Napoleon Symphony, Page 4

  “When?”

  “I expect Massena before dawn. He will precede his division. You, Joubert, are to hold the eastern side of the plateau with one brigade. That should secure the gorge and Ocksay’s column. For a time, that is. Your two other brigades must hold off Koblos and Liptay in the northern sector.” He seemed to feel Mantua raying out its dangerous heat behind him.

  When Massena arrived, he ordered him to hold the valley of the Tasso (ah, noble name) on the left flank, using a single brigade, and to mass the rest in readiness around the plateau. The moon moved to setting. At dawn they began.

  In blissful nescience of the1 drift of man,

  Fulfilling only its2 Creator’s plan,11

  The wide3 plateau9 extends its windy plain,

  A rarity in that engorg’d terrain,4

  Where eagles wheel8 about the mountain-wall,6

  Soar to the height then like a plummet fall7

  1. Joubert advances with ten thousand men, eighteen cannon (six from Massena) to engage Austrian twelve thousand.

  2. Koblos’s column checks.

  3. Liptay’s proceeds toward flank of Joubert’s most westerly brigade. Eighty-fifth half-brigade in disgrace: collapses, flees. Massena’s reserve moves in.

  4. Austrians mount batteries on eastern bank of Adige, begin to dominate Osteria gorge.

  5. Lusignan’s column appears on southern ridge of plateau. French line of retreat and reinforcement cut off. Eighteenth half-brigade, newly arrived from Lake Garda, ordered to attack column.

  6. Austrians have advantage in gorge. Joubert brigade exhausted. Koblos and Liptay adjudged temporarily harmless. Joubert’s westerly brigades moved east. Light artillery devastates close-set Austrian column. One chance shot hits two Austrian ammunition wagons. Carnage, disorder.

  7. Five hundred infantry and cavalry take advantage of Austrian panic and drive the enemy from the gorge. Eastern sector now cleared.

  8. 9. All forces shifted northward to meet Koblos and Liptay, now revived and regrouped. Main Austrian army split. Flanks harried.

  10. Rey’s reinforcement arrives, pincering with Massena’s brigade on Lusignan. Three thousand prisoners.

  11. (Bonaparte and Massena move south to engage Provera.) Rivoli now in Joubert’s hands. Three Austrian columns flee for La Corona. Murat and Vial seize gorges. Joubert to Bonaparte: “Followed your plan. Success beyond all hopes. Three guns, four thousand to five thousand prisoners. Alvintzi himself precipitated down rocks and fleeing up Adige valley.” Last great Austrian offensive over.

  Citizens Thiriet, Carné, Blondy, Fossard, Teisseire, Hubert, Tireux, Carrère (Jacques), Carrère (Alexandre), Trauner, Barsacq, Gabutti, Mayo, Bonin, Borderie, Verne, Chaillot, Barrault, Brasseur, Dupont, Salou and all the thousands and thousands of others wondered how the hell they had done it. Marched all night, then fought all day at Rivoli, marched all next night, all next day, then smashed Provera at La Favorita. Mantua, a snarling great fortress ringed with fever lagoons, was quick to fall. It was full of skeletons, some of them still alive, and there was a powerful stink of decaying horsehides.

  “The view of the Directory,” Bonaparte said, “is that you are a Frenchman who has taken up arms against his own people.” He kept hitting his left palm hard with his riding crop.

  “I see,” Würmser saw. “It’s not enough merely to fight for the monarchical cause against the republican. I take it that they want me for the guillotine.”

  “No. Shot. By my immediate orders.”

  “They ordered you, did they? Do they order you?”

  “I won’t do it, of course.” The sugary fecal reek of the dead city pierced even here, the palazzo set about with deformed trees, stripped of bark and leaves for hopeless ragouts. “You naturally escaped from me. I consider that you’re a good brave commander.”

  “But not as good and brave as a republican one, yes? So. The long cold road to Vienna.”

