Officer's Prey (The Napoleonic Murders)

by Armand Cabasson

  He was dashing towards them as cannonballs bounced around him. The hussar in him was awakening and he was furious. Piquebois became frenzied, as in the past at the height of the charge. He wanted to fling himself into the midst of the Imperial Horse Guard and perish in the heat of battle, in a climax of blood, broken bones and severed limbs. Margont went running after him but would never have caught up with him had a shell not exploded near his friend. Margont picked Piquebois up, slung him over his shoulder and brought him back to the redoubt. Piquebois, half-conscious, was delirious. He could see the famous Imperial Horse Guard galloping along, roaring with laughter and pointing at him.

  While the taking of the Great Redoubt was in its final phase, Kutuzov ordered his Imperial Horse Guard to charge the French cuirassiers. But French cavalry reinforcements were sent in. At the end of this massive clash between mounted troops the Russian cavalry was driven back and several enemy infantry regiments also received a mauling. By four o’clock the Russian left flank had fallen back. The centre, although seriously weakened by the loss of the Great Redoubt and the village of Semenovskaya, was still holding out.

  Once more Napoleon wondered whether he should send in his Guard against the Russian Foot Guard, who had formed square, and the survivors of the other units. He had never encountered an enemy so ferocious and tenacious. He did not sense that the Russians were about to give in yet.

  After much hesitation, he declared: ‘Eight hundred leagues away from Paris you do not risk your last reserve.’ He had his last reserve guns brought into position and gave this order to General Sorbier, who was commanding the Imperial Guard: ‘Since they want more, let them have it.’

  The Russians now had four hundred cannon firing at them. But Kutuzov stood his ground and answered back with his ordnance. This unprecedented artillery duel ended only when night fell.

  The Grande Armée had lost thirty thousand men, killed or wounded, including forty-eight generals. Russian losses stood at fifty thousand. Fewer than a thousand of those had been taken prisoner. But the Russian army had not been destroyed, so the war was not over.

  After holding a tense council of war with the heads of the general staff in an ordinary isba, Kutuzov decided to pull back his army. He preferred losing Moscow to losing both his army and Moscow. However, he had a victory message sent to the Tsar announcing that he had ripped the French army to pieces, destroyed the Imperial Guard, captured one hundred guns and taken sixteen thousand prisoners, including Prince Eugène, Davout, Ney and Murat. Only the claim involving Murat was true because General Bonnamy, after surviving the twenty bayonet thrusts he had received in the Great Redoubt, had proclaimed that he was the King of Naples in order to be spared. As fortune often favours pragmatists, Rostopchin, the governor-general of Moscow, ordered a Te Deum to be celebrated in the Upenski cathedral in the Kremlin and the Tsar promoted Kutuzov to General Field Marshal and paid him a handsome reward.

  With the Russian army in retreat, the road to Moscow was now well and truly clear.

  CHAPTER 25

  HE was wandering amongst a vast expanse of corpses. To him, these bodies suggested dead leaves mistakenly carpeting a summer landscape. One scene had particularly struck him. Before his very eyes a cannonball had wrought havoc in a column of infantrymen. In a flash the projectile had blown off the left legs of seven soldiers who were advancing in single file. The man walked along in its wake, among the mangled victims, scattered limbs and pools of blood. Almost immediately he felt empty once more. A little further on, he noted the entangled bodies of combatants and imagined their struggle. However, the tumult of this slaughter soon faded from his mind, like a patch of fog dispersed by the wind. He crouched down to stroke the cheek of a Russian drummer boy barely twelve years old, hunched up, his stomach smashed to pieces by shell splinters. His gesture would have melted the hardest of hearts. It was not the child he wanted to caress, but death itself, and even that did not entertain him for long. He stood up, in a state of turmoil. He had witnessed an appalling butchery and yet he was already beginning to miss the suffering. He was afraid of no longer being able to escape detection. He felt the veneer wearing thin. He wondered how much bloodshed he would need to witness in order finally to feel assuaged.

