Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  When at last she spoke her voice cut through him like a sliver of ice.

  “If you don’t begin turning in your assignments, Michel, you will fail this class,” she said. “And then, God and the bishop willing, you shall have me again next year.”

  * * *

  “I wonder if I can join the army,” Moussa said to Paul on their way home. They had stopped and were skipping rocks on the Seine. The sun was still high in the sky in what Moussa was sure had been the longest day of his life. The war couldn’t be any worse than school, and the Prussians could probably learn something from Sister Godrick.

  “I don’t think so. I think you have to be sixteen.” Paul whipped a rock across the water. It danced five times before it sank. “That’s five!” he whooped.

  Moussa threw next. He thought he had it just right. But in keeping with his day, the stone sank immediately.

  “At the rate things are going,” he said miserably, “I don’t think I’m going to make it to sixteen.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The little wooden cart seemed to find every hole in the road. Two of its spokes had broken and had been repaired with baling wire. Then the repair had broken and had itself been mended with leather straps. Each new break brought the cart closer to total destruction as it jarred and rattled along. It was pulled by a mule that looked in worse shape than the cart itself. Behind came some supply wagons and behind them, a line of men in a double file, seventy-three of them, each attached by an iron ring to a chain that ran from the back of one of the wagons and dragged in the dirt and kicked up dust with a constant clanking and rattling sound. At the front of the column rode a sergeant of the Garde Mobile, while on the sides and at the rear rode several mounted guards.

  Jules sat alone in the cart, riding while the others walked. It was a cruel concession to his rank, for it set him apart and drew attention to him, lending him a freakish air as the procession made its way on the road from Meaux to Paris. His legs were shackled in iron rings. He was thankful that his shackles could not be seen from the road, but an onlooker could be left with little doubt that he was a prisoner along with the rest.

  Châlons was a blur in his mind. He had arrived with his guard to find the encampment very nearly deserted. Most of the regular garrison and its officers were gone, the town a shadow of what it had been just a few days earlier. The streets were empty and peaceful, the residents able to move about with a freedom they hadn’t enjoyed for a long while. Jules had expected a quick resolution to his situation, once he could simply talk to anyone with a level head. He expected that to be General Ducret, the commandant of the encampment and a fair man who had been an instructor of his at St. Cyr, but the general had been called away. Colonel Merrier, the next in command and also a man known to Jules, had gone to Orléans. No officer remained above the rank of Major Cabasse, who didn’t know Jules and was unmoved by his protestations of innocence. The major had read the letter from Delescluze describing Jules’s desertion, then turned it over and read the note from the sergeant who had thwarted his escape. The major had no desire to become involved in what was clearly going to be an ugly situation.

  “There is a train leaving for Paris with other prisoners,” he said. “You will be on it.” Jules protested vehemently. The farther he got from his men, from the scene of the crimes at the farmhouse, from this part of the country, the more difficult it would be to demonstrate his innocence. His objections fell on deaf ears. And then the humiliation of it all struck him full force. There he was, addressing an inferior officer, a major, a man who ought to feel some fraternity, and in the middle of Jules’s impassioned argument, the major simply turned his back on him and without a word strode out.

  This cannot be happening to me, he thought as they led him away. This is not possible.

  The sergeant in charge of the band of prisoners was not a rude or unkindly man, and he alone showed respect for Jules. He had apologized as he put Jules into the cart and secured his leg irons. “I have to do it, sir. Orders.” As he finished he passed him a fistful of cigars. “Something for your journey, Colonel,” he said.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Jules replied, glad to have something to smoke, and gladder still for the momentary show of humanity. They set out for Paris, the sergeant on the horse, the colonel in the cart, the supply wagons behind, and the rest of the prisoners – murderers, mutineers, and deserters – trudging in the rear on foot. They followed a small road that ran alongside the river Marne. An hour out of Meaux they stopped for the night. The walking prisoners collapsed in dusty fatigue on the ground, while Jules tried to make himself comfortable in the cart. There was water, but still nothing to eat. Jules didn’t care. He was past hunger.