  “Not so long.” He saw the map very clearly in his mind. How many available for guarding the Tyrol? It was the Austrians on the Rhine that were the trouble. Snow still at this season, and he dared not wait. Spilimbergo, San Vito, Laybach, Klagenfurt, Marburg, Gratz. As for the Papal States, they were as good as subdued. He smiled and said: “You would have been in very holy company. One of our Directors wants the Pope shot too. The Goddess of Reason told him in a vision.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “I don’t want the Bourbons back in France. I share that view with my army. I stand for the Constitution.”

  “Yes. What hypocritical nonsense: a Frenchman taking up arms against his own people, indeed. You and I appreciate the metaphysical aspects of this struggle. And it will be a long struggle, we both know that. How can you win? You can’t garrison the whole world.”

  “Education. Spreading the truth. The republican clubs in Milan are already powerful and enlightened. The people have to be made to be free.”

  The eyes, Würmser was thinking, are remarkable. The eyes are a whole Haydn orchestra. “Your Directory, if I may say so, seems to contain some rather giddy men.”

  “I stand for the Constitution.”

  “You have to hand it to her,” Massena said. “She shows the other women up. Look at old Mother Goodpart there, blazing. Can’t keep her eyes off her tits.”

  “Not the only one.” The victorious generals took fresh flutes of champagne from the flunky with the silver tray. They kept together, awed by the aristocratic company and the creamy splendor of Mombello. Pauline Bonaparte, Pauline Leclerc as she had just become, was, as the Paris papers would say, radiant, but the Creole matron knew all about outshining. “It’s the eyes,” Joubert said.

  “Whose?”

  “The whole damned family of them. Sexuality. That little bitch there couldn’t wait to have it from Leclerc. Lui—What does his mother call him?”

  “It sounded like Nabuliune.”

  “He found them fucking behind a screen. But he didn’t turn on old Charles Victor, oh no. He knew where the fault was, if you can call it a fault.”

  “So now it’s benefit of clergy,” La Harpe said. “Back where we were before. Incense and communion and the whole butcher’s shop. Still, this is Italy.” Summer Italy, gorgeous, sun and fireflies and fountains and sexuality. “Nabuliune is going to make a speech.”

  It was in Italian, and they could not understand it all. They caught certain key abstractions—victory, democracy, tyranny, republicanism—but they missed the jokes, which seemed to be unsoldierly, positively intellectual. He seemed to quote from an Italian poet, and then from a Latin one. Some of the old and distinguished smiled and nodded at each other. You had to hand it to him. Then he said how delighted he was to have tutta la famiglia there with him, including Joseph, Giuseppe, his elder brother, to whom he apparently apologized for taking over from him his elder brother’s function, but he saw himself, if he might so put it, as Giuseppe in Egitto. Everybody applauded.

  “What’s that word?”

  “Egypt.”

  A lot of the Italian dignitaries present seemed to know French very well, and one of them, very old, said something about the remarkable son of a remarkable mother, quoting Racine or somebody.

  “You see what he means about family,” Kilmaine said. “He wants to have everything in the family. He’ll bring in more sisters and cousins and try to have us married to them. It won’t make any difference if you’re married already. Bills of civil divorcement. Family everywhere. Nothing’s right for a Sicilian unless it’s in the family. The clan, so to speak.”

  “He’s a Corse.”

  “Where’s the difference?” He looked benevolently at old Berthier, smarter these days, spluttering less, hardly biting his nails at all any more, as he spoke halting but worshipping Tuscan to the Visconti married woman, a beauty. Lui would soon have the poor devil married to that little Caroline there, only a child, or somebody.

  Lui was somewhat flown with wine and water: this, after all, was his sister’s wedding.
“No,” he was smiling, “that is one toast I will not propose. Not peace. Not on the terms of a restored monarchy. I know all about Pichegru’s intrigues. Augereau should be in Paris by now, ready to save the republicans, more cannon round the Tuileries. I stand for the Constitution.”

  “Whose constitution?” Miot de Melito asked.

  “Ah.” He gave him a warm cold complicated look. “An excellent question.”