  *

  The soldiers were marching stooped, their shoulders hunched. They looked like ghosts wandering in the night. Although he was as exhausted as the rest, Margont’s impatient pace was at odds with this spectacle and either surprised people or annoyed them. Under the pretext of asking for news about someone or other, Margont visited the 9th of the Line. He made sure that Colonel Barguelot noticed him and the colonel hailed him jovially. His uniform was gleaming and he looked triumphant.

  ‘Captain Margont! I’m glad you’ve survived. What a business! I was at the Great Redoubt during the afternoon assault, the successful one. I climbed up that wretched earthwork, sabre in hand, and there, with my fusiliers from the 9th, we caused a frightful slaughter. Frightful! It was indescribable! Indescribable! Everyone agrees that it was the fiercest part of the whole battle. You can’t imagine what it was like!’

  ‘I don’t need to, Colonel, because I was there.’

  Barguelot’s jaw dropped. ‘You were there? No, the 84th couldn’t have been there because the Delzons Division … You’re mistaken.’

  ‘The fact is that for the day I was assigned to the 13th Light of the Morand Division.’

  Barguelot was disconcerted. ‘The 13th Light … Well, yes, I did see them, of course. But there was so much smoke that you couldn’t make out a thing.’

  ‘Perhaps you noticed Colonel Pirgnon, from the 35th? He was also at the Great Redoubt.’

  ‘No. Not with all that smoke; it was worse than fog …’

  It would have been difficult, though, not to have noticed Pirgnon perched on his breastwork. And, climbing up an earthwork without dirtying his uniform … Margont himself was so covered in soil that he looked as if he had just risen from the grave.

  ‘I must leave you because I have to check up on the state of my regiment. I look forward to seeing you again, Captain.’

  The two men parted. Margont caught up with the 35th of the Line. He was unable to meet Colonel Pirgnon, who was being treated for a superficial wound to the arm, so he ended up going back to the 84th.

  Soldiers surrounding Saber were singing:

  Long live Saber! Long live Saber!

  Our hero captured the Redoubt

  Of that there ain’t the slightest doubt

  Got himself a nice promotion

  By his show of sheer devotion

  Long live Saber! Long live Saber!

  In the army no one’s braver!

  Long live Saber! Long live Saber!

  Saber motioned to him to join them but Margont kept on walking and caught up with Lefine, who had done the rounds of his spies. He was going to have to take on more. Those allotted to Pirgnon had all been killed or wounded, and only one of those keeping a watch on Colonel Fidassio had survived. The same was true for Barguelot and Delarse. Neither Margont nor Lefine could believe such a death toll.

  ‘Let’s start with Delarse,’ Margont declared.

  ‘Our surviving spy lost sight of him for three-quarters of the time. What he was able to tell me was that Delarse took insane risks. He was at the head of all possible attacks. I don’t know why the hell the general staff don’t get a move on and put him up a rank or two. At this moment he’s alone in his tent and won’t see anyone. His new adjutant took him a meal on a tray and came out soon after with soup all over his uniform.’

  Margont sat down and leant against a tree. He couldn’t take any more. He thought he could still hear the sound of gunfire, distant and unreal. Lefine sat down cross-legged. His face, black with gunpowder, couldn’t be seen in the darkness, and Margont had the impression he was listening to a report by a soldier who had been decapitated by a cannonball. Death pervaded all his thoughts.

  ‘It’s because General Huard has been killed,’ Lefine
continued. ‘Delarse already saw himself promoted to general and put in charge of the brigade but he found out that he was going to remain a colonel and that he would be assisting Huard’s replacement. Everyone found that disgraceful.’

  Margont closed his eyes. ‘Don’t worry, I’m listening carefully. What about our Italians?’

  ‘Even if most of General Pino’s Italian Division couldn’t get there in time to take part in the battle, Colonel Fidassio was there right enough. He showed immense courage.’

  Margont reopened his eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘All the time he stayed at the head of his regiment and personally ran his sword through a Russian captain who had just shot his horse and was trying to skewer him. He took the dead man’s gorget and put it around his neck.’

  Margont instinctively touched his own gorget, the small horizontal metal crescent worn by infantry officers, that last vestige of medieval armour.

