by Mike Carey
24
Lieutenant Klaes found himself at a loss. He had set his men to clear the western side of the parade ground, as instructed, but had been given no further orders since then. August had not summoned him to hear the rest of his report. The prisoners had been taken from his custody on arrival and handed over to Tusimov, and he had heard no more of them till the dismaying news, early in the afternoon, that they were to be flogged.
Hearing that, he had returned to his quarters and taken up Spinoza, trying to calm his mind. But he could settle to nothing, and finally found himself wandering back to the parade ground to check on his men’s progress. The sound of hammering greeted him as he approached, and he saw, at the far end of the field, the first of the whipping frames being erected: a gaunt triangle of raw wood, taller than a man.
In his present grim mood, he was not in the least surprised to find that Drozde was there. She seemed to be rehearsing a conversation she intended to have with someone in the near future. At any rate she was both speaking and gesticulating to the empty air. She broke off to stare at him as he passed, though. It was a stare of such soul-shrivelling contempt that he might have taken issue with it if his spirits were not already so low. As it was, he only shrugged. Your bad opinion of me? Yes, by all means throw it to me as I pass, but forgive me if I don’t stop to add it to the list.
He went to August’s rooms in the hope of finding the colonel there and speaking a word to him in private, but Dame Osterhilis was alone there. She directed Klaes to the billiard room. The table was piled deep with the colonel’s papers, the maps laid out across the uneven surface so they looked as though they’d been rendered in haut-relief.
Tusimov, Pabst and Dietmar were sitting around the table on folding stools, and August was holding forth to them. That made Klaes the only one of the lieutenants not called to what was obviously a strategic briefing. Unless he had been summoned when he was at the parade ground, and was therefore arriving late.
Either way, overlooked or in dereliction, he must look uniquely foolish. But he did not wish to spare the time either for offence or for apology.
‘Colonel,’ he exclaimed, as the eyes of all four men turned towards him, ‘I wondered if I might speak with you?’
Colonel August frowned. ‘Later, Klaes, by all means,’ he said. ‘At the moment we’re discussing the likeliest routes for a Prussian advance on Wroclaw. If they cross the border at Sagan or Halbau, we might be well placed to come in from the north and cut them off. Sit down, please. I’d value your opinion on this.’
You didn’t go to much trouble to get it, Klaes thought glumly as he took the offered place at the table. For the next hour he listened with scant patience and less interest as a number of scenarios for a Prussian attack were offered. The Prussian forces would press on directly to Wroclaw. They would burn the border towns and then withdraw. They would take a walled town – Świebodzin perhaps, or Sulechów – and overwinter there, pressing on towards Wroclaw in the spring.
Did anyone here believe there was the remotest likelihood that any of these things would occur, as the year drew to its end and every day brought the snows closer? Only a fool would cross the Beskids now, and risk wintering in a newly conquered city in hostile, unpacified territory. Klaes did not think that Frederick Hohenzollern was a fool.
So he contributed little to the conference, beyond his presence and the occasional shrug or equivocal gesture when a question was canvassed around the group. Despite Colonel August’s supposed enthusiasm for his counsel, he was never asked for an opinion and never offered one. He just endured in silence until the colonel rolled up his maps and set them aside.
‘Well, well,’ August said. ‘Time will tell. Our primary concern, of course, is to guard the pass here at Glogau and to send word to Graf Khevenhüller if any troop movements are seen on the other side of the Oder. But it does no harm to be aware that we’re – in potentia, of course – part of a larger theatre of war. I think we should continue with our manoeuvres, and make sure we’re all thoroughly familiar with the routes to the south. If it comes to it, we want to make our knowledge of the terrain, and our consequent speed of deployment, count in our favour. So I expect all of you to borrow these maps and con them, over the weeks to come. Dietmar, would you like to take first watch, as it were?’
