The Battle

by Patrick Rambaud

  Sitting on a drum in Essling's fortified granary, a plank across his knees, Colonel Lejeune was writing to Mile Krauss. He pondered as he dipped his quill pen made from a crow's feather into the little inkwell he always carried with him for drawing. He was telling Anna nothing of the horrors and dangers: he spoke only of her, of Vienna's theatres, which they'd visit, of the pictures he planned to paint, of Paris above all, of the renowned Joly, that hairdresser at the height of fashion who would twist her hair into a chignon a la Nina, of the presents he'd give her — jewellery or the shoes from chez Cop, so delicate they'd tear if you walked in them. They'd stroll along the avenues and amongst the pavilions of the Tivoli Gardens, in the glow of the red lanterns that hung from the trees. Glow, red: these words did not conjure up the Tivoli Gardens in Lejeune's mind; they were prompted by the fires surrounded him. The thing was, he wanted to be light-hearted, but he couldn't bring it off, or only imperfectly, and that must make itself felt: his sentences came out too dry and too terse, as if driven by anxiety. There is nothing lyrical about war, he thought, or if so, then only at a distance. After all, he had almost died at least three times in the course of that savage day. In his mind's eye, Aspern in

  flames took the place of Tivoli's peaceful gardens and Massena that of the hair stylists whose artistry fashion rewarded by making them wealthy men.

  'Lejeune!'

  'Your Excellency?'

  'Lejeune/ asked Berthier, 'what stage have the repairs to the large bridge reached?'

  'Perigord is on the spot. He will inform us when the troops on the right bank can cross the Danube.'

  'Let's go and have a look,' continued Berthier who, until that moment, had been discussing the situation with Marshal Lannes.

  They had taken a tally of their losses, and so knew that Molitor had lost half his division — three thousand men strewn across the streets of Aspern and the surrounding fields — not counting the wounded who would be of no use in the next day's fighting, in three or four hours at the most, when the opposing sides would meet at dawn and, exhausted, launch themselves into the fray again. Together, Berthier, Lannes, their aides-de-camp and equerries stood up and, in procession, led their horses at a walk along the Danube which was faintly lit up by the flames still engulfing parts of the two villages. Lejeune had not finished his letter and he dried the ink with a handful of sand. The wind had risen and was driving the smoke towards Lobau, making their eyes smart. As they drew near to the rear of Aspern, they heard firing.

  Tm going there!' said Lannes, wheeling his horse.

  He disappeared into the tall, dark wheat which lay between him and Aspern. His aide-de-camp, Marbot, automatically followed; then, after several strides, he took the lead because he knew the way and its hazards better. The

  ,

  others continued towards the island and the small bridge. The marshal and captain rode forward slowly and cautiously. In its last crescent the moon was weak and the night so thick they couldn't see a thing. A headwind carrying with it a smell of burning irritated the horses and rutrled the feathers on the marshal's tricorn. To relieve his horse and test out the ground with his boots, Marbot dismounted and led his mount by the bridle.

  'You're right,' said Lannes, 'this is no time to break a leg!'

  'Your Excellency, we could find a barouche for you to direct our attacks from.'

  'Fine idea! I'm fond or my legs the way they are, you know/

  And he in turn dismounted to walk beside the captain whom he had held in high esteem for such a number of years.

  'What do you think of the day we had of it yesterday." 5 ' 'We have seen worse, Your Excellency.' 'Possiblv, but the truth is that we didn't manage to break the Austrian centre.' 'We held our ground.'

  'One against three: yes, we held our ground, but that's not enough.'

  'Bv dawn tomorrow, we will have' received tresh troops and Davout s army. W hilst the Austrians have no hope of being reinforced.'

  'Their Army of Italy • . It s still a long way oil.'

  'We have to carry the day tomorrow, Marbot, no matter what the cost!'

  'If you say so, then that's how it will be.'

  'Oh, don't flatter me!'

  'I have seen you on the attack a hundred times, and the army loves you.'

  'I offer them up to cannon and bayonets and they love me! Sometimes I don't understand any more.'

  'Your Excellency, this is the first time that I have heard you expressing doubts.'

  'Is it now? In Spain, I had to keep my doubts to myself.'