  ‘His soldiers nicknamed him “the lion”,’ Lefine added.

  ‘Not very imaginative! Anyway, I must recant. I judged Fidassio too hastily. Because he wasn’t coping with the responsibility of leadership and was panicking at the thought of it, I considered him incompetent and a coward. In fact he’s only incompetent.’

  ‘I personally don’t understand the mysteries of this transformation.’

  ‘He must have drunk some of that potion of yours.’

  Lefine took his Austrian gourd – a trophy he had picked up on the battlefield at Austerlitz, so a sacred object and a lucky charm – and took a large swig.

  ‘What’s the second explanation?’

  ‘I’m still convinced that the responsibility of being a colonel is beyond Fidassio. He can’t make quick decisions and, when faced with a problem, hesitates like weighing scales that never manage to balance. But in a battle everything becomes clear. He’s ordered to attack in column a given point in the enemy line, so he attacks in column a given point in the enemy line. There’s no more self-questioning, no more decisions to make. Paradoxically, fear is the price he has to pay for his peace of mind. He makes up for his lack of judgement and competence with his courage. He’s even happy because for once he knows what to do.’

  ‘Close ranks.’

  ‘That’s more or less it. Obviously, if he has to take the initiative because everything’s not going as planned, then …’

  ‘Nedroni, help!’

  Margont set about removing the soil from his uniform. ‘Exactly. And how did Nedroni conduct himself?’

  ‘As courageously as his master. The two of them are two sides of the same coin.’

  ‘Yes, except that one side is worth more than the other. We don’t know much about them, when it comes down to it. They’re difficult to make out because they’re always together. I’m sure that if we managed to separate them for a few hours we’d find out a lot more, just by observing them. Perhaps, then, it’s precisely so that we don’t find out too much about them that they are inseparable. It’s as if each were hiding the dark side of the other; as if they were permanently back to back, covering for each other. But if Nedroni is concealing Fidassio’s incompetence, what is Fidassio concealing about Nedroni?’

  ‘A skeleton in the cupboard?’

  ‘According to von Stils, our Saxon Life Guard, it’s his homosexuality. Or else Nedroni has no secret and supports Fidassio in order to further his career. In any case, it’s pointless hoping to find a way of separating them. The only solution would be to kill one of them …’

  Lefine chuckled. It was so good to laugh.

  ‘If we went for that option, Captain, I’d prefer it if we got rid of Nedroni. I fear him more than Fidassio,’ he chipped in.

  ‘Are you sure? When someone hits his master, even the most placid dog can go wild. The conclusion is that whatever the precise connection between them, Nedroni is bound to be in the know and will protect him no matter what. Your spies responsible for Pirgnon were killed but you were in the Great Redoubt with me.’

  ‘He was incredible! I give him second prize for foolhardiness, a pass with merit. Delarse receives third prize.’

  Margont folded his arms, looking amused. ‘Really? I’m dying to know who won first prize.’

  ‘General Miloradovich. I have a friend who’s an interpreter in the general staff of our corps. A prisoner told him that Miloradovich wanted to prove that he was the bravest man in the whole Russian army so he sat on the ground where our guns were causing the maximum carnage and announced that he was going to have his lunch. That man is insane and gets a special commendation, “fit for the madhouse”.’

  Margont was full of admiration. ‘How do you always manage to know everything about everything?’

  ‘Because that’s all I have to sell.’

  ‘Pirgnon loves Greek and Roman mythology and is astonishingly knowledgeable about it. When he talks about it it’s as if he was alive at the time. It’s as if he thinks he is the reincarnation of a famous classical figure. He must imagine being the hero of an odyssey.’

  ‘But if this campaign is an odyssey, it’s obvious that Pirgnon is not its Ulysses.’

  ‘What about Barguelot?’

  Lefine became even more joyful. ‘I’ve kept the best until the end! Poor Colonel Barguelot really is unlucky: when the Broussier Division attacked the Great Redoubt … he sprained his ankle again.’

  ‘Oh! When you’ve sprained them once, these joints do tend to become unsteady … Why didn’t he go into the attack on horseback, then? Had his horse sprained its hoof?’

