Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, Page 6

  “Did he honestly expect me to go?”

  “He honestly did. On assback and camelback and quin-quereme or however one gets to the Sublime Porte, if that’s the right name. A good thing for you you didn’t go. They’d be presenting your ballocks, nicely mounted, to Sir Smith there.”

  “So that’s the end of Egypt. A pity in a way. A Gallicized Cairo would have been pleasant for a winter holiday. Aperitifs in the sun.”

  “And the smell of camel-dung. No, Egypt won’t do. No ecclesiastical saltcellars there. It’s mad. All that comes out of Egypt is letters screaming about divorce. Has there ever been anything like it before in the whole history of the world? The British press prints evidence that our friend’s a cuckold, and the intended recipient gets his letter by courtesy of London, Frankfurt and the Paris press. Well, this is perhaps the end of a promising career. It’s hard to survive that kind of laughter.” He took a draught of burgundy from a delicately wrought chalice. Talleyrand seemed to murmur words of consecration over his before drinking:

  “Gloria mundi, gloria mundi” And then: “How long will it be, do you think, before the Directory sees what has to be done? And the Elders and the Five Hundred and all the rest of the nonsense.”

  “When they’re thoroughly frightened they’ll listen. And nod. And say yes yes yes.”

  “I suppose history will say it was an interesting experiment. Useful too. Confirmatory. The bottoms of the monarchs will feel their thrones securer than ever.”

  “That isn’t what happened in England. No more absolutism after Cromwell. Nothing in history is a mere parenthesis.”

  “Did you make that up?”

  “It’s not too soon to start getting a speech ready. I have a number of little maxims of that kind. Purged and cleansed, we return to the ways of light. Would interregnum be better than parenthesis’? That partridge you have seems over-crisp.”

  “I like crisp things.”

  “Armies,” Barras said, when they got to the roast beef stage, “are very expensive.”

  “They brought you some pleasant things from Italy. Don’t you think that Tiepolo is hung a little too high?”

  Bonaparte thrust from his head the biblical associations of Gaza, but the image of gouged-out eyes kept recurring. The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body—make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy. There were so many of the skeletal or bloated who had survived the Sinai march, now torpid under the limes and lemons and olives, who might welcome the ultimate atrocity—at least on others—as the fitting artistic completion—a nod of satisfaction as the concluding horror prepared. Some were sick in their sleep as they remembered, in some dream fantastication that could hardly outdo hard fact, the tearing at raw donkey-flesh, the fetidity of sliced dromedary hump, the salt acid abomination of camel-piss. Some had fallen dead in the burning snow with the taste of crushed limes almost in their leather mouths. Of the living, furred teeth could hardly engage the golden skins, eyes swooned up in pain at the released zest. With the orchards stripped in a blue locust-swoop, the goats butchered and eaten to the very caecum, what was there to feed the two thousand prisoners on? Quartermasters snarled, with right jealousy, over the dwindling store of army biscuit. The Turks expected head-lopping but they were given freedom, what was called parole: your war is over. They did not understand: this was holy war, holy war was never over. Bonaparte dragged his men to Jaffa and whipped them to another victory, what time the fifes cried:

  Let extortion and tyranny tremble:

  Now the blood-red flag is on high.

  This time they took four thousand Turks. Some of them were parolemen of Gaza. None could be fed, none could be freed. The field officer said from caked lips:

  “But I promised quarter. It was the condition of their surrender.”

  “On whose authority?”

  “I assumed—”

  “Never assume in war.” And, after two days of discussion with his staff, he strode up and down, boots softly crunching, a fluent parcel of red and shadow in the night-fires. “Anything, some have said, but that to which we are, I am, ineluctably led. We freed the Gaza prisoners and they considered it weakness. Djezzar Pasha and his friend Sir Sidney Smith are watching. What would Djezzar Pasha do if he took four thousand Frenchmen? What, in fact, has he done, or encouraged to be done, to the Greeks they hold in the bondage of terror? I need not answer. He fights with the British but he fights in his own way.” He was puzzled at the image of a kind of French savant he knew of, a cousin of Paul Barras, a gross-bellied man in a madhouse. What was his name? “We have to decide now how to execute a regrettable duty, putting out of our minds the humane philosophies on which our Revolution is based, thinking only, as soldiers should, of the technic or method.” A man full of dreams of slaughter and earthquakes, frotting his yard with glee as he dreamed. “So how? Split the entire corpus into forty centuries, conducting each century without the walls for an entire infantry company to dispatch with ordered rifle-fire. The task could be completed in a day.”