  'Here we are . . .'

  There were no sentries posted on that side of Massena's bivouacs and the two men passed noiselessly between the soldiers drowsing on the ground. Near a fire, they saw Massena's tall, stooped silhouette and, next to it, that of Bessieres. As Marbot was walking in front, Marshal Bessieres recognized him first by his civilian hat: since he'd been wounded in the forehead in Spain, Marbot hadn't been able to wear Lannes's aides-de-camps' customary fur cap. Thinking that he had come on his own, Bessieres snapped at him, 'Captain, since you are here for information, I will give you a piece. Go back and tell vour master that I will not forget his insults!'

  Lannes, who had a fierce temper, pushed aside his aide-de-camp and strode into the light of the bivouac fire.

  'Monsieur,' he said to Bessieres, barely containing his anger, 'Captain Marbot knows how to risk his life and take a punishing! I demand that you speak to him in a more civil tone! He has been wounded ten times while others have been parading in front of the enemy!'

  Bessieres raised his voice, which was not characteristic. 'What, I parade about, do I? And yon.' I didn't sec von at close quarters with the uhlans!'

  'Some people fight, others prefer to spy and denounce!'

  The allusion was crude but unmistakable. Lannes was reviving their old animosity. When Bessieres had taken Murat's side against Lannes's, he had revealed that Lannes, as commander of the Consular Guard, had overspent their equipping budget by two hundred thousand francs. Napoleon had instantly withdrawn Lannes's command, and Murat had married Caroline. On that night, outside Aspern which was still in flames, the marshals' hatred for one another knew no bounds.

  'That's too much!' shouted Bessieres. 'You will give me satisfaction!'

  With his arms crossed, Massena was waiting for the quarrel to wear itself out, but Bessieres had drawn his sword, Lannes had swiftly followed suit and they were on the verge of fighting a duel. Massena stepped between them. 'Enough!'

  'He has insulted me!' Bessieres said, enraged.

  'Traitor!' roared Lannes.

  'In the face of the enemy? You're going to tear each other's guts out in the face of the enemy? Break up: that's an order! You're under my jurisdiction here! Sheathe your swords!'

  They obeyed, despite themselves.

  Without a word, and trembling .with rage, Bessieres turned on his heel to rejoin his horsemen. Massena took Lannes by the arm. 'Do you hear?'

  'I don't hear a thing!' said Lannes, scowling.

  'Listen, you ass!'

  In the still of the night, fifes were playing a rhythmical refrain which Lannes had no difficulty recognizing. He felt shivers run down his spine.

  'Your men are playing the "Marseillaise"'' he asked Massena.

  'No. It's the Austrians stationed on the plain. The music carries a long way.'

  They fell silent in order to listen to the former anthem of the Army of the Rhine, which had been spread through all insurgent France by the volunteers from Marseilles, which had accompanied the Revolution and its soldiers at every step until the emergence of the Empire, when it was forbidden by decree as a vulgar, seditious chant. Lannes and Massena avoided each other's eyes. They remembered their former exhilaration. They were dukes and marshals now, they possessed as much land and money as the nobility before them, but the 'Marseillaise' had roused them to arms in the past; at the sound of it, they had left their provinces to go and fight, and how many times had they sung its verses at the tops o
f their voices to give themselves courage? Lannes couldn't help mouthing the words to the refrain the enemy was playing, either as a provocation or because they believed that it was their turn now to wage a war of liberation against despotism. Massena and Lannes thought of the same things, they relived the same scenes, they felt the same emotions, but they didn't exchange a word. They listened with grave expressions, absorbed and deeply moved. They had been young and poor and patriotic. They had loved those martial verses. And here they were, flung back at them by their adversaries as an insult or an appeal to their consciences.

