Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  “Wait over there, Captain,” Jules said.

  “What for?” Delescluze asked.

  Jules’s eyes blazed at that. “Major Dupree! Escort this—” Delescluze scowled and drew back before the command was issued. Jules knelt again.

  “Madame,” he said, touching her arm gently. She pulled away from him. He drew his hand back. She looked at him through haunted eyes.

  “Madame, I must know. The captain” – he indicated Delescluze – “the captain says that the Prussians were here. I must know, madame. Is it true? Did they do this to you? Did Prussians kill your husband?”

  The woman quivered. Her whole body shook like a leaf. She said nothing. Her eyes had lost none of the terror he had seen in them earlier.

  “Madame, s’il vous plaît. You are safe now. Tell me what has happened here. If there are Prussians we must find them quickly.”

  Silence.

  Jules tried a few more times, but to no avail.

  “See what you can get from her, Major,” Jules said to Dupree, and then he returned to Delescluze.

  “Did she tell you lies, Colonel?” Delescluze asked. “Why would she do that?” Jules’s voice was sharp. “She’s hysterical. She could say anything.”

  “What could she say that would be of concern to you, Captain?” Jules gave him a cold, appraising look.

  “She’s a cripple, Colonel. Just a crippled peasant woman. It doesn’t matter what she says.”

  “You disgust me, Captain. She’s a Frenchwoman. You should busy yourself with the Prussians.”

  “We were.”

  “There’s no sign of them. No sign they were here.” “They were here, Colonel, I tell you they were. Four of them. Uhlans. I saw them. My men saw them. We chased them away. And what about the dead man, Colonel? You think he shot himself?”

  “I wonder, Captain. Why weren’t you chasing them?”

  “We were about to chase them when you got here.”

  “It looked to me like you were beginning to chase her when I got here.”

  “Hell, Colonel, I was just having some fun.”

  At that moment one of the lieutenants Major Dupree had dispatched to reconnoiter the area around the farmhouse rode up and stopped before them.

  “Any sign of Uhlans?” asked Jules.

  “No sir, no sign at all. We’ve made two circles. Rien du tout, Colonel.”

  Jules looked long into the eyes of the captain. He was certain Delescluze was lying. He was certain he was looking at a murderer and a thief, but there was nothing he could do, not as long as the woman would not talk, and Major Dupree appeared to be having no luck. Besides, he couldn’t afford to get tied up here. He needed to be moving.

  “It appears your Prussians have disappeared into thin air, Captain,” he said.

  “They’re clever bastards all right, Colonel,” Delescluze said with a smirk.

  Jules got his face up close next to the other man’s. “I think you’re a liar, Captain. I think you’re a killer and a coward.”

  Delescluze stiffened, his face reddening. His hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, but he stopped himself.

  “Get your swine out of here, Delescluze. Get the whole stinking lot out now. If I see you again I’ll have you arrested if I have to make up a reason. I would love nothing better than to see your smile beneath the blade of a guillotine.”

  Captain Delescluze saluted with another of his waves of amused insolence. “Yes sir. Je t’emmerde. Fuck you, Colonel, sir.”

  The lieutenant, still on his horse, heard the insult and started to raise his rifle. Jules felt his blood run hot. In a lifetime of military service he had never been so abused. In Paris he would have seen personally to the man’s arrest and court-martial. Even in Châlons, in field camp, he would have done the same. And had this man been a member of the regular French forces, Jules would have done so now.

  But in that moment Jules was to make the greatest mistake of his life.

  He held the man beneath contempt and did not consider him part of the military establishment. He was a thug in charge of bandits and bullies, and wasn’t worth hot spit. Jules could not afford the men required to place him under arrest and return him to Châlons or Paris for trial. Jules had no doubt that the mangy group of assassins would kill its share of Prussians, and that, in this mistaken moment, outweighed his own need for justice.

  So it was that Jules did not act, that he waved off his own officer and let the group go. “Laissez, Lieutenant. It is not important. These… these men are leaving.”

