ON THE morning of July 22, 1848, a patrol squadron, the 2nd Squadron of Wallmoden cuirassiers numbering 107 cavalrymen under Captain Baron Rofrano, left the San Alessandro mess before six o’clock and rode in the direction of Milan. An inexpressible stillness lay over the open, glittering landscape; early-morning clouds climbed from the peaks of the distant mountains toward the shining sky like tranquil puffs of smoke; the corn stood motionless in the fields, and country houses and churches shone between stands of trees that seemed to have been washed. The patrol was barely a mile or so past the army’s farthest line of outposts when weaponry glinted among the cornfields and the advance guard reported enemy infantry. The squadron massed for attack beside the road, was raked by strangely loud bullets which sounded almost like the meowing of cats as they flew overhead, charged across the fields, and drove a company of unevenly armed men before it like quail. They were soldiers of the Legion of Manara, with odd headgear. Prisoners were passed to a corporal and eight privates and sent to the rear. The advance guard reported suspicious figures in front of a fine villa with an approach flanked by ancient cypresses. Sergeant Anton Lerch dismounted, took twelve soldiers armed with carbines, surrounded the windows, and captured eighteen students belonging to the Legion of Pisa, well-bred and handsome young men with white hands and hair to their shoulders. Half an hour later the squadron seized a man passing by, dressed in the costume of a native of Bergamo, who had attracted suspicion because of his excessively harmless and unprepossessing appearance. Sewn into the lining of the man’s coat were detailed plans of the greatest importance concerning the formation of volunteer units in the Giudicarie Valley and their liaison with the Piedmontese army. Toward ten o’clock, a herd of cattle fell into the hands of the patrol. A strong enemy detachment offered some resistance immediately afterward, firing on the advance guard from a cemetery wall. Second Lieutenant Count Trautsohn’s front line leaped over the low wall and, amid the gravestones, set upon the completely bewildered enemy, many of whom sought refuge in the church and from there, fleeing through the vestry door, in a dense wood. The twenty-seven new prisoners had enlisted as Neapolitan volunteers under papal officers. The squadron suffered one casualty. A party consisting of Lance Corporal Wotrubek and Dragoons Holl and Haindl circled the wood on horseback and captured a light howitzer harnessed to two farm horses by setting upon its escort and getting hold of the horses’ halters to turn them around. Lance Corporal Wotrubek was wounded slightly and sent back to headquarters with a report of the fighting and other favorable events; the prisoners were again sent to the rear; but the howitzer was brought along by the squadron, which now numbered seventy-eight cavalrymen after the departure of the escort.
The statements of various prisoners agreed that the city of Milan had been abandoned by both regular and irregular enemy troops and was empty of all artillery and matériel, so the captain could not deny himself and the squadron the opportunity to ride into the fine great city, now lying undefended. Under the sound of the noonday bells, the General’s March blared up from the four bugles into the steely gleam of the sky, rattling a thousand windows and echoing back to seventy-eight cuirasses, seventy-eight bared and brandished blades; openmouthed faces like a churning anthill filling the streets to the left and right; figures turning pale and uttering curses, disappearing behind their doors, windows shuttered for the night now being thrown open by the bare arms of beautiful strangers; past Santa Babila, San Fedele, San Carlo, the world-famous marble cathedral, San Satiro, San Giorgio, San Lorenzo, San Eustorgio; all their ancient bronze doors opening, and waving from them the devout—silvery under candlelight and incense smoke—and brocaded, radiant-eyed women; shots anticipated from a thousand garrets, dark archways, cheap shops, and again and again half-grown boys and girls showing their white teeth and dark hair; from atop the trotting horses, eyes gazing down on all of it, glittering from cocoons of blood-flecked dust; in at the Porta Venezia, out at the Porta Ticinese: thus the fine squadron rode through Milan.
Not far from the last-named city gate, where there was a rampart planted with lovely plane trees, Sergeant Anton Lerch thought he saw the face of a woman he knew in a ground-level window of a recently built bright yellow house. Curiosity impelled him to turn around in the saddle. At the same time he sensed from a certain stiffness in the gait of his horse that it had a stone in one of its front shoes; since he was also riding at the tail of the squadron and could fall out without causing disruption, everything convinced him to dismount, which he did once he had guided his horse’s forequarters into the entry of the house. He had hardly raised the second of the bay’s white-stockinged forelegs to examine the hoof when a door which led to a room inside the house and gave onto the very front of the entry swung right open, revealing a woman, voluptuous, still almost young, and wearing a somewhat disheveled morning dress, behind her a bright room with a few pots of basil and red geraniums in its garden windows as well as a mahogany chest and a bisque mythological group. At the same time his sharp eyes spied the opposite side of the room reflected in a pier glass. It was taken up by a large white bed and a flush door which was open and through which a corpulent, clean-shaven older man was at that moment withdrawing.