  Death rattles, wailing, moaning, sobbing, crying and screaming: there was nothing nostalgic about the song of

  the wounded on the island of Lobau. The medical orderlies, their uniforms cobbled together from mismatching jackets and trousers, had long since ceased to feel anything as they chased the swarms of flies away from the open wounds with palm leaves. His long apron and forearms running with blood, Dr Percy had lost his bonhomie. In the little hut of branches and reeds which had been renamed an ambulance, his assistants were laying out on the table the men they'd fished out from the mass of naked and near dead. The doctor's helpers, whom he'd obtained by bitterly protesting his predicament, had, for the most part, never studied surgery. So, since he couldn't treat such a number of maimed and such a variety of wounds on his own, he marked the writhing bodies with chalk to show where they had to saw, and the helpers - not much more than stop gaps, really — sawed. Sometimes they removed limbs right up to the joints. The blood spurted out as they cut into the bare bone; their patients lost consciouness and lay still. A great number died of heart attacks or bled to death in this way, an artery severed through bad luck. 'Cretins! haven't you ever carved a chicken?' the doctor would shout.

  Operations couldn't last longer than twenty seconds. There were too many wounded to attend to. Afterwards, the arm or leg was thrown onto a pile of arms and legs. The unqualified orderlies would make a joke of it to stop themselves vomiting or passing out. 'Another leg of lamb,' they'd shout raucously as they tossed away the amputated limb. Percy kept the difficult cases for himself. He tried to knit bones together, to cauterize wounds, to avoid amputation, to alleviate the men's pain - but how could he, with such wretchedly inadequate facilities? At the slightest

  opportunity, he'd coach the brightest orderlies. 'You see here, Morillon, the fragments of the tibia are riding and exposed . . .'

  'Can they be set, Doctor?'

  'They could be, if we had time.'

  'There's a mass of them waiting out at the back.'

  'I know!'

  'So what do we do?'

  'We cut, imbecile, we cut! And I loathe that, Morillon!'

  With a rag, he wiped his face drenched in sweat. His eyes ached. The wounded man - the condemned man, more like — was entitled to a line of chalk which Percy drew above the knee. He was lifted onto the table where, only a little while before, Austrian peasants would have been drinking their soup, and an assistant began sawing, his tongue poking out of his mouth as he concentrated on following the line. Percy was already leaning over a hussar, recognizable by his moustache, his side-whiskers and his queue.

  'Gangrene is setting in,' muttered the doctor. 'Forceps!'

  A tall, clumsy lad held out a repellent pair of forceps, a handkerchief over his nose. Percy used them to tear away the burnt flesh. 'If we only had some Peruvian bark,' he fumed. 'I'd steep it in lemon juice, use that to soak a pad of tow, and then we could wash all this, relieve the pain and save a man's life!'

  'Not this one's, Doctor, he's gone,' said Morillon, a bloodstained carpenter's saw in his hand.

  'So much the better for him! On to the next one!'

  With a corner of his apron, Percy dug out the maggots that had worked their way into the next man's wound. He was delirious, his eyes turned up in their sockets.

  'Done for! Next!'

  Two assistants, one holding him under the arms, the other by the legs, hoisted Private Paradis onto the surgeon's table.

  'What's he got, this lad, apart from where it's swollen, there?'

  'We don't know, Doctor.' k Where does he come from?'

  'He was in the batch we picked up near Aspern cemetery.'

  k But he hasn't even been wounded!'

  'He had pieces of flesh all over his face and sleeve. They thought he'd taken a cannonball but it came off when we scrubbed him down.'

  'Well, then, one his comrades must have been blown to bits and caught him full in the face. At any rate, his head must have taken a knock.'

  Percy bent down towards this impostor amongst the ranks of the wounded. 'Can you talk? Can you hear me?'

  Paradis didn't move but mumbled his name and rank: 'Private Paradis, Voltigeur, Second Infantry of the Line, General Molitor's 3rd Division, under the command of Marshal Massena . . .'

  'Don't worry, I'm not going to send you back there, you're in no fit state to hold a musket.' Turning to Morillon, he ordered, 'He's a strong lad, go and get him dressed, we've got work for him.'

  The doctor and his assistant set Paradis back on his feet and the voltigeur in his drawers meekly followed Morillon. Outside, the wounded considered by Percy to be condemned to death, because of the lack of medicine and equipment, were sprawled on stacks of straw bales with a

  chalk cross on their foreheads; that way they wouldn't be confused with the new arrivals or inadvertently brought back to the surgeon's table. The dying men probably wouldn't see the dawn; they were lost to and to life. Only a few paces away, under a screen of elms, the ambulance touts had set up a sort of boutique where they sold on, for their own profit, the greatcoats, knapsacks, cartridge pouches and clothes which they had scavenged from the Austrian and French corpses strewn over the plain.

