée wondered why the Russians kept falling back. The Russians were wondering too. Alexander’s forces were impatient to engage in combat and were bemused by the retreat, but the massive exodus continued. The combatants found it demoralising to abandon large portions of their country without a struggle, knowing that their villages were being burnt to cinders and their families exiled to some as yet unknown destination.

There were two possible explanations for this pull-back. Some supported this strategy, which weakened the French and was easy to implement, thanks to the sheer size of the country and the paucity of its resources. It was a procedure that had proved effective in the past. The Scythians, semi-nomadic tribes who lived in the area between the Danube and the Don, had used it centuries earlier against the Romans. Peter the Great had done the same to weaken the Swedish army of Charles XII before crushing him at Poltava in 1709. Napoleon had procured documents about this war. The most distinguished supporters of this point of view were General Barclay de Tolly, the commander-in-chief of the Russian forces, and Tsar Alexander I himself. But the pressure of those in favour of a direct encounter was becoming such that they would have won the argument had it not been for another factor: the state of the Russian army.

Against Napoleon’s four hundred thousand men, including sixty thousand cavalry and twelve hundred guns, the Russians could line up six hundred thousand men … on paper. In reality, after deducting the auxiliaries, and the phantom soldiers, who existed only for the purpose of embezzling their pay, there were just over four hundred thousand men. And these were very scattered: facing the invading army in Finland, in Moldavia, on the Turkish border, on the Dvina and the Dnieper, in the garrisons, in the interior of the country … The immediately available forces amounted to two hundred thousand men but the crowning misfortune for the Russians was that they were divided in two: the western army, commanded by General Prince Barclay de Tolly, consisting of fifty thousand men, and the southern army, under the orders of General Prince Bagration. Napoleon had attacked with bewildering speed and since then he had been urging his troops on in order to defeat these two armies separately, a tactic he had employed brilliantly in the past. So the Russians were pulling back hurriedly in order to link up before deciding on a possible confrontation on favourable ground.

The monotony and inaction of the interminable days of marching preyed on Margont’s mind. What was worse was that his investigation was advancing as laboriously as this campaign. He had been obliged to go back to the 84th to avoid arousing suspicion with his repeated absences. He had given Lefine the task of using any pretext to recruit a handful of reliable soldiers to gather information discreetly about all the colonels in IV Corps. There were about forty of them. None, of course, was called Acosavan. No witnesses could be found to a brawl involving a tall, ginger-haired soldier and a civilian, or to the sighting of a colonel in civilian clothes in Tresno. The investigation had quickly eliminated any who were too small, too tall, left-handed, invalids (of which there were plenty, since a colonel was duty-bound to lead his regiment into battle, which inevitably brought down a hail of bullets on him) and those who were known to have spent the night of 28 June in the company of such and such a person.

By 15 July, Lefine had been able to draw up a preliminary list of a dozen or so names. It included two that Margont would have preferred not to see: Colonel Pégot, who was in charge of the 84th of the Line, and Colonel Delarse, one of General Huard’s aides-de-camp. Delarse commanded the 1st Brigade of the Delzons Division, which included the 84th, together with the 8th Regiment of Light Infantry and the 1st Croat Regiment.

Lefine and his men had then begun to reconstruct the movements of the suspects on the night of the murder. The fact that Margont had always been exasperated by the question of shoes in the French army had given him an idea. One of a French soldier’s best weapons was indeed his shoes. The imperial troops were second to none in their ability to cover long distances in record time. Napoleon had brilliantly incorporated this advantage of speed into his strategic calculations when launching his infantrymen on frenzied, crazed, hellish marches. As a result, in 1805, on the way to Austerlitz, Margont had seen soldiers literally die of exhaustion. Others fell into such a deep sleep that the officers could not wake them, even by prodding them with the points of their sabres. They had nevertheless continued to advance with the result that, thanks to some skilful manoeuvres, Napoleon had succeeded in preventing the Austrian army of General Mack from linking up with the bulk of his forces. The Austrian army had finally been encircled in the city of Ulm. The Austrians had lost twenty-five thousand men, whom they sorely missed a few days later during the battle of Austerlitz …