  It was that time of late summer when the days were still hot but the nights could get cold. Jules spent long sleepless hours shivering under a beautiful harvest moon. Several times he sat up and lit a cigar, and stared out into the ghostly black moonshadows. His mind was in turmoil, fixed on the dark mad eyes of Delescluze. He saw the bodies of his men, doused in kerosene. He saw a little girl, dead on her mother’s belly.

  He chewed furiously on the end of his cigar. He had no doubt, none whatever, that justice would be done. He had friends, powerful friends. This sham would be exposed. The real criminal would be caught and prosecuted. Jules himself would affix the blindfold and stand the man against the wall. He himself would give the order to the firing squad. He himself would administer the coup de grâce. A hundred times that long cold night he watched Delescluze die.

  The next morning as the sun was warming them, a farmer pulled up. He was carrying grain to Paris. The rear wheel of his wagon had gotten caught in a bridge support and was hopelessly broken. Each time it turned the whole load bounced and threatened to come off. A wounded soldier lay on top of the load. There was a bandage wrapped around his eyes. It was dirty and bloody, but the blood was dry. His right leg was missing below the knee.

  “Can you transport this soldier to Paris?” the farmer asked the sergeant. “I’ll not be going any farther with this rig, not for a while, and he’s got a ways to go.” The sergeant shrugged. He didn’t have to ask Jules, of course, but he was a polite man.

  “Colonel? You got any objections? He’ll have to ride with you.”

  “No. It’s fine. Here, bring him in.”

  Jules backed up as the sergeant and the farmer shifted the boy from the top of the wagon into the cart. The boy grimaced as they moved him. He was weak and clearly in pain from his injuries, but he helped as best he could. They laid him on his back on the bottom of the cart. He was a pale youth with sandy hair and white, even teeth. He was big and strong. Even through his pain he managed to occasionally find his smile, and it was that contagious sort of grin that belonged to someone people instinctively liked. After they had settled him in the sergeant threw in his bag. “There, Colonel, maybe that’ll work as a pillow.”

  “Colonel?” Jules saw the boy stiffen. “Are you a… a colonel, sir?” He said it with a mixture of respect and awe. He seemed not to know what to do. He struggled upward, to sit at attention, trying to decide through his bandages which way to look. Then, flustered, he remembered himself and started to salute. Jules put his hand on the boy’s shoulder to put him at ease.

  “Don’t bother, Private. Rest easy. Colonel deVries, Imperial Guard.”

  The boy gave a low whistle. “I’m sorry to put you out, sir. I hope I haven’t taken up room you were using.” The boy was clearly in earnest, more solicitous of the colonel’s comfort than his own. “Gosh, Colonel, sir, I’ve never been this close to a real officer before. I mean, nobody higher than a captain, sir, Captain Frossard that is, and we only used to see his backside on a horse. Never saw none like you except from a distance, sir. Somebody as low as me, you don’t see important people except from a distance.”

  “Well, I guess I’m pretty much like anybody else. What’s your name?”

  “Millarde, sir, Private Etienne Millarde, Colonel.” Even beneath his banda
ges his face was expressive. His skin was still a boy’s, smooth and fresh. He hadn’t started shaving. There was down on his chin. Jules guessed him to be sixteen or seventeen. The boy was still working out the magnitude of his company.

  “Imperial Guard, Colonel? Does that mean you’ve seen the emperor himself? I mean, up close?”

  “Many times. I’m based… I was based in the Tuileries.”

  “The palace?”

  “Oui, the palace.”

  Etienne digested that for a few minutes. He struggled against his blindness to imagine the man who must now be in front of him, a man who’d seen the emperor before, and not just at a parade, when the great man was so far away that he was just a little toy figure.

  “I sure appreciate the ride, Colonel. I’ve hitched all the way from Fohrbach. I’ve done pretty well. I want to get home. They let me go when they saw how my injuries were and all; they said I couldn’t do them no good and that if I felt like it I could make my own way. Don’t know how long I’d have had to wait otherwise. I was just stuck in a tent. Outside a tent actually, after they got my leg, since there wasn’t enough room inside.” He said it matter-of-factly, without any trace of lingering emotion.