  Delescluze smiled broadly. “That we are, Colonel, that we are.” He turned to his men. “On y’va, messieurs,” he said, bowing slightly to the colonel and waving his men along. They laughed and joked among themselves as they left the yard. In a moment they had mounted their horses and were gone.

  “Ugly lot,” said the lieutenant.

  “Bastards,” said the colonel.

  A detail buried the farmer in a shallow grave. The woman watched them with no expression on her face, never moving from where she sat. Her daughter peered out from under one of her arms. As they were about to leave, Major Dupree helped her up and into the house.

  Tbe fire burned itself out quickly. There was nothing left of the barn or anything that had been in it. A few wisps of smoke rose lazily from the rubble. Jules went briefly into the house after he satisfied himself about the other arrangements. The woman sat in the semidarkness of the sparsely furnished room. Jules stood before them. He felt terrible for what had happened, but could think of nothing to say.

  Gently he reached out and touched the little girl’s hair. It was soft, and reminded him of Paul’s hair when he was a baby. After a moment he turned and left.

  * * *

  Half an hour later Jules was atop a bluff with Major Dupree where they had a commanding view of the surrounding terrain. To the north they could see the great crawling black and gray mass of the army, still moving slowly along toward Rethel. The Prussians would be off to the east somewhere, although he could detect no trace of them. He had dispatched two squadrons to the northeast and another to the southeast with instructions that they rendezvous later that afternoon at a small village called Marchault.

  He finished scanning the horizon and turned his glass to the area beneath where they sat. He could see the farmhouse. He was still haunted by the look in the woman’s eyes, by her child. He felt the bile rising in his throat as he thought of the Francs-tireurs. It was not enough to have the Prussians with which to contend. They had to cope with these animals as well.

  How I wish I were at the front of this army, and not the rear.

  Suddenly the major touched his sleeve. “Colonel!”

  Jules looked where the major pointed. The sun was behind them, and from their vantage point they could see for kilometers. A smile grew on Jules’s face as he looked. The sun, behind his shoulder, illuminated it all: the lance carried by the lead rider, the gold emblems on the helmets, the white sashes across the chests, the crimson bands around their necks and waists, the red-rimmed blue blankets on the horses. As distant as they were, there was no mistaking it: six Uhlans, threading their way carefully through a section of trees below them. The Uhlans would not be visible from the road, but from where Jules sat the view could not have been better.

  “Any more behind them?”

  “Non, Colonel, c’est une partie settlement,” the major said. The Prussian patrol was alone, in keeping with their practice of employing small scouting parties. Jules felt his spirits soar and his blood race. Prussians, by God, there were Prussians at last! His horse felt his excitement, and stirred his feet impatiently.

  “Let’s have a go at them, Major!” He continued scanning, and stopped abruptly as his scope fell once again upon the farmhouse.

  He swore. “Merde!”

  “Colonel?”

  “Les Francs-tireurs. They’re back.”

  Delescluze and his five men had waited in the bush, and once believing the way to be clear had r
eturned to the farmhouse. Through his glass Jules watched them dismount. Delescluze led his men inside. Jules knew what they wanted. He knew what they would do. His blood ran hot as he thought about what was going to happen.

  He thought quickly. As much as he wanted the Prussians, they were a small group. Dupree could take them easily.

  He would deal with Captain Delescluze.

  “Major. I’ll keep six men. I’m going back to the farmhouse. You take the rest and have after the Uhlans. You’ll take them neatly if you wait for them there, in that stand of trees where the road bends to Attigny. After you have them, wait for us there.” Jules indicated a broad arc in the road.

  Dupree nodded, a smile on his face. It was all the same to him. Prussians or Delescluze – after weeks of nothing, they had something to do at last.

  The two parties split and disappeared down opposite sides of the bluff. Jules thought of the woman and knew there was no time to lose. He urged his horse on. Surefooted and eager, the horse negotiated the rocky terrain easily as they descended. They made their way quickly down a ravine, through a light wood, and straight through the rocky fields. As they entered the potato fields belonging to the farmhouse the men following Jules moved abreast of him, so that they rode in a line, shin to shin. The hooves of their horses made a muffled rumble as they raced across the field.