He handed the maps to Dietmar, who took them with a strained show of enthusiasm, then turned to Klaes. ‘Now, Lieutenant Klaes,’ he said. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about? I assume it’s related to this other business you’ve been investigating for me. Go on, then. What have you found?’
Klaes was expecting August to dismiss the other lieutenants before the two of them had their converse, so he was caught off guard by this blunt demand. ‘It’s not exactly …’ he stammered. ‘Perhaps in private, sir, if I may? This is more in the nature of … of …’
‘In the nature of what?’
Klaes didn’t want to say. Not while his brother officers were standing by, their curiosity aroused by his flushed face and his evident inability to finish a sentence.
‘I was hoping to discuss …’ Klaes tried again.
‘Yes?’
He swallowed, aware of how thin and querulous his voice sounded when it was up against the colonel’s hectoring staccato. ‘The beatings, sir.’
‘The what?’
‘I mean, sir, the order you’ve given that the villagers who brawled with Lieutenant Tusimov’s men should be flogged.’
August’s expression became grave. ‘There is little to be said on that subject, Klaes, whether in private or in public.’
Klaes looked around. All eyes were on him, and none of them were friendly. But he saw no way out of this now, so he ploughed on. ‘If you are determined on this course, sir, then no. Of course not. But I hope that you are yet to be swayed.’
‘Swayed?’ This was Tusimov, bridling as though Klaes had smacked him in the face. ‘Swayed? My men were set upon. Waylaid in the street, and beaten. What should sway the colonel, when he’s responding in the only way he possibly could?’
‘That does not entirely accord with what I saw,’ Klaes said doggedly.
‘Doesn’t it, by God? Then rub your eyes, Lieutenant Klaes, and see clear. Those men were returning to camp, worn out from a whole day’s strenuous military exercises. They assumed, as they had every right to assume, that they would be safe breaking their march in Narutsin. But the villagers saw an opportunity, and took it. They jumped on my soldiers like dogs on a rabbit. Disgraceful exhibition!’
‘It sets an unacceptable precedent,’ August summarised. Klaes realised now that this was the colonel’s standard justification for any over-reaction to small or imagined transgressions. It was necessary to jump on them hard in case they led on to large or at least real ones.
He tried again. ‘I’m not defending the villagers’ actions, sir,’ he said, addressing himself only to August now. ‘I do question, though, whether exemplary punishment is the best way to proceed. You said yourself that you were afraid there might be some instinctive sympathy in this region for Prussian claims and Prussian aspirations. If that’s so, surely we need to be wary of doing anything that might further alienate the people here from the empire and make them feel that a change of regime might offer them some tangible benefits.’
August was clearly not impressed, and neither were the other lieutenants. Tusimov was still looking affronted, Pabst pained and Dietmar coldly amused. ‘Follow that logic to its conclusion,’ the lieutenant of artillery observed, ‘and we’d shy away from punishing any criminal for fear of driving them on from bad to worse.’
‘I speak of this particular situation only,’ Klaes protested. ‘The practicalities of it. The weighing up of our procedures against our mission – what we desire to achieve. And the punishment of criminal offences, I mean where the offenders are civilians, is hardly in our—’
‘Set upon, don’t you know?’ Tusimov broke in, looking from Dietmar to Pabst and back again. ‘In the
street. Baited like bears. There’s no other way of expressing it. A mob, howling around them. An ill-intentioned riot.’
‘And yet the injuries seem evenly distributed on both sides,’ Klaes felt obliged to point out.
‘They were attacked and they defended themselves, you young idiot,’ Pabst huffed. ‘What would you expect?’
Klaes was wading deeper and deeper, into waters where riptides lurked, but he seemed unable to stop himself now. A recklessness had seized him, almost like the impulse towards self-destruction. It was not just the floggings – it was the calling of this meeting while he was away on other business, and the colonel’s remark about his sabre, and the assumption of every officer here that he was unworthy because he was untried. Yet what did their experience consist of besides defeats?
