'Ah, war! When you haven't had a taste of it, it can really shake you up.'
The lieutenant cut himself a thick slice oi terrine and
continued his chatter. 'That's not like the Duke of Monte-bello's mistress. She's an old hand, no doubt about that. She came onto the island and she even asked me, because I happened to be there . . .'
'Thank you, Lieutenant, thank you,' said Henri, to cut him short. He wanted to help Carino take Anna back to her room, but she feverishly waved him away. The doctor apologized for her, raising his eyes to the ceiling. When they had gone out, Henri bent down to pick up Lejeune's letter, which he smoothed out and was unable to read.
'Do you understand German, Lieutenant : '
'Oh, no, Monsieur Beyle, very sorry. I can get by in Spanish, that's not too bad, owing to the spell we put in there with the Colonel during that damned rebellion of theirs, but German, no, I haven't had the time yet.'
Then he bored Henri senseless with his reflections on the difficulties of that particular language.
Vincent Paradis's sleep was filled with naive images which were barely dreams, more like pictures and always the same ones, taking him back to his village, the surrounding hills and the badly kept-up courtyard where his father mixed leaves with scraps to make compost. They lived off what grew in the fields and, depending on the year, met their needs. Last year they'd killed a pig. Such a rare event had been a memorable occasion. The neighbours had taken part and they'd quartered the animal and filled the salting tub. The mayor had given them the salt and, since he didn't know how to fill out the registers, he'd also protected them from the gentlemen of the town, especially the one who had it in mind to drain the swamps. In their part of the
world, they knew all about monotony and death from natural causes, but then the gendarmes and soldiers had come to pick out the strongest for the war. Like his eldest brother, Vincent had drawn the short straw and his family didn't have a sou to pay someone to take his place. He had baulked at imitating his friend Bruhat, who worked at the tannery and had come up with a way to stay in the country. With a laugh, he'd showed his toothless mouth. 'Oh yes, I pulled them all out by the roots, because, you see, without teeth you can't open cartridges and they don't want anything to do with you!' Vincent had followed the sergeants meekly and full of regret.
'Hey! On your feet, you sluggard!'
Vincent Paradis felt a clog kicking him in the shoulder. Yawning, he opened his eyes and saw Morillon, the medical orderly in charge of the battalion of ambulance men which he had been drafted into the day before on Dr Percy's orders.
Paradis pushed himself off what had been his pillow for the night and realized that it was a dead man, but it didn't shock him because he'd seen a mass of them by then. He simply muttered, 'Sleep in peace, comrade, and who knows, see you soon . . .' Without a musket to lug about, he felt light on his feet and followed Morillon as he had followed the recruiting sergeants before. The ambulance battalion was made up of louts and the scum of big cities who'd do anything for a piece of gold, because Dr Percy paid them out of his own pocket so he could employ them as he wished. They were fanned out in a line behind a wagon with big wheels on which they were putting those who had been wounded in . Two medical orderlies accompanied them to sort the dying into groups: the most
seriously wounded would be sent to the ambulance post at the entrance of the little forest, the rest evacuated onto the island. The troop passed through rows of maimed soldiers who had collected on the riverbank. The wind covered them with clouds of dust and they shaded themselves from the fierce sun with leaves they had torn from the clumps of reeds. Some dragged themselves to the Danube to vomit into its waters, others were convulsed by spasms. There were hundreds of them, groaning, screaming, moaning in agony, mumbling incomprehensible sentences and raving deliriously. They insulted the ambulance men, and feebly tried to grab hold of their breeches. They wanted to be finished with it all, one way or another, which was why any weapon that could still do harm had been put out of their reach: every sword, bayonet and knife with which they would gladly have opened their veins, stopped the pain and disappeared, once and for all.