  An anonymous deputy aide started to retch.

  “Take that officer away. Give him cognac. Unfortunately, we are not rich in ammunition. Spent cannonballs, as you have been informed, may soon have to be collected from the field, a nominal money prize awarded for each retrieval. Steel, however, iron, points and edges, are not spent as bullets are. How many heads has our guillotine in Paris shorn?” One or two staff officers thought of the guillotine for an instant with homesickness that threatened tears: a cup of coffee, a cognac (and not for nausea), a stroll by that killer, trapezoid of light in the air, Paris.

  “Iron, steel, gentlemen. They that live by the etcetera etcetera. Practicable would be a narrow egress in the outer wall—our engineers could blast one speedily, the prisoners to walk as to freedom through it, an endless file with gaps of several meters to obviate panic, two men to grasp the emergent Turk, one to fell him with a club, the executioner to perform his office—executioners in shifts, a roster can be drawn up, two men to drag the body away. The technic of execution. The axe? That means the grotesquerie of thousands of severed heads, always more frightening to the squeamish than a corpse minimally mutilated by some entering instrument. The bayonet? Our men are, ha, well-used to the bayonet. Perhaps I might depute the choice of actual mode of dispatch. General Berthier would welcome volunteers.” “Bbb—”

  “Think about it, gentlemen.” He took on a visionary look that the fires made devilish, angelic. “Conceivably a thesis might be written, a considered conspectus drawn up. The army’s functions expand, we have our Institute we need theory, thought, speculation, philosophy, all within the army. Consider, for instance, the efficient annihilation of a whole disaffected city. The unventilated room crammed with subjects—we must not think of victims, prisoners, the terms being emotive—and the introduction, by a simple pumping device, of some venomous inhalant. Our army chemists may work on such things. New methods, gentlemen, for new wars. We are done with dancing minuets.”

  They sarabanded to Acre. Captain Croisier and the rest saw a crusaders’ castle white in the glare beyond a wide ditch and the great groins of ramparts. Sea-glare and sand-glare. Nearly three hundred cannon and jolly English tars under Sir Smith, known to the Commander-in-Chief from his days at Toulon. And the Turks. Hornpipes and dervishes. Beer and sherbet. Ashkurak, mates. Fackyou, effendi. The French guns sent by sea and, inevitably, the English had captured them. They had twelve guns, twelve, mark that. It was mad, but Croisier was glad of the madness. I don’t want that sort of cowardice again. Cannot too much emphasize gentlemen the importance of taking Acre vital British naval base take it way clear to Damascus and Constantinople: words filtered down from army to brigade to division to company to platoon. And so they pounded, the guns loosing their twenty-four-pounders, pounding, while the infantry waited. Out of the smoke, incredibly, a wound gaped in the wall. They charged and met scimitars. Croisier sa
w one of his men converted to a prodigy: a bayoneting pair of hands beneath a rich arterial fountain. Another cursed as he slithered in the blood of his fellows, dancing, groping, running-on-the-spot his way out. Turks went down with shocked beard-framed open mouths, ringed fingers holding in spilling guts. Croisier saw with surprise his own legs splashing out don’t want that sort of to safety, scrambling over corpseless heads, headless corpses, cowardice again, in coughing gun-fog and thunder. But, on the last hopeless plunge into that wound, he found atonement. He watched with a sort of interest as the Turk, one eye bleeding, his mouth full of words he had a passionate and hopeless desire to understand, swung with a grunt with the scimitar. Sorry for his body, not for himself, he saw for an endless second that body spurt out its crimson gallons, himself in his head that flew and spun, the body only just about to buckle at the knees as his light went out, still in the air.