  Pauline, even though she was now a married lady, put out her tongue at her sister-in-law, bitchy little jealous madcap as she was. Chatterbox too, all about Giuseppina and her young men. Madame Letizia, a handsome hard-eyed ramrod, dowdiness a virtue, gave the deep decolletage and the willow body, Grecian high-waisted silk seemingly pasted to it, a fine look of hate. Neither chit nor child yet, where was his sense, seduced by Parisian wickedness, Joseph should have asserted his authority, inherited too much of his poor father’s weakness. Then she smiled at some who bowed, a happy mother though unhappy among these Greek columns and pagan pictures, cherubim writhing on the ceiling. Little Caroline and Jerome were playing a hitting game with her son, Eugène. Children by her first, but none by lui. There had been time, there had been urgency. A curse from somewhere, God’s curse? There was a God, and a punishing one, despite or because of the Paris wickedness. Time would show a lot, but not a child.

  “The whole province of St. Mark,” he was now saying. “Well, it’s useful for bargains. The Austrians can have it, the Venetians know who the real masters are.” He suddenly grabbed and hugged his wife with bedroom relish, despite all these eyes. Real masters are. “And my dove shall be feted by the Doge, so you shall, my pigeon, and ride in a gondola.” She saw herself stepping into one, Charles’s warm hand sustaining her. Lights lights. Then lui became Alexander again. “It’s one gate to the East. It’s in the East where the scheming foxes of Albion will be hounded and torn. Those watery kings, those kings of water. India.” He looked round the family, including his generals, all brothers-in-law really, with bright scheming eyes. Sarees and turbans and their fingers afire with spill of sapphires. “If only father were alive,” he said. Then the dancing began.

  In the name of Allah the all-powerful, all-merciful, all-knowing, know that it is by his holy will that we come to free the peoples of the Nile from their immemorial and most cruel bondage to the Turks and the Mamelukes, free men of Frankistan bringing freedom, respecting Islam and the tenets of the holy prophet, may his name be praised and the holy name of Allah most high exalted for ever more.

  The disembarkation was a fucking shambles and we only took Alexandria as quick as we did to get a fucking drink somewhere, because we were near dead with the thirst. There he sat watching, on a mess of old ruins called Pompey’s Pillar, slashing away at old bits of pot with that whip of his. The town was full of a lot of half-starved blacks, near-blacks you could call them, in filthy rags, raising their hands to the bloody burning heavens when they saw us come in, shouting Allah Allah and so on. Some old bints with veils on gave us fucking filthy water to drink, but filthy or not it was like elation and ecstasy and so on. There was hardly a solitary fucking thing worth having in the whole town, all half-starved goats and so on, and talk about the fucking heat and the smell. Anyway, what they called sheikhs came and gave him the keys, and the officers did all right with like knives and scimitars with jewels on, but then we had to move on to Damanhur and Rahmaniya and so on, near dropping with the fucking heat.

  The trouble is, Carné said, all the fucking lies. First we were sailing to England, and then it was Malta we took, and now we’re here, and Christ knows why. The fucking heat and the flies and scorpions and all this fucking sand. On on on, loaded with fucking equipment, only dry biscuits to eat and no water bottles, not that there’d be any water to put in them. Thiriet went mad, crying out ha ha ha I see you mother stop swirling about in the air with all that water pouring out of your tits, then she seemed to call out shoot yourself son, better that way, and by Jesus he did. Blondy and Tireux saw what they swore was the Nile just over the next sandhill, and Hubert said it was what they call a mirage, then he wanted to peel down his breeches to shit but we were told on on on on, got to get there before the Nile floods, wherever the fucking Nile is, so he shat all the time in his breeches like the rest of us. The sun of glory fills the sky, but it was a big baker’s oven up there with the doors wide open. Fossard screamed out that he’d gone blind, and so did Teisseire a bit later on, and later on Jacques Carrère. These fucking great swarms of black flies had plenty to drink, which was the sweat on our necks and faces. In a way you could see that a man could laugh at the extremes of the misery of it, for misery could not easily go any further, three days of it, stumbling through all this white sand like hot snow, the dried shit in our breeches, and knowing we were marching on on on on only to get cut to pieces with fucking axes and scimitars at the end of it. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains, as that bastard said. Once or twice we came to villages, but they were all empty or full of dead that the Bedouins had left to the flies and the ants, and the wells had been filled in with stones. Soon it was Alexandre Carrère that went mad and shot himself and nobody stopped him. We were like silent ghosts going through that sand, and the only sound was the buzzing of these fucking great black flies. The sky was pure metal, pewter or brass or something, clanking down on your head with no noise, and the sun was like a great round arse shitting fire.