  'Fat Louis,' Morillon said to a hulking lout wearing a cap, 'you're going to kit out this strapping lad.' 'Has he got any sous?' 'Dr Percy's orders.'

  Fat Louis sighed. His trade was tolerated, but if he refused to obey the doctor, he could be forbidden to sell any soldiers' effects he recovered. He complied reluctantly and Paradis found himself rigged out in green breeches with yellow stripes, a pair of boots that were too big, a shirt with a torn right sleeve and a light-cavalry waistcoat which he had difficulty buttoning up. Morillon handed him over to a team of canteen workers who were responsible for cooking the wounded men's broth.

  The fare was not so coarse at the Emperor's table, set up in his bivouac at the head of the small bridge. Cooks' boys were turning chickens on spits over a fire of brushwood and the skins sizzled as they turned a golden brown, filling the air with a delicious smell. M. Constant had set out his trestle tables, tablecloths and lanterns under a copse, so that the guests couldn't see the convoy of unfortunates being

  carried back to Dr Percy, who, if they didn't die first, would presently have one of their limbs sawn off. Dinner could be enjoyed in peace, and the cannon forgotten for a moment. Lannes was sitting to the right of the Emperor, who had invited him to coax him out of his bad humour. The marshal had recounted his altercation, bending the truth to show himself in a better light, and Napoleon had summoned Bessieres, given him a sharp lecture and then dismissed him. Bessieres had been the offended party, but he became the one who had given offence because His Majesty had decided so, and because he loved to perpetuate this sort of injustice to toughen up his entourage, doling out kisses and slaps for no good reason other than it pleased him. Instead of reconciling the two marshals, he was stirring up their animosity and driving them further apart, because he needed to feel in every circumstance that he was the supreme judge and the sole recourse, and because his dukes could never be too friendly lest one day they combine against him.

  These considerations were beyond Marshal Lannes, who had been plunged into gloom by his latest quarrel and whilst he normally devoured chickens by the dozen, was only picking at a brown drumstick. He preferred to mull over melancholy thoughts. He took delight in it. He dreamed he was elsewhere, with his wife in one of
his houses or riding safely through Gascony, his fortune secure, peace having been declared. The Emperor spat some bones out onto the grass and noted his marshal's lugubrious mood. 'Aren't you hungry, Jean?'

  'I have no appetite, sire . . .'

  'You're sulking like a little girl who's been given a scolding! Bastal Tomorrow Bessieres will obey you and we will win this damn shambles of a battle!'

  The Emperor tore the carcass of his chicken apart with his hands, sunk his teeth into it and, with his mouth full, having wiped his lips on his sleeve and his fingers on the tablecloth, he explained to Berthier, Lannes and his headquarters staff the plan of action they were going to follow. 'With the troops who are going to cross the large bridge, Berthier, how many men will we have at our disposal : '

  'Roughly sixty thousand, sire, not forgetting Davout's thirty thousand, who ought to have reached Ebersdorf by now.'

  'Davout! Get someone to hurry him up! Cannon?' 'Five hundred pieces.'

  'Bene! Lannes, you will rout the Austrian centre with Claparede's, Tharreau's and Saint-Hilaire's divisions. Bessieres, Oudinot, Lasalle and the light cavalry and Nan-souty will wait for your breakthrough before they surge into the breach, and then they'll turn back on the enemy's wings massed in front of the villages . . .'

  The Emperor gestured to Constant, who draped his frock coat over his shoulders because it was growing cold. Caulaincourt poured him a glass of Chambertin and he continued, 'Supported by Legrand, Carra-Saint-Cyr and the skirmishers of my Guard, Massena will recover a stronger position in Aspern. We'll keep Molitor's voltigeurs in reserve, they've deserved it. Boudet will defend Essling.'

  The Emperor drank and, getting to his feet, dismissed his guests. Lannes went off by himself, his tricorn under his arm. He was no more tired than he had been hungry. He walked across the little bridge jammed with wounded, and reached the stone house where he had spent the previous night in Rosalie's arms, but tonight the hunting lodge was empty. The girl had gone back over the bridge