  At Mount Tabor thirty-five thousand Turks roared and slashed at the right flank under Kléber, and Bonaparte rushed in and slashed back with his four-and-a-half thousand and sent them off screaming. But Acre would not yield and disease crept through a frustrated army. Monge moaned with the dysenteries, Caffarelli died of gangrene, Bonaparte wept. “Max, Max, my dear friend Max, his heart shall go back to France with me, never leave me, cut it out tenderly, Larrey, we shall have it embalmed and kept in a fine box, there is no friendship like the friendship between men, comrades-in-arms, comrades in ideas and hopes and aspirations, women are nothing, women are treacherous toys, that wooden leg of poor dead Max Caffarelli is worth more to me than all the perfumed flesh in the Grand Turk’s seraglio, all the proffered bosoms of the stinking Paris salons, when I think what that bitch bitch did to me and she lives, lives, fornicates, grins, glories in her infidelity, and as for those fucking idiots in the so-called Fighting 69th, the number is right, 69, they suck cocks, no, they have no cocks, they’re a load of simpering treacherous pansies, they won’t take Acre, oh no, I’ll have their breeches off and dress them in skirts, cunts they have not cocks, poor poor dead Max, a scholar, a fighter, a man.” A time-bomb fired from Acre fell at his feet and he was dragged back by two grenadiers. A shell struck the gun-fascines where he peered through his telescope and knocked him back so as nearly to knock Berthier over. He cursed women, the cruel fates that had taken Caffarelli, cursed Berthier, the 69th, the bubonic plague, the foul water, the weeviled biscuit. He saw thirty ships sailing in proudly from Rhodes, an Anglo-Turkish fleet full of fresh and ready marines. Now or never, he ordered a blistering attack and the jollies and tars were ready for him, yare me hearties so much for the Frenchies, and drove him out. He danced before the 69th, tore off his buttons, out his hair, had an untimely accession of micturition after dysuria and stained his breeches, raged and dithered so that it was a great and memorable wonder.

  “That’s what I’ll do,” he screamed, “I’ll have your fucking trousers off and parade you as prickless creampuffs, you ungrateful and cowardly effeminate bastards, not one decent cubic millimeter of man’s sperm in the fucking lot of you, I’ll turn you over to the Turks to have great men’s rods stuck up your wincing sweet little arseholes, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll paint and powder you and sell you in the market, not that you’d fetch more than two cunting Turkish piasters, the sweet-breathed girly-wirly mincing and primping lot of you, a load of perverts and bloodless bastards of bitches’ gets, get out of my nauseated line of fire before I spew, you filthy cockless unsoldierly ingrates.” And then there were the sick to be transported back to Cairo (where already the holy war might have spread like the bubonic and smiling beards above gelders’ knives be waiting at the gates), and how in the name of filthy castrating Allah did you march men back through the Sinai who couldn’t even sit a mule? He reviewed the sweating patients in gloom, all distorted with buboes, and if you could kill prisoners, breaking one rule of war, you could. Put them out of their misery, you did it with animals.

  “Out of their misery.” To Desgenettes, in charge of medical services. “A strong dose of laudanum. I think you know what I have in mind.”

  “An overdose? You mean, you suggest, you would order that I give an—?”

  “I did not use that word, you did. A strong dose, I said. An unusually strong dose. That’s not the same as an overdose.”

  Desgenettes gave the cold-blood Turk-slayer a look of special awe: killing your business, mine save lives. “It may act as an emetic. Painful in their weakened—”

  “They’ll vomit the plague up, they may vomit the. What do you want, eh, what are you after?” He double-rayed onto the groom, a good obsequious man, disproportionate lightning. “What horse, you say, which horse do I choose, do I hear aright, horse? Horses only for the incapacitated, do you hear me, everyone else on his own two feet or one foot or whatever he has. Poor Max, poor poor Max. Including me, yes, me, yes, me, me, me.” And he laid into the groom with his whip. He likes it, Desgenettes thought, he likes to be cruel.

  “Can I go now, sir?” the smarting groom said.

  “Go, go, go.” And a couple of whip-strokes on his back. “Who asked you to come in the first place?”