The ambulance men followed the wagon along the riverbank as far as Essling where General Boudet's division, having been forbidden to mount an attack, had set about barricading itself in. The entrenched village now presented a sort of defensive wall towards the plain. Furniture, mattresses, broken caissons and corpses were piled pell-mell up to the first floor of the stone houses which had been blown open by cannonballs' and, overnight, the breaches had been blocked with harrows and rubble. The most recent casualties were waiting under the trees lining the main street, on the grass which some of them were soaking w r ith blood. A captain propped himself up against a tree, his left eye covered with a bloodstained handkerchief, and he grimaced as he bit down on his pipe hard enough to split a tooth. Paradis helped lift up a dragoon
who had taken a lance thrust in the side of the forehead; one could see where the bone had been cut into. Then a voltigeur, who screamed as he was put in the wagon on the bundles of hay. His shoulder blade was shattered and Morillon, with an expert air, commented, 'A good amount of flesh will have to be cut away to get at those splinters of bone . . .'
'You operate as well, do you, Monsieur Morillon.'' Paradis asked, dazzled by such a display of scientific knowledge.
'I assist Dr Percy, you know that!'
'Will this poor lad make it : '
'I'm not a fortune teller! Come on! We haven't got time to waste!'
The din of could be heard again. It seemed to be getting closer. So, the Austrians weren't withdrawing any more. The wounded squeezed onto the wagon which did a half-turn towards the little wood and the Danube. Paradis wiped his red, sticky hands on the grass. His ears rang with the sound of groaning but he was proud of his new assignment. Dr Percy and his assistants would be sure to save a few bodies from the maggots.
Just before the small bridge, where they were going to unload their pitiful cargo, the ambulance men met a procession of skirmishers carrying the body of an officer on a plank who was thrashing around in agony.
'Whooah!' Paradis said. 'That's got to be at least a colonel, with all that gold braid on his chest!'
'Count Saint-Hilaire,' said Morillon, who knew all the generals of the Empire by sight.
Paradis, forgetting the wounded he'd picked up, posted himself in front of the ambulance door. The soldiers laid
the officer on Percy's table. 'He's had his left foot taken off by canister shot. . .'
'I can see that!' Percy said, tearing off what was left of the boot and shouting, 'Lint!'
'None left.'
'A piece of jacket, a rag, some straw, grass, anything!'
Paradis tore off his shirt-tail and handed it to the doctor. The latter used it to wipe his forehead, which was covered in sweat. He was exhausted. He had been amputating constantly for more than a day now. His sight was becoming blurred. With a white-hot cauterizing iron he burnt the wound to kill the nerve endings. Saint-Hilaire opened his mouth wide as if to scream, but made do with a grimace instead. His face drawn with pain, he stiffened and then fell back onto the table as Percy began sawing off his ankle because tetanus had set in. The doctor paused, lifted the patient's eyelid and announced, 'Gentlemen, you can take the general away. He has just died.'
Paradis never found out whether General Saint-Hilare was entitled to an immediate burial or if they waited to take his body back to Vienna, because Morillon sent him and ten other ambulance men to prepare broth for the wounded. They went away grumbling but at least cookhouse fatigue was not dangerous. Fresh supplies were still on the right bank with Davout and no one could fight or survive on an empty stomach, so Percy's battalions had been ordered to help the cooks on the mobile canteens. Teams of men had spent the previous night scouring the ground between the villages for dead horses whose bellies were beginning to swell up. They tied ropes around them and artillery nags had dragged them b
ack to the ambulance, where they formed a hideous mound of muzzles, manes,
hooves and hocks. Paradis and his new workmates were to cut up the carcasses with blunt swords or cleavers. Then the quarters of fresh meat would be thrown into a cuirass from a pile of them that had been salvaged, covered with muddy water from the Danube and set to boil on a series of fires. Gunpowder would do for seasoning. Paradis had started quartering when a band of starving voltigeurs marched up to him. "You're not giving all that to men who're going to die anyway, are you.''
'You've got your rations,' answered Fat Louis, who was in charge of the apprentice butchers.
'Our mess tins are empty."
'Well, too bad!'
The voltigeurs surrounded him and threatened him with their bayonets. 'Shove over!'
'It it's swordplay you're after,' said Fat Louis, raising his cleaver, 'the Austrians are crying out for your sort!'