But while the woman’s name was coming back to the sergeant, and much else besides—that she was the widow or divorced wife of a Croatian noncommissioned accounting officer, and that the sergeant had spent a number of evenings and late nights with her nine or ten years previously in Vienna in the company of another man, who was in fact her lover at that time—his eyes tried to find the lush but slender form of those days beneath her present opulence. But the woman standing there smiled at him in a rather coy Slavic manner that drove the blood into his strong neck and behind his eyes, and when she spoke a certain affectation in her speech intimidated him, as did her morning dress and the furnishings of the room. Yet as he was following with somewhat heavy eyes a large fly running over a comb in the woman’s hair, seemingly thinking of nothing but how he was now going to put his hand on the white, warm yet cool nape in order to shoo the fly away, he was filled from head to toe with an awareness of the fighting and the other successes of the day, so that he drew her head forward with a heavy hand and said, “Vuic”—he had certainly not spoken her name in ten years and had completely forgotten her surname—“in eight days we will move in, and this will be my billet” (he gestured toward the half-open door). While he was speaking he heard the slamming of door after door inside the house; he felt he was being drawn away by his horse, first by its silent tugging at the bridle, then by its loud neighing to its fellows, so he mounted and rejoined the squadron with no response from Vuic other than an embarrassed laugh delivered with chin drawn in. But with his utterance he had asserted his authority. As he rode to one side of the column at a pace that was no longer smart, under the heavy metallic glow of the sky, his gaze enclosed by the traveling dust cloud, the sergeant was more and more living in the room with the mahogany furniture and pots of basil, in a civilian atmosphere (through which the martial gleamed nonetheless), an atmosphere of comfort and pleasant brutality with no one telling him what to do, an existence in slippers, the basket of his saber stuck through the left pocket of his dressing gown. And an important role was played by the stout clean-shaven man, part clergyman, part retired valet, who had vanished through the door, almost more important than the fine wide bed and Vuic’s delicate white skin. The clean-shaven man soon took on the aspect of a trusted, somewhat obsequious friend who reported court gossip, brought tobacco and capons; soon he had his back against the wall, had to pay hush money, was mixed up in all sorts of intrigues, was an informer for the Piedmontese, a papal cook, a procurer, the owner of suspicious buildings with dark garden-level rooms used for political meetings, and grew into a bloated colossus in which you could knock twenty holes and draw off gold instead of blood.
There were no new incidents during the afternoon hours, and nothing inhibited the sergeant’s daydreaming. But a thirst for windfalls, for extras, for ducats suddenly falling into his pockets had taken hold in him. The thought of his future first entrance into the room with the mahogany furniture was the splinter in his flesh around which all wishes and desires festered.
