‘I have agreed to new peace commissioners. You are to work with them and Talleyrand, Gage, and make everyone see reason. I need trade and money from America, not gunfire.’ He looked down. ‘By God, will you finish with those buttons!’ Then, dressed at last, off he rushed to the next room where a map of Europe, stuck with little pins, was spread like a carpet on the floor. ‘Look at the ring my enemies have me in!’
I peered. Little of it made sense to me.
‘If I march to relieve Massena in Genoa,’ Napoleon complained, ‘the Riviera becomes a narrow Thermopylae where Melas and his Austrians can block me. Yet Italy is the key to outflanking Vienna!’ He threw himself down on the map as if it were a familiar bed. ‘I’m outnumbered, my veterans trapped in Egypt, raw conscripts my only recruits. All Revolutionary enthusiasm has been lost, thanks to incompetence by the Directory. Yet I need victory, Gage! Victory restores spirit, and only victory will restore me!’
He looked restored enough, but I tried to think of something encouraging. ‘I know the siege of Acre went badly, but I’m sure you can do better.’
‘Don’t talk to me of Acre! You and that damned Smith only won because you captured my siege artillery! If I ever find out who told the British about my flotilla, I’ll hang him from Notre Dame!’
Since it was I who told the British – I’d been a little peeved after Napoleon’s riffraff had dangled me above a snake pit and then tried to include me in a massacre – I decided to change the subject. ‘It’s too bad you don’t have any elephants,’ I tried.
‘Elephants?’ He looked annoyed. ‘Are you once more employed to waste my time?’ Clearly, the memory of Acre and my ignorance at the pyramids still rankled.
‘Like Hannibal, out in the corridor. If you could cross the Alps with elephants, that would get their attention, wouldn’t it?’
‘Elephants!’ He finally laughed. ‘What nonsense you spout! Like that silly medallion you carried around in Egypt!’
‘But Hannibal used them to invade Italy, did he not?’
‘He did indeed.’ He thought, and shook his head. But then he crawled and peered about on the map. ‘Elephants? From the mouths of imbeciles. I would come down into their rear. And while I lack pachyderms, I have cannons.’ He looked at me as if I’d said something interesting. ‘Crossing the Alps! That would make my reputation, wouldn’t it? The new Hannibal?’
‘Except you’ll win instead of lose, I’m sure of it.’ I hadn’t dreamt he’d take me seriously.
He nodded. ‘But where? The accessible passes are too near Melas and his Austrians. He’d bottle me up just as he would on the Riviera.’
I looked, pretending I knew something about Switzerland. I saw a name I recognised and a chill went through me, since I’d heard it bandied about in Egypt and Israel. Do certain names echo through our lives? ‘What about the Saint Bernard Pass?’ This was farther north, away from the little pins. French mathematicians had told me about Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who’d seen God in width, height and depth.
‘Saint Bernard! No army would attempt that! It’s twenty-five-hundred metres high, or more than eight thousand feet! No wider than a towpath! Really, Gage, you’re no logistician. You can’t move armies like a goat.’ He shook his head, peering. ‘Although if we did come down from there we could strike their rear in Milan and capture their supplies.’ He was thinking aloud. ‘We wouldn’t have to bring everything, we’d take it from the Austrians. General Melas would never dream we’d dare it! It would be insane! Audacious!’ He looked up at me. ‘Just the kind of thing an adventurer like you would suggest, I suppose.’
I’m the world’s most reluctant adventurer, but I smiled encouragingly. The way to deal with superiors is to give them a harebrained idea that suits your purposes and let them conclude it’s their own. If I could pack Napoleon off to Italy again, I’d be able to relax in Paris unmolested.
‘Saint Bernard!’ he went on. ‘What general could do it? Only one …’ He rose to his knees. ‘Gage, perhaps boldness is our salvation. I’m going to take the world by surprise by crossing the Alps like a modern Hannibal. It’s a ridiculous idea you’ve had, so ridiculous that it makes a perverse kind of sense. You are an idiot savant!’
‘Thank you. I think.’
‘Yes, I’m going to try it and you, American, are going to share the glory by scouting the pass for us!’