'And there's plenty of horses to eat on the plain,' added Paradis.
'Thanks, mv lad, but that's where we've come from. Shove over!'
The voltigeur bundled Paradis out of the way and sank his bayonet into the neck of a grey mare. Fat Louis chopped the bayonet in half with his cleaver. Two soldiers as scrawny and vicious as wolves grabbed him from behind, calling him a stinking civvy. He lashed out and they started fighting. Paradis ran and hid behind the mound of glassy-eyed horses. The soldiers and ambulance men were throwing entrails in one another's faces, while one sly devil cut himself off a piece and sank his fangs into the meat.
Bessieres had taken the Emperor's unwarranted reprimand hard and resolved, from that moment on, not to take the slightest initiative. He would defer absolutely to Lannes's orders, whether he approved or not, without thinking of ways they might be improved, and consequently delay the movements of his troops. He applied all his ingenuitv to keeping his cavalry safe, only sending to the front the squadrons he was ordered to send. Thev were to withdraw : So be it. They were to attack' So be it. He had been kept awake all night, brooding over his anger. He had inspected his troops, worn out two horses and, with his Gascon dragoons, breakfasted on a slice of bread rubbed with garlic. The Emperor disappointed him but he put a brave face on it. Thev shared a similar history, hated by the Jacobins and despised by the Republic, even though Marshal Bessieres's links with the nobility were purely a matter of the education he'd received at the hands of his surgeon father, an abbot who was a relative and the teachers at the Saint-Michel de Cahors school. He understood the Emperor's methods and they cut him to the quick: did so much hatred have to be stirred up tor him to rule. : Two years earlier, Lannes himself had been mortified when, at the last moment, the Emperor had preferred Bessieres to him to go and meet the Tsar at Tilsit. Whims bear little relation to sense, Bessieres thought as he studied the plain. Through his spyglass he saw the Austrians redeploying their cannon and pouring canister shot into the unfortunate Saint-Hilaire's battalions, whom Lannes, the pigheaded fool, was mustering to his rear. An isolated shot rang out, sharp and distinct amongst the confused din of the fighting. It came from a company of cuirassiers. Bessieres steered his horse in their direction and found two dismounted troopers
quarrelling. One of them had blood all over his hand. Captain Saint-Didier, rather than keeping them apart, was helping the taller cuirassier pin the struggling wounded man to the ground.
'An accident?' asked Bessieres.
'Your Excellency,' said the captain, 'Cuirassier Brunei tried to kill himself.'
'And I knocked the carbine away,' added Fayolle, holding his friend down with all his weight, one knee on his chest.
'An accident. Get that hand dressed.'
Bessieres didn't order any punishment for Cuirassier Brunei, who had snapped under the strain. Suicides, like desertions, were on the rise amongst the army. It was no longer unusual in the middle of a battle for a conscript at the limits of his endurance to creep away into a thicket and blow his brains out. The marshal turned around and rejoined a regiment of black-maned dragoons, disappearing amidst the brass helmets bound in navy-blue calfskin which gleamed in the sun. Brunei pulled himself up on his elbows, gasping for breath. A cuirassier cut strips from his saddle cloth for him to bandage his hand, two fingers of which had been sheared away by the bullet. Captain Saint-Didier took a flask of alcohol from his saddle holster, uncorked it and stuck it between the trooper's lips. 'Drink and then back in the saddle!' f
'With his hand mashed up like that?' asked Fayolle.
'He doesn't need his left hand to hold a sword!'
'But he does to hold the bridle.'
'He can just wind it round his wrist'
Fayolle helped Brunei put his feet back in the stirrups, grumbling, 'The horses can't take any more, either.'
'We'll ride them until they drop!'
'Aah, Captain! If the horses knew how to shoot, I tell you, they'd kill themselves straight off!'
Brunei looked at his comrade. 'You shouldn't have done that.'
'Bah .. .'
Fayolle couldn't think of anything clever to say, but he wouldn't have had time to either, because once again the trumpets were blowing the assembly, once again they drew their swords, once again they set their horses off at a jogtrot towards the Austrian batteries.