  “What I hear,” Bonaparte said in his tent, whisking at the flies with his whip, “sounds very like mutiny. I gave General Mireur a chance which he dredged up enough honor to take, but there will be no more suicides on my staff. I will shoot General Dumas with my own hand.”

  “There’s a lllimit—”

  “I will set an example. At the same time let it be known to all ranks that their troubles are nearly over. Temporarily, of course. We shall soon be in Cairo. Murad and Ibrahim are frightened. Now you can tell Croisier to come in.” He took a draught of Italian wine unmixed with water. Captain Croisier almost tottered in, young, scared, pale, sweating. Bonaparte said:

  “Your military conduct shows you unfit to be an aide-de-camp. You are a trained soldier leading trained soldiers. It was inexcusable of you not to wipe out that band of Bedouins. They penetrated some of the outer tents. They killed, they stole, they got away.”

  “It was a very large band, sir. I had only a handful—”

  “Don’t interrupt. To think that an officer of the French Army, an officer moreover entrusted with so high and intimate an appointment—I am ashamed. A ragged troop of marauding Moors, flea-bitten, disease-ridden—”

  “As I said, sir, we were outnumbered.”

  “Outnumbered? We are always outnumbered. Numbers are nothing, as I showed again and again in Italy. You’re a stain, you’re a blot, a cowardly travesty of a soldier of the Republic. Do you hear me?”

  “I can hardly do otherwise, sir.”

  “Insolence.” And he cracked Croisier on the body with his whip.

  “That, sir, is surely inexcus—”

  “Don’t. You. Tell. Me. What.” This time the blow was on the left cheek. In almost no time the flies were feeding. “I hope, sir, you will know how to make amends.”

  “Have no fear of that, general. If you want a sacrificial victim, you shall have it.”

  “I don’t want a suicide. I don’t want that sort of cowardice again. You’ll have your chance. Now get out. Out” And the whip swished.

  Nerves, Berthier was thinking, nerves. Is it worth it, any of it? He had forgotten, in his own exhaustion, what precisely they were supposed to be doing here. Doubts crept: his youth, the mess of the disembarkation, the encumbrance of scientific civilians, the worst possible season of the Egyptian year. It was something to do with modernizing this country and something to do with India and Africa and British trade. And saving the Republic, in all this sand, miles from anywhere. Berthier said:

  “On bbbehalf of the savants, Monsieur Monge wishes ttt—”

  “S
oft civilians. No time for them now, let them suffer like the troops. Conquer first, civilize after.”

  They could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsmoke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya. The citizen troops threw themselves into it like crocodiles and soaked and swilled and gorged, champing the water like solid food, inhaling it like air. Trauner and others burst like blown frogs; others, luckier, vomited up gallons like public fountains. Then Barsacq yelled watermelons, and soon they were all gouging and bayoneting and tearing with sore teeth. They lay like babies, sucking succulent pulp. Gabutti got through eight in a single sitting, then the dysenteries started. Mayo and Bonin lay moaning while their entrails pumped out through their anuses. Borderie died wondering what those big pointed things were, staring through the mist, the Holy Trinity perhaps, come to get him.

  Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding, guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy guns and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves onto the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam onto the uncircumcised, they wheeled and swung toward their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.