With its horses now fed and partly rested, the patrol attempted toward evening to swing onward toward Lodi and the bridge over the Adda, where there was every expectation of engagement with the enemy. A village with a half-ruined belfry lying in a darkening hollow some ways off the road looked temptingly suspicious to the sergeant; he motioned to Holl and Scarmolin and moved off with them from the side of the column. So inflamed was his imagination that he was hoping it would be easy to surprise and attack some lightly escorted enemy general in the village or in some other way earn a quite splendid bonus. At the edge of the wretched and apparently deserted hamlet, he ordered Scarmolin and Holl to ride around the houses to the left and right, while he himself set off at a gallop up the road, pistol in hand; but, feeling under him hard flagstones covered with some sort of slippery grease, he had to rein in his horse. The village remained deathly quiet—there was not a child, not a bird, not a breath of air. To the left and right were small dirty houses with the plaster crumbling from their walls; here and there were obscenities drawn with charcoal on the bare brick; through open doorways the sergeant saw now and again a weird half-naked figure lounging on a bed or dragging through a room as though on dislocated hips. His horse was walking with difficulty, laboriously putting its hind legs down as though they were made of lead. He turned and was bending down to look at one of its rear shoes when there was the shuffling of steps coming out of a house, and, as he straightened, a woman whose face he could not see came up close in front of his horse. She was only half dressed. Her torn, filthy skirt made of flowered silk dragged in a trickle of rainwater; she wore dirty slippers on her feet, which were otherwise bare. She was so close to the front of his horse that the breath from its nostrils stirred the greasily glistening hank of hair which hung to her bare neck under an old straw hat, yet she moved no faster and did not get out of the cavalryman’s way. Two bloody rats locked together rolled from under a door at the left into the middle of the road. The one getting the worst of it squealed so wretchedly that the sergeant’s horse pulled up, staring at the ground with its head to one side, breathing audibly. The sergeant gave it a squeeze to move it forward, and now the woman had disappeared into the entry of a house; he had not been able to see her face. A dog ran busily out of the next house, head raised, dropped a bone in the middle of the road, and tried to bury it in a crack in the pavement. It was a white mongrel bitch with drooping teats. It dug with diabolical energy, then gripped the bone in its teeth and carried it a bit farther on. Three more dogs had arrived by the time the bitch resumed digging. Two were very young, with soft bones and loose skin; unable to bite, they pulled silently at each other’s chops with blunt teeth. The other dog with them was a light-yellow greyhound whose body was so swollen that it was able to propel itself forward only quite slowly on its four thin legs. Its head looked much too small on its thick, drum-tight body; its small restless eyes held a dreadful expression of pain and trepidation. Two more dogs immediately bounded up: a lean white dog of the most ravenous meanness, black runnels under its inflamed eyes, and a shabby dachshund with long legs. This dog lifted its head to the sergeant and looked at him. It must have been very old. Its eyes were vastly tired and sad. But the bitch dashed foolishly back and forth in front of the cavalryman, the two puppies snapped silently with their soft mouths at the horse’s pasterns, and the greyhound dragged its ghastly body just ahead of its hooves. The bay was unable to take another step. The sergeant tried to fire at one of the dogs, but his pistol jammed, so he gave the horse both spurs and clattered over the cobblestones. He had to rein it in sharply after just a few strides, for a cow, being dragged by a boy to the slaughter at the end of a taut rope, now blocked the way. But the cow, recoiling from the smell of blood and the fresh hide of a black calf which was nailed to a doorpost, dug in its hooves, inhaled with flared nostrils the reddish sunlit haze of the evening, and, before the boy overpowered it with his stick and his rope, with a piteous look in its eyes tore off one more mouthful of the hay that the sergeant had fastened to the front of his saddle. He had now left the last house in the village behind him. Riding between two dilapidated low walls, he was able to see the continuation of the road on the other side of an old bridge consisting of a single stone arch over an apparently dry ditch, but he felt such an indescribable heaviness in his horse’s gait, such an inability to move forward, that every foot of the walls to his left and right, even every centipede and pill bug on them, heaved past laboriously as he looked, and he felt he had been riding through the abominable village for an immeasurable age. At that moment a heavy roaring issued from his horse’s chest, but he did not immediately recognize this sound, which was completely unfamiliar to him, and, seeking its source overhead, nearby, and finally in the distance, he noticed a cavalryman of his own regiment coming toward him on the other side of the stone bridge and about as far from it as he now was; it was in fact a sergeant; on a bay, in fact, and one with white-stockinged forelegs. Since he was well aware that there was no such horse in the entire squadron other than the one he was now riding, but still was unable to make out the face of the other rider, he impatiently drove his horse to a very lively trot, even using his spurs, whereupon the other rider quickened his pace to the same degree, until there was only a stone’s throw between them, and now, as the two horses, each from its side, put the same white-stockinged forefoot onto the bridge at the same instant, the sergeant stared and recognized himself in the apparition, pulled his horse back as though in a frenzy, and stretched out his hand, fingers spread, toward the figure, which, likewise pulling up and lifting its right hand, was suddenly not there, and Holl and Scarmolin came up out of the dry ditch at the left and right, their faces expressionless, and at the same time the squadron’s bugles sounding the attack, loud and not at all distant, came across the pasture-land. The sergeant rode over a rise at the fastest gallop and saw the squadron already galloping toward a wood from which enemy cavalrymen armed with pikes were speedily debouching. As he gathered the four loose reins in his left hand and wrapped his wrist sling around his right, he saw the fourth platoon detach itself from the squadron and slow its pace; now the ground under him was shaking, now a strong smell of dust was in his nostrils, now he was amid the enemy, struck at a blue arm carrying a pike, saw near him the captain’s face with staring eyes and fiercely bared teeth, was then suddenly completely hemmed in by hostile faces and foreign colors, plunged into a mass of swinging blades, dove at the neck of the nearest man and knocked him off his horse, saw Scarmolin next to him laughingly severing the fingers of someone’s rein hand and slicing deeply into the horse’s neck, felt the melee break up, and was suddenly alone, on the bank of a small stream, behind an enemy officer on an iron-gray horse. The officer was trying to cross the stream; the gray was refusing to move. The officer jerked it around and turned a young, very pale face and the barrel of a pistol toward the sergeant just as a saber drove into his mouth, carrying in its small point the concentrated force of a galloping horse. The sergeant pulled the saber back and caught the bridle rein of the gray (which was lightly, daintily lifting its feet over its dying master like a deer) where the fingers of the fallen man had let it go.