As they crested the slope, they found themselves facing lines of cannon ploughing up the green wheat, but when the trumpets summoned them to attack, it was impossible to force their exhausted horses into a gallop. Poorly fed on barley, their strength sapped by endless cavalry charges, none of them could manage more than a brisk trot, the most gruelling pace for cuirassiers. Jolted up and down in the saddle at every stride, their steel backplates and breastplates cutting into their shoulders, necks and hips, they were even more exposed to the constant fire, because the cannons spat relentlessly, almost like a fusillade, and the roundshot fell like driving rain, ravaging their ranks. Even so, Saint-Didier's troopers charged slowly forward under the hail of fire, their swords drawn. Fayolle thought he was riding to certain death but it was Brunei, his neighbour, who went to hell first. A roundshot took off his head and, as his heart kept beating out of habit, jets of blood came spurting out of the top of his cuirass. Frozen in the saddle with his sword arm stiffly outstretched and his sword dangling from the lanyard round his wrist, the headless trooper rode on to dash himself against the line of artillery.
At the same moment and in the same volley of cannon fire, Fayolle's horse had a hoof sliced off and it span around, whinnying with pain. Fayolle dismounted, paying no attention to the barrage of canister shot. He looked fondly at the worn-out animal; it was standing on three legs and licking his face as if to say farewell. The cuirassier let himself fall full length into the wheat. Flat on his back, arms crossed, forgetting death and its racket, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Napoleon had halted at the edge of the lethal plain which the Austrians were bombarding remorselessly with two hundred guns. His officers had mangaged to persuade him against riding into Aspern, where he wanted to restore the courage of Massena's men.
'Don't take pointless risks!'
' is lost if you are killed!'
'You're trembling as much as my horse,' Napoleon had growled, holding the reins too tight, but he had sent an emissary to the village to find out how matters stood.
'Here is Laville, sire . . .'
A young officer in a stylish uniform galloped up. To report more quickly, he jumped the fences round the enclosures and reached the Emperor out of breath. 'The Duke of Rivoli, sire.
'He's dead?'
'He has retaken Aspern, sire.'
'He'd lost that devil of a village, then, had he?'
'Lost it and retaken it, sire, but the Hessians of the Confederation of the Rhine have been of great service to him.'
^ Ram baud
'And now?'
'His position appears to be a strong one.'
'I'm not asking what his position appears to be but what he thinks of it!'
'The Duke was sit
ting on a tree trunk, he was perfectly composed, he assured me that he could hold out for twenty hours if necessary.'
The Emperor made no reply: this young aide-de-camp irritated him. He abruptly wheeled his horse and the little band headed back to the tile factory where the Major-General was waiting and praying that he hadn't been killed. The Emperor asked for his arm to dismount, complaining, as he did so, about his unruly horse. Once on the ground, he said, 'Berthier, send General Rapp to give the Duke of Rivoli the support he needs.'
'He is a general on your headquarters staff, sire.'
'I am aware of that, damn it!'
'With which troops?'
'Put him in command of two battalions of the fusiliers of my Guard.'
Then the Emperor immersed himself in the map which two aides-de-camp held unfolded at eye level. As on the previous day, the front stretched in a semicircle from one village to the other, its arc ending, on both sides, at the Danube. The Austrians had to be prevented from breaking through this deployment, so that they could effect a complete withdrawal onto the Lobau when night fell. The Emperor couldn't hesitate any longer. He had to use the Guard, which had been kept in reserve until then, to strengthen an extremely precarious position. Berthier, who had dictated and signed Rapp's orders, came back to deliver the latest information he had received. 'Boudet has barri-
cadcd himself in Essling, sire, and set up firing positions throughout the village, but he is not threatened yet. The Archduke is directing the bulk of his forces against our centre. He is leading the attack in person, with the twelve battalions of Hohenzollern grenadiers . . .' 'Supplies?'
'Davout is sending us what ammunition he can by boat but the oarsmen are having trouble not to be swept downstream, past the island.'
The Battle Page 18