  “You’re going straight to Paris, sir? I mean, it’s all right with me if we’re not, I don’t mean to… I just…”

  “Yes. Straight to Paris. You’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Merveilleux.” He was clearly pleased. He was almost home.

  “This transport must have important business for them to send a whole colonel.”

  Jules smiled in spite of himself at the youth’s naïveté. And then, thinking about the question in the statement, a strange new feeling swept over him, an extraordinary one he had never before encountered. It was awkwardness. He was a colonel and this was a boy, blind and crippled. And the man didn’t know what to say to the boy.

  “It’s a prisoner transport,” was the only way Jules could find to explain it.

  It was enough. Etienne was satisfied.

  “If you ask me, Colonel, you should just shoot them instead of taking them prisoner. They’re animals, and would do the same to you or me.” Clearly, the boy thought he meant they were transporting Prussian prisoners. Again, Jules felt the terrible turmoil of the lie, of a situation too bizarre to explain. He had done nothing wrong, and this boy was only a private. It shouldn’t matter. But somehow it did, and once more he had no idea what to say.

  “You smoke?”

  “When I can get it, yes sir, I do.”

  Jules handed him a cigar. The boy took it in his hand and felt it. It was fat and fine. He passed it under his nose. A satisfied grin blossomed on his face. “Thank you, Colonel, it’s a fancy one, that.” Jules lit it for him and the boy leaned back, contented. He took a puff and burst into a fit of coughing. The coughing sent him into spasms of pain. Jules could read agony all over his face, but there was nothing he could do. Etienne took a minute to recover, breathing deeply until he regained his composure.

  “Sorry, sir. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve had something as good as this.”

  “That’s all right. The next one will smoke easier.”

  The cart bounced over the road. Each hole sent a jolt through the cart that telegraphed itself through Jules’s body. It was a rough enough ride for him, and after a few hours of it his back and arms and legs were aching. He knew it must be hell for the boy, but Etienne didn’t complain. The hours passed slowly, like the countryside. The caravan settled into a sleepy rhythmic march. The Marne was full of driftwood that floated lazily past them. He watched it as they talked. Jules welcomed the boy’s company. It was nice to have someone to help pass the time. Jules answered eager questions about Algeria and Italy, and talked about military history. Not given to small talk, Jules was uncomfortable at first, but the boy’s nature was so easygoing that soon Jules relaxed a bit and felt almost at ease. The boy listened raptly, engrossed in the stories of foreign campaigns, of generals long dead and battles long won. He talked a great deal himself, with great enthusiasm on every topic. He was the only child of a carpenter and a cleaning woman, a poor family who lived in Montmartre. He had been unemployed before joining the army. He had been in the army only three weeks before they put him on a train for the front.

  “I’m a substitute,” he said proudly. It was a grand word for him, and he waved his cigar in the air as he said it. “There was a broker’s son got a bad number in the draft. He had insurance, and it was my turn. I got to go.” He took a puff off the cigar and didn’t cough. “I got fifteen hundred francs for my mother. It was more money than she’d seen in a long time, that’s sure. She had to lie some about my age to get me—” He caught himself and his face flushed red as he realized his gaffe. “Oh, Colonel, sir, I know it was wrong, but my mother needed the money so bad—”

  “Don’t worry,” Jules said. “Your secret is safe with me. Anyway, it was a brave thing to do.” It was a common enough practice. If a man’s number came up in the military draft, another man could be paid to fulfill the service. Fifteen hundred francs was the going rate, and there were even insurance companies that sold cheap policies to those who could afford it. A substitute would be found, glad to have the money, and the question of military obligation was satisfied.

  “Where were you wounded?”

  “At Spicheren, sir. At least I think it was. Nobody had maps. Somebody said it was Giferts. That’s a forest, I know, so it might have been. But I guess it might have been somewhere else, too. We were lost most of the time. We did a lot of wandering around.”

  “I know the forest of Giferts. I’ve been there.” Jules had passed through it some weeks earlier, before the battle. The woods had been empty and still, no different than all the other places he’d been in those early weeks.