‘Me?’ I was appalled. ‘But I know nothing of mountains. Or Italians. Or elephants. You just said I’m to help with the American negotiations.’
‘Gage, as always, you are too modest! The advantage is that you’ve proved your pluck on both sides, so no one will be certain who you’re sleeping with now! It will take months to get the new American commissioners here. Haven’t you wanted to see Italy?’
‘Not really.’ I thought of it as poor, hot, and superstitious.
‘Your help with the American negotiations can wait until their delegation arrives. Gage, thanks to your elephants, you are going to once more share my fame!’
CHAPTER FOUR
Some fame. The Alps in spring, I learnt, are cold, windy, and wet, with snow the colour of snot. The Saint Bernard of Switzerland was not even the Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: there are too many saints in the world, apparently, including two Bernards within a few hundred miles of each other. And no one believed I was hiking to the pass out of idle American curiosity, carrying my Pennsylvania longrifle like a walking stick. Everyone assumed I was exactly what I kept denying, an early scout for Bonaparte, since the first consul was visiting the encampments near Geneva and taking the unprecedented step of actually explaining to the common soldiers what it was he wanted them to do – to emulate the Carthaginians who’d stormed Rome. I was so obviously an agent that I found myself bargaining with the monks at the summit hospice to supply Napoleon’s troops with food. Indeed, the first consul ran up a bill of forty thousand francs from wine, cheese, and bread sold from trestle tables the enterprising friars put out in the snow. What the holy men didn’t grasp is that Napoleon always bought on credit, and was a master of evading bills at the same time he was extorting tribute from provinces he’d overrun. ‘Let war pay for war,’ his ministers said.
The painter David gave us a portrait of Bonaparte at the crest on a rearing charger, and it’s as inspiring a piece of nonsense as I’ve ever seen. The truth is that Napoleon ascended the Alps on a sure-footed mule and slid down the far side on his own ass, he and his officers whooping with delight. Most of his sixty thousand soldiers walked, or rather trudged, up steadily worsening roads until, for the last seven miles, they were on a trail of ice and mud, potential avalanches poised above and yawning gorges below. Each hour they’d rest for a five-minute ‘pipe,’ or smoke, which was one of the two pleasures of army life – the other being to curse the stupidity of their superiors. Then on again! It was a hard, dangerous ascent that had them sweating in the cold. The soldiers slept at the summit, two to a blanket, great heaps of them huddled together like wolves, and by morning half had fevers and raw throats. Ice cut shoes to pieces, lungs gasped at thin air, and gaiters couldn’t keep cold mud out of socks. Extremities went numb.
Yet they were proud. It was one of the boldest manoeuvres of its age, made more so when the French snuck by a stubborn Austrian fort on the far side of the pass by muffling the hooves of their animals with straw. They hauled their artillery muzzles across the Alps in hollowed-out pine trees. Sixty thousand men crossed that pass, and every powder keg, cannon ball, and box of biscuit was packed or pulled by men with tumplines to their foreheads.
They sang Revolutionary tunes. I handed out cups of wine in encouragement as they passed the summit. A friar kept tally.
Once over the pass, Bonaparte was everywhere, as usual. He studied the mountain fortress of Bard from concealing bushes, ordered different placement of his siege guns, and got it to capitulate in two days. We entered Milan on June 2nd. In a masterstroke he’d occupied the Austrian rear and made the French surrender of Genoa suddenly irrelev
ant. (The siege had been so horrific that Massena’s hair had turned white.) The Austrians had driven their enemy out one side of Italy, only to have Napoleon’s army show up on the other! Of course there was nothing to prevent General Melas from doing what Napoleon had done. He could have marched the opposite way across a different Alpine pass, left the French stranded in Italy, captured Lyon without a shot, and probably forced Bonaparte’s abdication. Except that the Austrian was forty years older and didn’t think in such sweeping terms. He was a superb tactician who saw a few leagues at a time. Napoleon could see the world.