  A good question to ponder as they trudged. Out of Syria with. Yelling fly-swarms of rear-harriers and. Marauders. He did, lui, but he would, would he not, proclaim himself no more than the agent of the goddess of republics, reason, humanity, knowledge, scientific progress, the goddess being encharged with many portfolios. A book of many volumes, all about Egypt, was being paid for by that man roped to a mule, vomiting endlessly into the sand, the vomit punching a transitory hole into the dense mob of black flies that fed on him, that man in multiplicate. And the British flag flew in the Acre wind and, on the Mediterranean, British warships flaunted like whores in the Place de la Concorde.

  “The laudanum worked, the excess dose.”

  “What?”

  “Some of them expelled the activating organism. Praise God, or lui, or something.”

  Sand and sand and everywhere was sand,

  Sand and sand and sand on hand and hand,

  The Holy Land I understand is sand.

  Expand the planned command that planned the sand,

  With blue too true a blue too blue to view

  Garagorigrawninfieryfieryflaw

  And blue to you who blew the few that flew.

  Then band and bland and brand and gland and grand

  And hand and land and rand and strand and sand

  And then remand the band in ampersand

  And overland and reprimand the sand.

  From Murat: They fell on such fleshpots as were, and lui, hardly pausing for a bath and a change of uniform, fell on his little blonde from Carcassonne. It was a matter of watching the sea, and the expected Turkish fleet was sighted making, it was evident, for Alexandria, or rather the peninsula they name Aboukir. We gave them a whole fortnight to encamp and to rest and reinvigorate our men. Report spoke of some ten thousand Turks, many of them of the new militia or, in their language, yeniceri, yeni meaning new, and frenched to janissaries, colorful in their red and blue and well-trained in the employment of musket, saber and pistol. When lui observed their formation—one line on flat ground and another on Mount Vizir—he said what was difficult at first wholly to understand: “She was wrong about water, wrong, wrong, wrong.” We concentrated on the line that stretched along the plain, Lannes with L’Estaing breaking the center, and your humble servant (whom, I fear, you will be shocked to see changed facially if not in heart or in the prowess of the amorous lists) to lead the cavalry against the flanks. As expected, the whole line retreated in some disorder to join their fellows on the hill, and then it was a matter of a vigorous cavalry charge into the very heart of these Mussulman worthies. It was on this occasion that your servant lost his good looks. I was honored to be confronted by the Turkish general himself, a fine if ancient fellow named Mustufa or Mustafa, the Mussulman being uncertain as to his vowels, who fired straight at my jaw with some inevitable disordering of both bone and dentition,
whereupon I slashed at my assailant’s hand, driving to the ground in one saber-stroke both the pistol and two of his fingers. The pain in my lower jaw was slow in declaring itself, and I was able to share in the ensuing victory. The gallant victor must ever have some measure of compassion for the vanquished, especially when they are rendered pitiable by forces beyond the scope of the attacker. Thus, the sight of thousands of terrified janissaries plunged to certain drowning is not one I would willingly witness again. The two thousand or so who lay, transformed speedily to garishly attired cadavers, were of the general order of the fairly slain, and the shivering prisoners foiled of more severed French heads, were worthy of the contempt that the lower ranks lavished upon them. It would seem that the Turkish threat has been lifted from Egypt, but the British ships continue to parade their power in the Middle Sea, and Acre remains a blot and a humiliation. Sir Smith compounds the humiliation with the foxy subtlety of his race, ensuring that certain packets reach Alexandria for transportation to headquarters at Cairo, these being exclusively made up of newspapers that report sad things of the patrie, which I for one would be glad to believe pure English slander, though I fear there may be all too much truth in the uneasy reports.

  “Stop reading those old magazines or whatever they are,” she pouted.

  “Eh? Who?” And he went on frowning at the six-weeks-old copy of the Gazette Française de Francfort. It all seemed hardly credible, what with the English and the Russians in Holland and the Austrians and the Russians in Zurich and the Turks and the Russians in Corfu, and Naples, where that royal bitch was, joining in the anti-French alliance. He had not reckoned with the Russians, who had a watery diffused kind of country. He had a sudden hunger, which chimed in with a dyspeptic jab or might have been somehow cognate with it, for some maps of Russia. Instead he had the pink and gold map of this houri here, spread over the bed and swiping languidly with a feather fan at the flying insect life. Outside the palms whistled in the night breeze.