Yet, despite the obvious importance of mobility for the regiments, the shoes used by the Grande Armée were very badly designed. There was no difference between right or left: the soldiers’ feet shaped the shoes during the march. There were only three sizes: small, medium and large, so it was hard for feet of other lengths. The shoes were supposed to last for five hundred miles, but many of the suppliers swindled the army and often, if you set off from Paris with new shoes, you ended up in Brussels barefoot.

Margont had decided to take advantage of this paradox. He had suggested that Jean-Quenin should write a letter asking the regimental cobblers to answer a list of questions. The medical officer claimed he wanted to do some research into the shoes in order to rethink their design. Lefine met the cobblers, read them the letter and immediately drowned them in a sea of words. He talked on and on. Sometimes his slick talk endeared him to them and he obtained all the information he wanted; other times he infuriated them and people said all they knew just to get rid of this wretched sergeant. Casually slipped in among the questions was one about the shoe sizes of the senior officers …

But this painstaking task proved to be unbearably slow.

The complete translation of the private diary had taught Margont nothing new. Maria Dorlovna suffered from loneliness. Being of a sensitive and dreamy disposition, she fed her hopes by reading romantic literature. Her writing was steeped in poetic melancholy, a feature that was all the more remarkable given that few women of her class had the opportunity to learn to read and write. She had believed that a miracle was possible. What had her murderer done to seduce her so quickly? What, then, could a Prince Charming possibly be like?

July 21 started badly for Margont as that morning bore an annoying resemblance to the preceding ones. How ironic to be constantly singing the praises of freedom and yet to be himself a prisoner! Where was the freedom to go where you liked? He had to continue advancing in this cloud of dust that the road to Moscow had turned into. Where was freedom of speech? Tiredness often made it impossible to talk. The laborious progress of the Grande Armée reminded Margont of his years spent in the abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. The old stone walls had been replaced by vast plains. Certain moments from his life there came back to him as if linked to the present by a common thread of hopelessness. He pictured himself again scraping away night after night at a stone hidden under the bed of his monastic cell. He had never succeeded in dislodging it. He remembered the obdurate expression of certain monks when he pleaded with them to let him accompany them on visits outside the monastery.

As a child his mind had been an empty vessel in an empty, locked room. Then he had discovered books and had feasted on words, dreams and the promise of travel. But even today he still retained this searing memory of emptiness. He still needed to fill himself up: with food, with any kind of learning, with reading … So he had devised all sorts of strategies for warding off boredom, this nothingness that threatened to swallow him up. He had learnt the rudiments of Russian; recited to himself entire monologues from plays, throwing himself into the roles; written articles for the newspaper he wanted to launch; scribbled notes and sketches in a notebook in the hope of having his memoirs published … And, to that end, he said to himself, in order to give an accurate idea of this long march in a work about the Russian campaign, he would have to leave dozens of pages blank. He had read all the books he had been able to bring with him: Candide, Hamlet, Macbeth, a treatise on ants – creatures whose ingenuity and tenacity fascinated him – and accounts of travels in Russia. He had been compelled to lighten his load by leaving these works by the wayside, hoping that they would be picked up by someone else. No soldier in his company had wanted them. Many of them could not read, and in any case with a kitbag containing three shirts, three pairs of socks, three pairs of gaiters, two pairs of trousers, dress uniform and the regulation ten kilos of rations … He frequently listened to the soldiers recounting their life stories, whilst being careful not to tell his own. Lastly, like the other captains, he spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to maintain order.