Unless, that is, Napoleon was distracted. While Josephine’s infidelities had made him come close to divorcing her, he set no such moral bounds on himself. Milan featured the famed diva Giuseppina Grassini, who conquered the French general first by song and then with her smouldering eyes, swollen lips, and bountiful bosom. Bonaparte spent six long days in Milan, too much of it in bed, and that was time enough for Melas to wheel his troops from the Italian coast and concentrate towards the French. Somewhere between Genoa and Milan, the great showdown would take place. It happened at Marengo.
My plan was to be well away. I’d seen plenty of war in the east, had played my part as scout for Hannibal, and was more than ready to scuttle back to Paris. There was no diva in Milan for me, and no other amusement, either. The Italians had been looted by rival armies too many times, and the best women had too many generals to choose from.
Then Bonaparte found a way to harness my talents. A spy had come, a swarthy imp of a man named Renato, oily as a neapolitan salad, who told us Melas and the Austrians were running. The French had merely to march forward to scoop up the reward for their alpine crossing! The spy carried Austrian documents in his boot heel as proof, and displayed a con man’s confidence. But as a rogue myself, I was suspicious. Renato was a little too ingratiating, and kept glancing at me like a rival. In fact, he looked almost as if he knew me.
‘You don’t believe my spy, Gage?’ Napoleon asked after the agent had gone.
‘He has a rascal’s manner.’ I should know.
‘Surely I pay better than the Austrians. I must, at his price.’
That was another thing that annoyed me: Renato undoubtedly made more money than I did. ‘He may be too slippery to be properly bought.’
‘He’s a spy, not a priest! You Americans are squeamish about such things, but agents are as necessary as artillery. Don’t think I don’t have my own reservations, about everyone.’ He gave me a hard stare. ‘I remain outnumbered two to one, my army is living on captured supplies, and I’m fearfully short of cannons. One loss and my rivals will have my throat. I know very well I have no true friends. Thank God Desaix has arrived from Egypt!’
Louis-Antoine Desaix, his favourite general, had landed in Toulon the same day we’d left Paris and been given a division here in Italy. Loyal, modest, shy of women, and extremely able, he was happiest sleeping under a cannon. He had Napoleon’s talent without his ambition, the perfect subordinate.
‘Perhaps I could carry word of your predicament to ministers in Paris?’ The last thing I wanted was to be caught on the losing side.
‘On the contrary, Gage, since you’re so suspicious I want you to spy on our spy. Renato suggested a rendezvous to pass on the latest from the Austrians and mentioned your reputation for daring. Take the road to Pavia and the Po, trail Renato, make the rendezvous, and report back. I know you like the perfume of gunsmoke as much as I do.’
Perfume of gunsmoke? ‘But I’m a savant, not a spy, First Consul. And I don’t speak German or Italian.’
‘We both know you’re an amateur savant at best, a dabbler and a dilettante. But when you look, you actually see. Humour me, Gage. Take a ride towards Genoa, confirm what we’ve been told, and then I’ll send you back to Paris.’
‘Maybe we should just believe Renato after all.’
‘Take your rifle, too.’
CHAPTER FIVE
So off I went, on a confiscated Italian horse (that’s a fancy word for ‘stolen’ that invaders use) and nervous as a virgin that I might stumble into the Austrian army. When you read about campaigns it’s all arrows and rectangles on a map, as choreographed as a ballet. In reality, war is a half-blind, sprawling affair, great masses of men halfheartedly groping for each other across yawning countryside while looting anything that can be carried. It’s all too easy for the observer to become disoriented. Gunshots echo alarmingly: fired accidentally, or from boredom, or sudden quarrel. Frightened, homesick eighteen-year-olds poke about with thirteen-pound muskets topped by wicked, two-foot bayonets. Passed-over colonels dream of suicidal charges that might restore their reputation. Sergeants stiffen a line in hopes for a sleeve of braid. It’s no place for a sensible man.
Within an hour after setting out on June 9th, I heard the ominous thunder of combat. Lieutenant General Jean Lannes had crashed into the Austrian advance force at the villages of Casteggio and Montebello, and by day’s end I was riding past long columns of Austrian prisoners, white uniforms spattered with blood and powder, expressions weary and sour. French wounded called insults to the prisoners plodding by. Wrecked wagons, dead horses and cows, and burning barns added to my disquiet. Gangs of pressed peasants were commandeered to tip heaps of battlefield dead into mass graves, while survivors matter-of-factly cleaned the muskets they called ‘clarinets’ with beef marrow and whitened crossbelts with pipe clay. Some soldiers hoped filth might make them less tempting a target, but others thought fastidiousness brought luck. They used a slit piece of wood called a patience to hold their buttons out from their uniform cloth, shining them with mutton fat until they gleamed.