‘I would expect an officer in charge of a unit to stay with his men,’ he said crisply. ‘Or to depute their organisation to a competent subordinate. Not to abandon them, and allow the line of march to break up so badly that these few soldiers were completely out of sight of their comrades.’ He parsed his own words, turned to the colonel and added a dilatory ‘sir’, but it sounded like a challenge rather than a palliative.
Certainly Tusimov took it as one. He stood, his face flushed and his posture rigid with anger. ‘I will not be accused in that way, Klaes,’ he said. ‘Not by a fellow officer. Not by anyone. You have implied that I am a poor commander. If you don’t withdraw that imputation, then you’ll answer me in a private arena.’
In a duel, he meant. But he could not say that in front of his commanding officer, who would then be obliged to rule against any such proceeding. Even so, August seemed unhappy with the way this was going. ‘Lieutenant Klaes, enough!’ he said. ‘We have weighty matters in hand, and this is not – not at all – a subject that should detain us. A few peasants were unruly, and they must be disciplined. Discipline is not an imposition, it is the foundation of good order in all things. If you think this through you’ll realise that I have no other option. To let the offence pass would be to advertise weakness and encourage licence. Do not, sir, petition me further. But before we let the matter drop, I believe Lieutenant Tusimov is correct in saying that you have cast a slight on his judgement. You will apologise.’
Klaes hesitated. Tusimov was still staring at him, triumphing in his discomfort. Pabst, embarrassed, was pretending to examine the moth-eaten curtains. Dietmar had already turned his back, giving the clear indication that he wished to waste no more of his time on this tale of a tub.
The silence grew beyond its lease.
‘Lieutenant Klaes,’ August said darkly. ‘I am ordering you to—’
‘I apologise, Lieutenant Tusimov,’ Klaes said, ‘if anything I’ve said has offended you. That was not my intention.’
‘Good,’ Tusimov grunted. ‘Perhaps you’ll watch your intentions a little closer another time.’
‘And now, Klaes, having defined everyone else’s duties for them, perhaps you can report to me on your own performance.’ August nodded to Tusimov and Pabst, who saluted and withdrew. Dietmar had left the room on the first word of Klaes’s apology, presumably remaining only long enough to have a sense of the outcome – and of which of his two fellow officers had come away humiliated by it.
‘You indicated earlier that you had something more to add on this matter of the villagers and their guilty consciences,’ the colonel said, closing the door before returning to Klaes. He did not sit down, but stood before the lieutenant like a stern and expectant schoolteacher – and certainly Klaes felt that his reddened cheeks must recall those of a chidden pupil. ‘I checked you then because there were more important things that had to be attended to first. But I will hear you now.’
Klaes nodded curtly. ‘I’ve determined what took place, sir,’ he said, ‘and can assure you that what the villagers have been concealing is of no concern to us.’ He recounted to August the story he’d heard from Meister Weichorek about the idiot boy, Petos, his thefts and his unfortunate death in the cellars of Pokoj. He was concise but circumstantial. The only detail he left out was Bosilka’s involvement, which he honestly judged to be irrelevant.
The colonel heard him out in silence, betraying not the smallest response. When Klaes was done he raised his hands and brought them close together, the tips of his fingers almost but not quite touching as though he held the story between them for closer scrutiny. His head was bowed, his grave face immobile.
‘The mayor told you this?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. Eventually. I had to tease it out of him by seeming to know more than I did.’
‘You had to tease it? Tease it out of him?’
‘Yes. By means of a bluff. I told him that I had heard about—’
‘Klaes, you’re a fool.’ August spat out the words.
Klaes tailed off into silence. The colonel left him foundering as he searched among the papers on the table. ‘Know it’s here somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘Yes. This.’ He held up a letter, his finger tracing the lines from left to right as he scanned it.
‘Nymand Petos,’ he said at last. ‘I knew it.’
