Musket for a King

by Todd Shryock

  “I urge you to shoot true and straight, aiming for the heart,” Niklas continued. “If the target does not die, you will have to reload and shoot again while the man suffers in agony. Best to end it now with one good, clean shot.”

  He stepped aside, looking down the line. “Ready!”

  A steady drumroll broke the air as he raised his black hickory cane.

  His eyes drifted to the captain, who dipped his chin once.

  We raised our muskets. I took aim for the heart of the condemned. It was only then I realized I was looking at the cherubic face of the boy who had asked me questions during training, the one I thought far too young to be in the army. I wanted to close my eyes, to fire my gun high in the air, but Niklas’ words echoed in my ears. It would do no good – we would just have to do it all again with the maimed boy screaming in agony.

  The cane cut through the air.

  My finger instinctively pulled the trigger before the word “fire” hit my ears.

  My shoulder bucked and the air filled with smoke and noise.

  When it cleared, three bodies lie on the ground, the one in the middle writhing in pain.

  As for the cherubic boy, he lie still, dead.

  Niklas quickly strode to the victims, and I left the line to join him. The man in the middle had been hit three times in the chest, but none hit the heart. He was bleeding and struggling to breathe, his hand clawing at the air for us to help him, eyes wide.

  The captain rode up beside us, all eyes of the battalion watching the drama.

  “Your men should have shot him in the heart like they were supposed to,” he said coldly. He pulled a pistol from his horse and nudged Niklas on the shoulder with it. “Now you must finish it.”

  Without hesitation, Niklas took the pistol, pointed it at the man’s heart as his eyes went even wider, and pulled the trigger. A sharp crack ended the man’s suffering as a smoking hole appeared in the center of his chest. Niklas handed the pistol back to the captain and strode off, whispering, “dismiss the men,” as he left.

  I stood transfixed by the dead man’s stare. Next to him, the cherubic boy stared at me, as if he, too, was appalled by my actions. How could I let such injustice happen?

  There was no reason for it.

  “Such is the consequence of not doing one’s duty,” the captain said before leaving the square, the officers solemnly marching off behind him on foot.

  I continued to stare at the dead men.

  “Should we bury them, corporal?” a voice asked in my ear. One of the shooters was standing beside me.

  “Yes,” I said, my voice breaking, forcing me to clear my throat and repeat the word. “Yes. It would only be right.”

  The man stared at me, but I ignored his gaze, too mesmerized to look away from the dead.

  “Well, it will be the only right thing we’ve done today.”

  Men moved past me, gently closing the eyes of the condemned, grabbing arms and legs to carry them off to some field to be buried — someplace friends and family would never know. Some place only the almighty could find them.

  When I finally looked up, I realized the battalion was still watching, their judgmental eyes boring into me.

  “Dismissed,” I said, lacking the rank or authority to do so.

  The battalion stood for a moment longer, then slowly dissolved throughout the village, some opting to help with the burial while others wanted to get as far away as possible.

  Long after the bodies were removed and buried and the sun left the sky, I still stood in the square.

  Tears ran down my cheeks but provided little comfort.

  The boy was gone.

  Chapter 14

  For two weeks, we played a deadly game of cat and mouse with local partisans, but for most of the time, we were the mouse, swatted at with lead balls fired from concealed positions. By the time we got to where the shots had been fired, the shooter was long gone. Casualties rose as isolated foraging parties were attacked, wounding and killing many. In one case, the men had been captured, castrated and nailed to a tree.

  The captain may not have liked us, but he liked the local peasants even less.

  Riding out to see the mutilated men for himself, he began grinding his teeth until he was practically foaming at the mouth with rage.

  “I want the villagers to tell me who did this,” he hissed.

  By now, we had our suspicions who was sympathetic to the partisans, which was pretty much everyone, and who was most likely helping them.

  “Sergeant,” the captain said, turning his fury toward Niklas. “Get me answers.” The way he said it made it clear that failure would be painful.

  Niklas said with great determination, “Yes, sir.”

  Soon, we were part of twenty men tearing apart the house of a local merchant, harassing his chubby wife and fat little children to tell us about the partisans as we spilled clothing from cupboards and pulled boards from the floor. Shouting and yelling ruled, with us launching accusations while the parents denied them and the children cried.

  Something about the destruction made me happy, and I gleefully tore things apart, more focused on the chaos than on looking for evidence.

  Niklas emerged from another room and shouted for us to stop what we were doing. A small silver watch on a slender chain swung from his hand.

  His eyes were focused on the merchant as the silver watch slowly swung back and forth in a hypnotic pattern. “Look what I found,” Niklas said.

  The merchant eyed the watch, his face full of confusion.

  “This belonged to one of our murdered men, yet it was in your house,” Niklas said, stopping before the man.

  “No, no, that cannot be,” the merchant stammered.

  “But yet here it is,” Niklas said.

  I knew there was no way that any of our privates carried a watch that valuable. Even if it had been looted, it would have long since been sold off or traded for something useful.