‘Bones were cracking in my division like a shower of hail falling on a skylight,’ Lannes reported to Napoleon. The battle had produced four thousand casualties between the two sides – a mere dress rehearsal – and it was through this carnage that I reluctantly passed to skulk in the wake of the retreating Austrians into that netherworld between two armies.
What Napoleon didn’t realise is that, look as I might, I couldn’t really see. The Po Valley is flat, its fields bordered by tall poplar and cypress, and rain that June came down in buckets. Every rivulet was swollen, the landscape as different from Egypt and Syria as sponge from sandpaper. I could have plodded by the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan and not spotted it, should they happen to take this muddy lane instead of that one, down a cut and behind a hedge. So I wandered, asking directions of Italian refugees in sign language, sleeping in hayricks, and squinting for the missing sun. If Renato was lying, I was unlikely to catch him at it.
Instead, he told me himself.
At an abandoned farmhouse near Tortona I spied a red sash draped on a loose shutter, the agreed signal that our spy was waiting with information. Families had scurried out of the path of the armies like mice darting between the hooves of cattle, and rummaging soldiers had torn off the home’s door, eaten the barn’s animals, and burnt the furniture. What was left, walls and a tile roof, offered shelter from another spring downpour. I was nervous, but the Austrians seemed to be falling back. The enemy had reportedly destroyed the bridge leading to lightly defended Alessandria, and more Austrians were running southwest towards Acqui. Accordingly, Bonaparte had split his forces, with Lapoype’s division racing north and Desaix’s division south. In the confusion, we spies were surely safe. I tied my horse, checked the load on my longrifle, and warily entered the dark home.
‘Renato?’ I almost tripped. He was seated on the stone floor, muddy boots outstretched and bottles at his side. I heard the click of his pistol hammer. ‘It’s Gage, from Napoleon.’
‘You’ll forgive my caution.’ A softer tap as the hammer was eased back to rest near the pan. As my eyes adjusted I saw the muzzle lower, but he didn’t put his pistol away. He was watchful as a cat.
‘My orders are to meet you.’
‘How convenient for us both. And your reward, American?’
Why not the truth? ‘I go back to Paris.’
>
He saluted me with his pistol muzzle and laughed. ‘Better than this cold farmhouse, no? You have the loyalty of a mosquito. Some blood, and you’re off.’
I seated myself across from him, rifle by my side, only slightly reassured by our candour. ‘I’m no warrior. I’ve been riding around in the rain for four days, no good to anyone.’
‘Then you need this.’ He tossed me a bottle sitting next to him. ‘I found the trap to the cellar’s sparkling wine, just the thing for a party. To a fellow spy! And of course I could believe you really are a mosquito, irritating and aimless. On the other hand, I’ve heard you have a reputation for pluck and persistence as well. No, don’t deny it, Ethan Gage! So perhaps you’re here to fetch my latest missive. Or perhaps to spy on me.’
‘Why would I spy on you?’
‘Because the French don’t trust me! Yes, we men of intrigue see things clearly.’ He nodded to himself. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to get back to France. Can you imagine being a soldier in regimental line, shoulder to shoulder with a rank of similar idiots just fifty paces distant, everyone blazing away?’ He shuddered. ‘It’s amazing what armies get conscripts to do. If the morons survive, it will be the highlight of their lives.’
I took a drink, thinking. His bottle was two-thirds empty, the champagne loosening his tongue. ‘People better than me say they believe in something, Renato.’
He drank again too, and wiped his mouth. ‘Believe in Bonaparte? Or that old ass, Melas? What are they fighting about, really? Ask any of those soldiers to explain a war of a hundred years ago and they’ll go blank. Yet they’ll march to their death for this one. They’re all fools, every one. Fools universal, except for me.’
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