The columns of soldiers were becoming more and more ragged, the ranks slacker and slacker. Exhausted stragglers, left behind by their regiments, attracted the attention of sergeants, who gesticulated at them, but to no avail. Some collapsed, overcome by sleep as if hit by a thunderbolt. Others lengthened their stride to regain their position before falling behind once more. Sometimes the officers turned a blind eye, but those in command could also prove ruthless. A flurry of punishments would then be meted out and surreal scenes would ensue: here three infantrymen being forced to wear their uniforms back to front as a mark of dishonour; there a straggler running back and forth between two columns of soldiers ten times without stopping; yet another miscreant being put on guard duty every night. There seemed no limit to the inventiveness of the punishments.

Fortunately, the men were united by a feeling of camaraderie. When a young recruit threatened to fall by the wayside, one veteran carried his musket and another his kit. When some of the men could no longer keep up, the regiment imperceptibly slowed its pace, or lieutenants would be furious to witness a sudden general outbreak of blisters and corns. Resupply problems had become so severe that officers sent detachments out looting to bring back what they could, which in most cases meant little or nothing. Everyone always volunteered for this sort of mission, despite the considerable risks posed by the Cossacks.

Originally, the Cossacks were free peasants and soldiers who fought the Russians, the Poles or the Tartars but now they were subjugated by Russia. Enamoured of nature and freedom, always on horseback, armed with lances and fanatically devoted to the Tsar, these marvellous horsemen were key elements in the Russian army. Highly mobile, swift and unobtrusive, they attacked isolated groups and concealed Alexander’s troop movements by disrupting reconnaissance expeditions and making it impossible to estimate their number by their constant comings and goings. At the head of the Cossacks of the Don was Hetman Platov, who had sworn to bring Napoleon back to St Petersburg in chains.

On that day, the 84th had just been given permission to make a halt. The soldiers lay down so quickly that the regiment looked like a house of cards blown over by the wind. Two corporals dragged the sick horses to one side. Because of the shortage of fodder, the animals grazed on wet grass, unripe rye and even straw from the roofs of the isbas, which gave them serious bouts of dysentery, which weakened them even more.

Margont lit a fire and boiled some water, into which he dropped a handful of rice. Saber and Piquebois did likewise. As he waited for the rice to cook, Margont stretched out on the grass and began to munch a biscuit, his only pleasure of the day. Lieutenants Saber and Piquebois were Margont’s other two close friends. Irénée Saber was a very self-assured man and too full of himself. His handsome face could look surprisingly arrogant when it broke into a sardonic smile. Though generous by nature, he was consumed with overwhelming ambition. In his youth, Julius Caesar had wept before the statue of Alexander the Great who, in his youth, had already conquered an empire. Saber, at thirty, inwardly broke down in tears before both Caesar and Alexander. He was only a lieutenant! Not even a major! When would he have a colonel’s epaulettes? Why had he not been decorated on the evening of the battle of Wagram? Had no one noticed that, without him, all would have been lost? Saber was jealous of Margont because of his higher rank but he also looked down on him because there was no doubt that by the age of thirty-two he, Saber, would be at least a colonel, perhaps higher … much higher.

Poor Saber. Rather than his military career, it was his lack of sincerity and narrow-mindedness that had become legendary (and then only in the small world of the 84th). So, when a soldier was too obstinate, it had become customary in the regiment to call him ‘as pig-headed as Saber’. Yet Irénée Saber had a brilliant mind. He had a real tactical sense and was able to grasp the deployment of troops and to work out the movements generals expected of them. He had an eye for all this on the battlefield, where all that most people could see was smoke, blood and indistinct masses of troops. In short, he could read pattern in chaos. But as he refused to question his own judgement, he was equally capable of displaying the clear-sightedness of a marshal and of raving like a madman claiming to be Napoleon. A little more flexibility would have turned his intelligence into genius. Margont was convinced that his friend would go very far. But what was very far for Margont was only halfway for Saber.