  “Giferts or anywhere, I guess we saw the Prussians, by God,” Etienne said. “We whomped them for a while, too, Colonel. Gave as good as we got. There was lots of rain, and it was hard to make out what was going on, but we could see enough, I guess. The battle messengers told us where to go, and then they changed up and told us somewhere else to go, but it didn’t matter. We could see the Prussians coming up the hill. We had our Chassepots, and we popped a bunch of them without their even knowing where the fire was coming from.”

  Etienne paused for a minute, as if wondering how much to exaggerate to his audience.

  “I don’t think I actually got any of them with my rifle,” he admitted, guilt in his voice. “I shot a lot and my gun got hot, but I never actually saw anybody I was aiming at fall down or anything.”

  “It’s hard to see that in a battle. You don’t know. Nobody knows. You just fire. I imagine they knew you were there.”

  Etienne smiled at the thought. “Yes, sir, I guess they did at that. They knew I was there. We had a mitrailleuse too, but nobody knew how to use it right.” Jules had seen demonstrations of the gun before the war. It was a terrible weapon, accurate and deadly, modeled after the American Gatling gun. It was far in advance of anything the Prussians had, but had been developed in such complete secrecy and released for use so soon before the outbreak of war that few units knew how to use it to advantage.

  “We killed some with it, I know, but then it was getting dark, and after that nothing we did mattered much. They said we had thirty German companies out there in front of us. The First and Second Armies, right there in the woods, on the other side of a ravine. By God, we thumped them for a while too, before their artillery came. After that” – he shook his head – “they were all over us, running through us and around us, and there was smoke where some of the artillery shells had set some trees on fire, and that’s when…” He hesitated, swallowing, and took a puff off his cigar.

  “That’s when I met my Prussian, Colonel. The one I know I got, I mean. He was right there on top of me. Thought he’d surprised me, but I saw him coming. I didn’t have time to fire, so I stuck him with my bayonet. Stuck him like a pig, just as he was there on me, and he kne
w sure enough he was dead. I held him up on the end of my rifle and I could feel… I could feel him squirm.” Etienne was breathing heavily as he relived the moment, not in terror but in pride. He had done what he was supposed to do for his fifteen hundred francs. He had found himself a Prussian with the end of his bayonet.

  “I could see his eyes. They were real scared like, and his mouth was open, and I could see his tongue, all swollen and moving like he was trying to say something. Only he just kind of choked and threw up on me. That was the last thing I saw, was when he threw up. I had him up there when the shell came. I heard it coming, and I guess if I hadn’t had him where he was I’d be killed now. He took most of the shell bits. Knocked him clear off me. But you know, Colonel, I’m sure I was the one killed him, not the shell. I’m sure of it.” It was vitally important to him, that distinction, something he’d worked over in his mind. No shell, especially not a Prussian shell, would steal that kill from Etienne.

  “I’m sure you did,” Jules reassured him. “A bayonet wound like that isn’t something a man walks away from.”

  Etienne nodded eagerly, cheered by the colonel’s affirmation.

  “No, sir, he didn’t walk away from it. The shell blew a dead man off me, but I caught some of it anyway. They said it chewed up my eyes pretty good. One was all minced up and I felt the other one was hanging out. I shoved it back in quick as I knew what it was, but I guess it wasn’t enough. Don’t guess I’ll be seeing much anymore.”.

  A kind of shadow passed over his expression. It was the closest Jules had seen him to reacting – to crying, to yelling, he didn’t know what – but Etienne tensed for a moment, as if he were ready to let go. And then it passed, and he relaxed.

  “I was out there all night in the woods. Never passed out.” Again, pride. “Tied my shirt around my leg. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell it was pretty chewed up too. Stayed there all night and listened. It was all I could do. There were bugles everywhere, up that hill and all around. The bugles got some dogs to barking, and they’d bark like they were talking to each other, talking about the fighting, talking back and forth through the woods. It went on and on all night. Then I heard someone talking German, and I did my best to look dead, because I knew they’d kill me if they found me like that. I guess I looked pretty dead because they never stopped. They just kept running by. After the fighting was over I heard lots of crying, Colonel, lots of hollering and carrying on. I think that was worse than all the rest put together, the carrying on. I didn’t. I mean I didn’t say a word or let out a yell or anything. Not even when they took my leg, sir,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “Not even when they took my leg.”