  ‘He’d left his horse in the rear.’

  ‘It’s true that it’s dangerous to go into the attack too quickly.’

  ‘You sometimes dismount before the assault yourself, Captain.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s in order to show solidarity with the men of my company. Besides, given how much marching we do in Russia, I wanted to be sure of keeping my mount. And, lastly, I did go to the Great Redoubt. Twice. It almost did for me, as well.’

  Lefine wiped his face with a handkerchief in a vain attempt to clean it.

  ‘Colonel Barguelot also ended up in the redoubt. He just arrived a tiny bit late, when it was all over.’

  ‘His uniform was sparkling.’

  ‘He skirted the redoubt and entered via the gorge. It was less dirty that way. He still almost got killed.’

  ‘Really? Did he catch a bad cold?’

  ‘He was limping along well behind his regiment, surrounded by a dozen soldiers – including our spy – when a Russian soldier who’d been pretending to be dead got up and attacked him with his sabre. Barguelot parried the attack so badly with his sword that, but for the speed of one of his men who stopped the Russian in his tracks by running him through, Barguelot’s heart would have had a taste of metal.’

  ‘So his title of “fencing master” is just one more piece of deception, is it? Excellent work, Fernand.’

  The two men were in no hurry to catch up with their regiment. They knew it was the moment for counting the dead. Men from each regiment were thinking of those they had lost or those hovering between life and death. The 84th had stayed in the second line so had not suffered much, but other regiments had sustained incredible losses.

  Of Margont’s acquaintances, Gunner Vanisseau had died. He had imitated birds and known how to attract ducks. Parouen had had both legs broken by a cannonball. He had been nicknamed ‘the Pike’ because he would swim in any stretch of water he could find and because he’d give you anything in exchange for a grilled fish. Partiteau had finished up not far from the redoubt, covered in bayonet wounds, like a pincushion. Oh, Partiteau! ‘As stupid as Partiteau’, ‘as daft as a Partiteau’, ‘bird-brain Partiteau’. No one could be more simple-minded than he, so the army, with its habitual sense of humour, had put him in intelligence. Yet if you quoted a date, even one ten years back, he would immediately tell you if it was a Monday or a Thursday and would quote you the newspaper headlines – though, of course, he wouldn’t understand a word of them. Agelle w
as dying in hospital with more lead in his stomach than you’d find in a cartridge pouch. He used to spend his evenings writing letters to his Suzanne, letters that were so riddled with mistakes as to be unreadable. In any case, his fiancée couldn’t read. Zaqueron had been crushed to death under the dead body of a Russian hussar’s horse. He had been such a good cook that one day the Emperor had made a six-league detour to treat himself at his inn. Noyet had been shot to pieces by a shell. He had never stopped talking, even when people had hit him to make him shut up and sometimes even during his sleep. They were already beginning to miss his never-ending chatter. Rabut was also missing. Oh, Rabut! The longest-serving man in the 9th. He had been nicknamed ‘That’s Poppycock’. The old sergeant seemed to have fought in all the Napoleonic wars, all those of the Republic and also two or three in the old days of the King. Whenever he had read the Grande Armée bulletins he had never failed to exclaim, ‘Poppycock! Poppycock! I know it is, I was there, damn it!’ Now here he was, finally dead. It was said that it had taken no fewer than three Pavlovs to get the better of him. Droustic, who was called ‘the Bavarian’, had been sabred to death. No one knew where his nickname came from and he got angry when asked. Sapois was waiting for a surgeon to carry out an amputation. He’d seen a cannonball rolling along and had wanted to stop it for fun. The result was a broken foot, the sort of foolish accident that happens to an inexperienced soldier. Mardet, from the 8th Light, had just given up the ghost after bleeding to death from a bullet in the arm that had hit him in ‘the wrong place’. He had so many children that in a few years’ time they’d be able to repopulate the whole company entirely thanks to him. The two Taleur brothers, who constantly looked out for each other, had been found within a few paces of each other. ‘Cock-eye’ had been run through by an Imperial Horse Guard’s sabre.