Lieutenant Piquebois had been very similar, before becoming very different. Aged thirty-three, he behaved as if he were fifty, with the result that he was often taken for a young-looking fifty-year-old. He had fallen madly in love with the daughter of a rich cloth merchant from Uzès. Étienne Marcelin, the young woman’s father, had not approved of this match. Piquebois had been studying medicine in Montpellier but for some strange reason he was to be seen every day in the taverns of Uzès. He had sailed the seas during his ‘I shall be a ship’s captain’ period and he had lived in Africa for two years during his ‘I shall make a fortune out of cocoa’ period. On his return, he declared that he was going to emigrate to South America. His journey to Peru never got any further than the Peyrou Gardens in the heart of Montpellier … Marcelin had therefore said no, categorically. His daughter, Anne-Lise, had become distraught, with the result that the veto was qualified: ‘No, unless you acquire a respectable social position.’ ‘But I’m studying to become a Protestant minister,’ Piquebois had explained, though no one seemed aware of this new calling. ‘“Minister” is not a social position, it’s a theological position,’ Marcelin had retorted. Piquebois guessed that this subtle distinction had something to do with income. He therefore gave up his religious studies before they had started, together with his interminable medical studies, naval studies and chocolate studies in order to enlist in the army. Nothing can compare with the army in wartime as a way of climbing the social ladder. For a long time Uzès had mocked ‘Piquebois the chocolate soldier’. In the cafés bordering the superb main square, all the inhabitants of Uzès had drunk to his health: ‘Heaven forbid that anything should happen to him! But let’s not worry too much. The sound of cannon fire isn’t often to be heard in Montpellier.’ Everyone had assumed that Piquebois was still there, dead drunk, snoring under the table like his fellow medical students, a young Rabelais without the inspiration.

To general surprise, Piquebois reappeared in full hussar’s uniform, his hair braided into elegant little plaits, sporting a bushy moustache and a smile on his face. In every house people exclaimed: ‘Has our chocolate soldier changed into a hussar? Let’s drink some of this magic cocoa straight away.’ Marcelin, thoughtful father that he was, had found plenty of better matches (better in his eyes, at least, and weren’t they the only ones that counted?). However, Anne-Lise, who was as stubborn as her father, had turned them all down. He eventually accepted the marriage, which was celebrated in the cathedral of the former duchy of Uzès.

Piquebois had not chosen the hussars by accident. Turbulent, fun-loving young men who lived their lives at a frantic pace were attracted to the hussars because everything they did was fast and furious. Instead of talking, they yelled; instead of drinking they got slewed; and they picked quarrels with anyone who wasn’t a hussar (while also getting into arguments with hussars from other regiments). Piquebois performed heroically on the battlefield but took even more risks away from it. He had nearly broken his neck by jumping out of the window of an inn in which he had thrashed a cuirassier. He was frequently picked up by the police ‘more dead than drunk’. He had also wounded two men in duels: one because of the accidental clash between two sabre scabbards – he let his own drag along the ground because he enjoyed the sound of it scraping over the cobbles – and the other because of a look he judged ‘full of innuendoes’, though what the innuendoes were, no one ever knew, not even the man on the receiving end.

Despite this tendency to play with fire (or perhaps because of it) Piquebois had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Everything changed on the day of the battle of Austerlitz. On 2 December 1805, Napoleon broke through the centre of the Austro-Russian army. In a final attempt to avoid catastrophe, the Russian Imperial Horse Guard launched a furious counterattack. Napoleon himself considered the charge admirable. Piquebois mingled with the cavalry of the French Imperial Guard (he already considered himself one of their number) who were racing towards the Russians. He did not see the triumphant conclusion to the battle because a bullet struck him full in the chest. He swore it was fired by Grand Duke Constantine himself, and when a man had undergone such suffering, he was allowed one final boast.