  Inside the farmhouse, Delescluze had picked himself up off the body of the woman and buttoned his fly. He was furious. The bitch had kept him from his pleasure. She wouldn’t let go of the little girl, so he had ripped the screaming thing from her arms and shoved her at one of his men like a sack of provisions. From that moment, the woman had fought like the devil, fought like no man he’d ever seen, fought him well and viciously. She had clopped him on the side of his head with her fist, making his ears ring. As he grabbed one arm, she tried to scratch his eyes out with the other, raking a fingernail across his eyeball. He roared in pain and hit her hard across the mouth. He hit her again and again, hearing something in her cheek breaking, but she wouldn’t stop fighting, wouldn’t give in. So he had reached for his pistol, to hit her with that, when she kicked him hard in the groin with that damned clubfoot. That was when his erection – so strong until then, so driven by her fury and the vigor of her blows – that was when his erection had gone from him. And once she had done that, once she had stolen his moment and changed it for pain and made him double over in agony, once he heard his men laughing behind him, laughing at his impotence in the face of this crippled woman’s battle, he had snapped, his mind cold with fury, his eyes bugged out in rage. He threw her down and pinned her beneath him and dug his fingers into the base of her throat and pressed down, pressed past her gasping and choking, pressed deep down until he could feel her spine with his thumbs, and she looked at him through awful eyes of hatred, eyes that were bulging but would not submit, and her lips turned purple, and finally, after what seemed an eternity, her arms went limp little by little and her legs weakened, until at last she stopped struggling and the life went from her and she died.

  “Fucking whore!” he roared at her as he struggled up. “Bitch!”

  One of his men laughed. Delescluze turned and hit him, knocking the man to the ground, and that is when the captain looked through the broken front window and saw Jules and his men storming across the field. Delescluze knew he and his men could not run. There was no choice.

  He knew what they had to do.

  No one in Jules’s squad was expecting a battle. They expected a bit of a dustup with some drunk and poorly disciplined irregulars, and multiple arrests. They looked forward to it, confident, even arrogant as they rode side by side – proud men of the Imperial Guard in their white uniforms and red breeches and black jackboots and epaulets, the fearsome Guard, the plumes on their golden helmets streaming behind them in the breeze. They would romp through it quickly, and rejoin the major where the real action was.

  They were drawing close to the farmhouse when the roar of the first fusillade erupted from within, killing four of them outright. The colonel’s horse took a bullet in the chest and went down. Jules was thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious. Stunned, the remaining two men pulled up desperately, their horses rearing in fright. The men reached for their weapons but there was no time. Rifles roared again from within the house. Both men went down, one wounded horribly in the face, the other dead. It had all taken less than thirty seconds from the first shot to the last. The man with the face wound writhed in agony, his screams the only sound remaining.

  The door to the house opened. One of the irregulars peered cautiously out. Satisfied that there was no one else, he made his way to the screeching form on the ground. He raised his rifle and fired.

  In the potato field before the farmhouse, all was quiet once more.

  * * *

  Jules regained consciousness with his face down on the dirt floor of the farmhouse. It was the smell he recognized, something familiar about that smell, pungent and irritating. Still stunned from his fall, he saw the irregulars moving about the room, as if in a dream. They had dragged the bodies of his dead Guardsmen in from outside. Jules could count them, all hazy and fuzzy counting, one-two-three-four-five-six dead, all dead, heaped in a bloody pile of white and red, thrown on top of one another like dolls, arms and legs all jumbled together in a big mess, rivers of blood running onto the floor. He could hear laughing, talking, and then two of them came over to where he was slumped against the wall. One of them kicked him in the mouth. Jules tasted leather and grit and blood, and then they grabbed him beneath the arms and hauled him to his feet. Through his daze Jules saw the body of the woman, her dress ripped from her shoulders and hitched up around her waist. Across her chest lay her daughter, the little girl face-down, the black handle of a carving knife protruding from her back.