As the sergeant rode back leading his fine spoils, the sun setting in the heavy mist cast a dreadful red over the pasture-land. Even where the ground was untrodden there seemed to be whole pools of blood. A red reflection lay upon the white uniforms and laughing faces, the cuirasses and shabracks glittered and blazed, and most striking of all were three small fig trees whose soft leaves the cavalrymen had laughingly used to wipe the blood from their sabers. Beside the red-stained trees was the captain and next to him the squadron bugler, who held to his lips a bugle that seemed to have been dipped in red syrup and blew roll call. The sergeant rode from platoon to platoon and saw that the squadron had lost no men and had won nine horses. He rode to the captain and reported, the gray still with him, prancing with its head held high and snorting like the fine, proud young horse that it was. The captain listened to the report distractedly. He waved Second Lieutenant Count Trautsohn over. The lieutenant immediately dismounted, and, with six cuirassiers who had also dismounted, unhitched the captured light howitzer behind the lines of the squadron, had the six men drag the gun off and sink it in a small bog formed by the stream, then, after driving the now useless draft horses off with the flat of his sword, remounted and silently resumed his place at the head of the first platoon. During this time the squadron, which was drawn up in two ranks, was not exactly restless, but the excitement of four successful engagements in one day had created a not entirely typical mood, expressed in subdued exchanges and minor eruptions of half-smothered laughter. Even the horses were uneasy, especially those next to captured ones. After such successes the space in which they had drawn up seemed too confined to all, and the victorious cavalrymen now felt a longing to go after new adversaries in an open pack, have at them, and seize new horses as booty. At that moment Captain Baron Rofrano rode to the very front of his squadron. Raising the large lids of his somewhat sleepy blue eyes, he commanded distinctly but without raising his voice, “Release the captured horses!” The squadron was deathly silent. Only the gray next to the sergeant stretched its neck, almost touching the forehead of the horse on which the captain sat. The captain sheathed his saber, unholstered one of his pistols, and, brushing a little dust off its gleaming barrel with the back of his rein hand, repeated his command in a somewhat louder voice, then counted, “One ... two....” At the count of two he fixed his veiled gaze upon the sergeant, who was sitting motionless before him in his saddle, staring into his face. Though Anton Lerch’s fixedly held gaze, in which something melancholy, something fawning flickered only intermittently and was gone, may have expressed a certain humble trust born of many years of service, his consciousness contained almost nothing of the terrible tension of this moment, but was flooded by a multitude of strangely cozy images, and from a place deep inside him of which he was entirely ignorant climbed a bestial fury at the man there before him who wished to take his horse away, an awful rage against the face, the voice, the bearing, the entire being of this man such as can mysteriously arise only from years of living at close quarters. But whether something similar was happening in the captain, or whether he felt, compressed in that instant of mute insubordination, all the silently spreading danger of critical situations, we cannot know. He raised his arm with a careless, almost affected movement, and as he counted three, curling his upper lip scornfully, the shot was already crashing, and the sergeant, hit in the forehead, slumped onto the neck of his horse with the upper part of his body and then onto the ground between the bay and the gray. He had not yet hit the ground when all the lower ranks and privates had freed their captured horses with a jerk at their reins or a kick, and the captain, calmly putting his pistol away, was again able to lead the squadron, still feeling a blow that had come like a bolt of lightning, against the enemy, which was apparently rallying its forces in the hazy and darkening distance. But the enemy did not engage the squadron in its second charge, and a short time later the patrol reached the southern outpost of its own army without incident.
(1898)