  “I do not know that watch.”

  “I shall have you shot for this,” Niklas said, his voice emotionless.

  The merchant shook his head in disbelief. “That is not my watch. I do not know how you came of it, but it was not in this house.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” Niklas suddenly screamed, creating a fresh wave of wails from the fat little children, the watch jammed in the man’s face.

  “No, no, no,” the man blubbered, his eyes cast to the floor in defeat. “I do not know this watch.”

  “Then one of your partisan friends must have left it here.”

  “No!” the man’s eyes lit up. “No fighters here! No fighters!”

  Niklas held the watch at arm’s length now, letting it dangle before the man.

  “You will tell me who the partisans are who killed my men, or I will kill you and your whole family,” he said.

  The man dropped to his knees, clutching at Niklas.

  “No, no, I do not know this watch. I do not know these fighters.”

  “Then I shall shoot your family, starting with your children.” Niklas unslung his musket from his shoulder.

  I had no doubt he meant what he said. I just found it odd that I had no feelings about the matter; whether the fat merchant and his family lived or died was far beyond me. This wasn’t my village and these weren’t my people. His kind tried to kill me and mine. Let them all die.

  “Frederick!” the wife blurted out. “Frederick, across the street. He is one of the men, I think. I saw him leave his house late at night!”

  Niklas reslung his musket and patted the merchant on the head. “You poor fool, your wife is braver than you.” He snatched the watch out of the air and slipped it into his pocket, motioning for me to lead the men out of the house.

  Within twenty minutes, Frederick, a young man of about nineteen, lay dead in the street, shot in the head by Niklas, his parents screaming in anger as we held them back as they tried to reach their dead son.

  Their faces were contorted as tears and spittl
e flew, but I couldn’t understand what they were yelling. I just kept using the butt of my musket to knock them back – and sometimes down – until the men behind me moved forward with burning torches.

  The grieving parents slipped by our cordon to cradle the bloody remains in their arms. The whole event to me was like a series of paintings – quiet, colorful and full of emotion, but I was just a detached observer from beyond the frame as the house went up in flames.

  “They must be punished for harboring secrets,” Niklas said to the men with the torches, motioning toward the fat merchant’s house.

  It, too, went up in flames as the fat little family shouted in protest.

  The heat and flames grew, the wind whipping the fire until both buildings were engulfed and the sparks spattered adjacent houses, threatening to take down the whole village.

  A messenger thundered into town, pulling his horse up next to Lieutenant Idiot who had been watching with some amusement as Niklas went about his business. A few words were exchanged, the drums beat the recall and word spread. The whole battalion was assembling for march immediately. We had been ordered to rejoin the main army as quickly as possible.

  Our line of green marched down the dusty road as plumes of fire and smoke rose into the sky, the flames quickly spreading as the villagers formed bucket brigades to try to stop them.

  “That village won’t exist in the morning,” Niklas stated as all but the smoke quickly faded in the distance.

  The only answer I could muster was, “Good.”

  And I hoped all the peasants perished with it.

  Chapter 15

  We forced march for three days, barely stopping, passing through dirty little unnamed hamlets and past disinterested farmers tending their fields, thankful that nothing was ready for harvest – and for us to steal. Men fell out of the march, some returned, some didn’t. We did our best to keep the younger men with us, but each roll call brought more absences.

  “They shall catch up,” the captain told us, optimistic the footsore men would rejoin the ranks once we stopped.

  We had no such illusions. “Those men deserted,” I told Niklas.

  “I know. They aren’t ever coming back,” he replied with a sense of envy.

  Food, as usual, was in short supply. Whenever we paused the march, men scattered in search of something to eat and a place to refill their canteens. The officers constantly berated us for not keeping them in line, but there is little that can be done to quell a hungry mob – especially one armed with muskets. The best we could do was to encourage them to return to the ranks as quickly as possible.

  It did give us plenty of reasons to leave the ranks ourselves in search of food. “Rounding up the men,” became a daily refrain as we roamed the countryside. Most of the time, we brought back a few men and some food; other times, we managed to find neither.

  At the end of the third day, we paused at a crossroads to let several French units pass. A general in a bicorn, his dark blue coat sporting gold epaulettes, sauntered past in the lead on a gray mare, its hooves scraping dirt from the road with its lazy gait. Thick ranks of tall men, mustaches waxed and stretching across their faces, came next. Their uniforms were immaculate and the whole unit looked as if it were on parade – blue coats trimmed with red collars, cuffs and epaulettes contrasting against white tunics, cross belts and gaiters. A sergeant carrying a golden eagle on a staff led the procession as drums beat and the men marched perfectly in step.

  “Imperial guard,” Niklas said absently as the men marched past, their bearskin hats secured to their packs in favor of the lighter fatigue caps for their journey. “The best troops the emperor has.”

  While they looked martial, we looked slovenly. Their equipment perfectly matched and their clothing looked freshly issued, while ours was a collection of captured Austrian gear and cloth. The men of the guard were older and marched with a look of determination in their eyes. The last time I looked around during our march, the men were unfocused and bored.