It took him a whole year to recover. But his fellow medical students and hussars were in the habit of saying that he never fully recovered. He did indeed change completely. No more heavy drinking sessions, duels, bragging or student pranks. Piquebois began to enjoy the quiet pleasures of an afternoon spent listening to his wife playing the piano, or chatting with friends while smoking a pipe. Considered unfit to serve in the hussars, he was transferred to the infantry and was very happy there. From then on Piquebois determined to become a serious-minded officer. ‘Serious-minded’ – a word that had never before existed in his vocabulary. His wife, delighted by this change, said to him one day: ‘It took a bullet to kill the eternal student in you. Now I have a man for my husband.’ Those who had formerly accompanied him on his escapades ruefully came to the same conclusion, and his squadron organised a funeral for ‘Hussar Piquebois’. They solemnly buried his saddle and cavalry sabre before going to get drunk to celebrate his resurrection in the vast world of spoilsports.

The aftereffects, his world-weary look, his air of moderation and the wrinkles etched into his forehead by the months of suffering, had prematurely aged him. But despite his settled existence and his old man’s ways – such as when he complained about the weather while mentioning his rheumatism – his former squadron swore that the old Piquebois wasn’t completely dead and that his ghost would rise up again from the charnel house of Austerlitz and fly back to his earthly frame to take possession of it once more. Then they would go and dig up his saddle and sabre – which they had buried in a field near Uzès in the hope that that would have a healing effect on the patient – and they would drink themselves senseless to celebrate the event. Because when a hussar fell on the battlefield he didn’t finish up like Piquebois. Certainly not. The Valkyries appeared from the heavens and carried him back to Valhalla singing of his exploits, a Valhalla that inevitably resembled an enormous tavern in which you got drunk with pretty girls on your knee before galloping off into the plains to mow down the enemy hordes.

Saber was polishing his shoes but they never shone enough for his liking. He was thoroughly annoyed. The Russians kept falling back but he couldn’t run after them indefinitely. How could he finish this campaign with the rank of colonel if the enemy didn’t play its part? Glory was awaiting him; he had a schedule to keep to. Piquebois stuffed his pipe calmly. Smoking eased his hunger. Lucky man. Saber was now furiously rubbing his shoes as if the whole Russian army had launched an attack on his feet.

‘Let’s smash their faces in again like at Austerlitz and then all go back home in triumph. An army that retreats without fighting!’ he exclaimed like a judge speaking to a person who has committed the most heinous of crimes.

He did not even notice the nervous twitch affecting Piquebois’s face at the mention of Austerlitz.

‘I think the Russians will fight like fanatics,’ said Margont.

‘Have you been reading that sort of nonsense in books?’ replied Saber immediately. ‘When we catch up with them they’ll be sorry not to have kept us on the go even longer.’

The atmosphere was gloomy as they ate their meagre meal. Margont kept seeing Maria’s martyred body. These images haunted him frequently and he tried to keep busy at all costs, to combat not only the boredom but also the memories that filled the void in his mind when he was insufficiently active. The atrocities had shaken his conception of humanity.

Margont smiled, thinking that he was conducting the investigation so tenaciously not so much to obey Prince Eugène as to fight for his principles. He thought back to Maroveski’s question that had made him so uneasy: why should a captain be interested in the murder of ‘a girl of no importance’? For Margont everyone had their value. However, the prince was likely to think of Maria as the equivalent of a speck of dust. An officer guilty of a crime, political stakes … yes, but why had Prince Eugène seemed so hesitant at the end of the meeting? Margont felt there was an element missing; the prince had concealed something from him. A link between the victim and him? It seemed absurd – even if absurd things did occur constantly on this earth. Doubts about the murderer’s identity? A hidden clue? But which and why?

Margont decided to write a letter to request a new meeting with the prince on the pretext of evaluating the situation. Never mind if it did not result in anything. Since the beginning of this campaign Margont had invented a new motto for himself: ‘Better to do something futile than nothing at all.’

Just when the order was given to march on, Margont spotted Lefine catching up with the regiment. He was on foot and so tired and covered in dust that he looked like a ghost. Margont’s heart began to race. Was there something new? Was there at last something else going on other than an endless march?