  Then he realized what was making the smell. One of the irregulars had sprinkled kerosene over everything in the room, over the furniture and the walls and the bodies, God, all the bodies, drenched in the stuff. And then the man knelt and lit a match, and Jules roared through his fog and lashed out, his hand finding something soft, but then someone hit him from behind, and as the flames began their work he was out again.

  When he awoke it was after dark. He couldn’t move. He was stiff all over. Everything hurt. His hands were tied tightly behind him. He couldn’t feel his fingers, couldn’t tell if they moved when he told them to. He tried to roll over but couldn’t. He groaned.

  Delescluze sat across from him in the darkness. He sat on one of the red blankets taken from a dead Guardsman. He was sipping from a bottle of brandy.

  “Well, well, our guest is awake. Sit him up,” he snapped. A soldier grabbed Jules by the shoulders of his uniform. As he did one of the epaulets ripped off. The soldier stared at the little silk cords dangling in his hand. With a laugh he reached for the other and ripped it off too. There followed Jules’s medal from the Italian campaign, a ribbon from Algeria, an insignia from St. Cyr; all the dressings of the colonel’s rank and history, and the soldier pinned them on his own plain shirt or stuffed them in his pockets.

  “There,” he said, “I’m a right proper officer of the Imperial Guard now,” and he pranced around, puffing his chest and holding the epaulets on his shoulders.

  Jules tried to get his bearings. He had no idea where he was. There was no fire in the camp, but a full moon in a clear sky provided light enough to see. They were in the country somewhere, but it was impossible to tell how far they might have come while he was unconscious. He shook his head to try to rid it of the haze. His mouth was swollen, his lips split and bloody. His head pounded, the blood surging in his temples. As the moments passed his head began to clear, and it started coming back to him, and he felt his fury rise once again.

  “Would you care for a refreshment, mon colonel?” Delescluze extended the bottle to Jules, who kicked it away savagely. His action brought a shake of the head from the captain, who rose calmly and retrieved the overturned bottle. “A shame
to waste such fine brandy,” he said. “It is from Charente. You should be more discerning.”

  “I demand you release me at once,” Jules said. For all he had been through, his voice rang strong, with absolute authority. “You must surrender to me.”

  At first Delescluze was silent, as though he hadn’t heard. And then a broad smile crossed his face and he and his men roared with laughter.

  “It is hugely funny, your joke,” he acknowledged, nodding his head in clear admiration. “But I am afraid, mon colonel, that you have become confused. It is you who have surrendered to me.”

  “The devil I have. I will see you roast in hell for this outrage.”

  “Perhaps you will see me in hell, Colonel, but not for this.” He shook his head. “No, Colonel, for this I will suffer nothing. For what has passed today, I shall take a bow on some great Paris stage, at the Comédie Française, perhaps, before crowds of those who will applaud and throw me flowers and kisses.”

  Jules could not comprehend what was being said. His tormentor’s head was bowed. Every so often he would look up, and in the bluish light of the moon Jules could make out his face. Behind the brandied glaze of his eyes there was force and purpose and terrible anger, Delescluze is not a drunk, he thought. He is a lunatic.

  “You are mad, Delescluze.”

  The captain laughed delightedly.

  “Mad indeed, Colonel, mad indeed. Through and through. Astute of you to notice.” He sat back against a great log that lay across the clearing in which they sat and lit a cheroot. The smoke rose languidly in the air. “Yes, mad is the right word, the precise meaning. Mad, but not crazy. Mad I am, mad I am…” His voice grew fainter as his mind drifted in some faraway place. He said nothing for a few moments, and then he looked at Jules.

  “I despise you, Colonel. You are disgusting. You and all your Imperial Guardsmen are swine, for you guard the Imperium. The great, the grand, the mighty Napoléon and his court of thieves, and you stand at his side and lick his boots and do his evil work. The empire is corrupt and you – you… bastard… you protect it! You preserve it!” His anger flared and his boot lashed out, catching Jules on the shin. A sharp pain shot up Jules’s leg, but his face remained impassive.