‘Petos?’ Klaes repeated. ‘Petos was the idiot who—’
‘Nymand Petos was my predecessor, Klaes. He is a captain in a Silesian militia unit, and he was placed in command of this post. A command of a dozen men.’ August brandished the letter in Klaes’s face, much too close for him to be able to read it. ‘He was based here – right here in Pokoj. He should have been here to receive us when we arrived and to hand over command in good order. That’s how these things are meant to be done.
‘Instead I was told by that tin-button fool Weichorek that the militia had moved on to another post. Taking, it would seem, every last bloody stick and stitch of their equipment with them, and leaving us only this hovel to camp in as we’d camp out in a bloody field.’
Klaes shook his head. He was still trying to process this information. ‘Meister Weichorek gave me a very circumstantial account, sir. There is no possibility of error.’
‘No,’ August agreed. ‘Every possibility, though, that he lied to you for his own purposes. And to me, through your deputation. If all of this relates to Petos, then I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Petos is still in the offing somewhere. Probably deserted his post and got the locals to hide him. And then Weichorek gives you this rigmarole of idiot boys! Perhaps he took you for an idiot boy, Klaes, do you think?’ This last uttered with a snort, as August threw the letter down and gesticulated at it as though he were trying to raise Nymand Petos’s spirit directly out of the offending paper.
‘This – now – is starting to make us look foolish,’ he exclaimed. ‘I told you, did I not? When we first arrived here, I said that these people were hiding something from us. My instincts are sound. Now we know that what they’re hiding bears directly on the archduchess’s writ and on our wider business here. Petos! If Petos has gone to ground you must smoke him out, Klaes. He had a duty to carry out here. Then he sees a cloud, thinks it’s the smoke from a Prussian gun, and he’s off like a hare. It won’t do, Klaes. It won’t do at all. Smoke him out, damn it. Smoke them all out. These people think they can … can bend us like bows, and play us like fiddles. But they can’t. Smoke them out, or by God I’ll know the reason why.’
Klaes had not thought, after making his apology to Lieutenant Tusimov, that he could feel any deeper embarrassment or discomfort. But now he had fallen into a pit so deep he could not even see his previous position. Red-faced, he began to stammer out assurances, but the colonel was disinclined to listen. ‘Dismiss,’ he said. ‘Dismiss, Lieutenant Klaes. Go and get me some answers.’
He walked directly towards Klaes, forcing him to retreat to the doorway, but the doorway was filled with the bulk of Sergeant Molebacher, as solid as any door. ‘If you have a moment, Colonel?’ he said, speaking to August through Klaes’s intervening body.
‘Yes, of course, Mole. Come along in.’
The sergeant did, forcing Klaes
– who was now caught between them – to step sideways out of his path. Apparently Klaes’s dismissal meant that August did not need to acknowledge his presence any more, and Molebacher took his cue from his chief.
‘If I’m not disturbing you, sir …’ Molebacher said in his basso rumble. Faced with the choice between an undignified exit and even more undignified eavesdropping, Klaes exited in haste. He closed the door behind him as he left, which at least allowed him the luxury of shaking his fist at it.
His humiliation was now complete. He had been shamed in front of his fellow officers, dressed down like a green private by his commander, and now slighted in front of a junior. A man without commission, whose uniform was as filthy as a chef’s apron. He strode away, his face as dark as his thoughts.
Well, it was something after all to touch the bottom of the ocean and know that that was where you were. Unless he were to be court-martialed, he could sink no lower than this. And yet he felt he had done no more and no less than he had been asked to do.
Except in that encounter with the mayor. He should have seen through Weichorek’s lies.
And with Bosilka. He might have pressed her harder and forced her to surrender up some clue.
And August might have given him that bloody letter to start with, instead of leaving him to flounder in the dark.
He slowed to a halt, thinking with unaccustomed clarity. In the dark. Yes. That was where he had been, all this time. Asking questions whose very vagueness and superficiality made it clear that it was safe to hide the answers from him. Making a parade of his ignorance, and expecting passers-by to give him the truth in the same spirit that they would give alms to a beggar.
That had to stop. And stop it would.