  “If the guard is near, then so, too, is the emperor,” I said.

  “True,” Niklas said, his voice soft. “Their emperor. Not ours.”

  I watched the ranks continue to smartly step by. “But yet here we are, ready to join the fight.”

  By this point, our own officers had clustered near the head of our column to watch the parade. They must have been jealous at the amount of elan and perfection shown by the guard, and when they looked back to us, it was the look of a man who suddenly realizes his girlfriend is not as pretty as he thought.

  The end of the ranks moved past, the sergeant at the end of the line looking at the officers with a quick jerk of his head. He snapped a salute, then snapped his head forward again, eyes front. Several regimental baggage wagons closely followed, but soon the word came to start forward once more. After seeing the beauty and grace of the guard, we felt like children playing dress-up soldier using grandfather’s old coat and sticks for guns. Our officers said little as they dropped back into their respective places along the line. No amount of shouting or encouragement would turn our motley bunch into the machine we had just witnessed. All of us felt like failures.

  We trudged along, dragging our feet much like the general’s horse, not really liking our job or where we were going or why we were doing it. But what choice did any of us have?

  The rest of the day was a frustrating set of starts and stops as our column became a human accordion. First battalion was now in front of us, but their column would halt, forcing us to do the same. We would stand unmoving for up to half an hour, then suddenly lurch forward once more, with no sign of what caused the holdup.

  As the sun set, we were assigned to an open field that was too small for one battalion, let alone two, and by the time we moved off the road, there simply wasn’t any space left to set up any sort of camp.

  Niklas and I found an open spot in a dry ditch and plopped down as men grumbled about everything from the lack of food to how the army couldn’t even provide enough dirt to sleep on. There was no wood for a fire and little to eat. I managed a handful of dried peas I had stolen on one of my forays from the march, but that was all I had for dinner. Some didn’t even have that much.

  Distant musketry, mostly scattered shots and not full volleys, snapped through the air. The more experienced men cocked their heads, assessing how far away it was, as a few officers headed toward the captain’s tent being set up further down the road.

  “Enemy is close,” one man said from the twilight around me. “Probably be a big to-do tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” another answered. “Sentries probably feeling each other out. Hard to find the lines in the dark.”

  From what I knew, I couldn’t disagree. Armies are giant blind animals that often stumble about, brushing against each other and coming to blows, but not always knowing exactly what their opponent looks like or even where they are. So they thrash about, sending thousands to their death in angry screams of fire and lead as the earth trembles under their weight. And when it’s all over years later, the massive animals with long tails of dead, settle back down into their dens, satisfied their territory has been protected.

  ***

  I woke up with a boot nudging me in the ribs.

  “We’re moving out,” Niklas said.

  The sky was still dark, but men were starting to stir as the order swept through our camp, which was really just an open area where everyone collapsed after the march.

  I pulled myself from the ditch and slung on all my equipment, rousing those around me with my voice as I did so. “Up, up, second battalion,” I said. “Pass the word.”

  Of course, first battalion was also awakening, and I saw it was going to be nearly impossible to get the men separated in such a small space. To make matters worse, at some point during the night, another battalion had taken up the field across the road and was also trying to assemble. I couldn’t see who they were but could tell they were speaking German.

  Shouts rang out throug
h the darkness. “First battalion, assemble forward, follow the voice commands. Second battalion here!” I saw silhouettes moving about but couldn’t tell who was speaking.

  The morning was cool and damp, and moisture clung to everything, making me wish for even a small fire to warm myself, but there was no wood and no time for such frivolity. Someone stood in the middle of the road, shouting for second battalion to form on him, so I moved about the field, pushing anyone who answered my call for second-battalion men in the right direction.

  Some intrepid person managed to assemble a makeshift torch and hold it aloft on the road, which gave me a temporary reference point to direct the men to, but it quickly went out and did not reappear.

  As the field emptied out, the situation became worse. Clumps of men were standing about on the road, while other groups tried to move through them to get to their respective battalions, calling out battalion numbers until they were satisfied they were in the right place. The battalion across the road was also trying to assemble on the road, which greatly confused things, because they were also apparently identifying themselves as a first battalion, which led the second-battalion men to think they were in the wrong spot and moved further back.

  “Second battalion, here!” I yelled, taking up position near the middle of the road, joining the calls of the officers and sergeants attempting to call in our men the way a mother bird cries out for its chicks.

  Someone approached, asking if we were Westphalians. “No, Wurttemberger.”

  The man snorted and moved off. I assumed this meant the battalion across from us was Westphalian, another one of Napoleon’s hapless German-speaking allies. I wondered what their king had been promised for his loyalty and the blood of his citizens?

  After a half hour, most of the mess had sorted itself out. A mounted officer rode the length of the line calling for any remaining first-battalion men to follow him forward and for everyone else to stay where they were. Not long after that, I heard the drums beat and the head of the column started forward, stragglers be damned.