Klaes waited on Colonel August early the next morning, although he knew the report which he had to deliver would be found deeply unsatisfactory. He held to the principle that the more unpleasant a duty, the more important it was not to delay in performing it, and accordingly he rapped on the heavy wooden door of the colonel’s quarters at 8 a.m. sharp.
His assiduity was to no end, however. A messenger had arrived at first light from Opole, where Henrik Dietmar, the fourth of the lieutenants under August’s command, had been assembling the detachment’s artillery. The big guns, and the final detachment that would bring the company to its full muster, were less than a day behind him. The messenger, a self-important artillery sergeant named Jursitizky, had much to relate on the subject of the guns and their possible deployment, and August remained closeted with him for most of the morning, pausing only to send out the adjutant with orders for Tusimov to set up a second camping-ground to the north of the house, and for Klaes to prepare another room upstairs for Dietmar and his new wife.
The wives, Klaes remembered. They would all be here now. He had been at the mayor’s house when they arrived: the colonel’s lady and those of two of the other lieutenants. Of all three now, of course. He sighed inwardly. He already had to suffer a certain amount of ribbing on account of his youth—and also, from Tusimov at least, because of his father’s position as a small-town magistrate. The arrival of the wives would remind the other officers of another of their favourite reasons to mock him: the fact that he was the only one among them who was still single. And here he was, once again given the job of chamber-master for the married men.
Heading for the main staircase to try to find another dry bedroom upstairs, he ran into a couple of privates squabbling in the hallway: Standmeier, he thought, and Fast, two of the quartermaster’s orderlies.
“We have to bring an extra donkey!” the older of the two was insisting. “He wants a hundred turnips and five sacks of oats. How else are we going to get that lot back here?”
“How are we going to control three of those brutes without help? Toltz can come with us—or Janek; he’d go if we asked him.”
“You going to charm him like you did Molebacher’s chopper? You’re a whore, Fast.”
“Fuck off, Standmeier!”
They stopped abruptly when they saw Klaes, and the older of the two saluted. The younger, slower off the mark, hung his head, red to the ears.
“Private Fast, keep your voice to civilised levels. This is not a fish market,” Klaes said to him. “And you,” he snapped at the other man, his tone considerably sharper. “I don’t tolerate name-calling, nor baiting people for your own amusement. You’ve been given your orders: go and carry them out.”
Klaes was pleased to see that Standmeier lost his swagger and even looked a little abashed. Both men saluted and marched smartly out of his sight. It was not really his place to reprimand them: they were not in his unit. But today of all days, exercising the authority of his rank went some way towards relieving Klaes’s feelings. He watched Privates Fast and Standmeier retreating in the direction of the stables, still arguing. If they were hoping to buy that many turnips—that much of anything—in the town, he wished them luck. The current quartermaster was efficient, Klaes would grant him that, but even so the man would have his work cut out providing for all of them in a place like this. He fervently hoped they wouldn’t be here long.
As he made his way somewhat cautiously upstairs (the treads were faced with marble, but he could feel the creaking of the wooden structure beneath) he heard women’s voices: the ladies were still up there. Most of the enlisted men never got to see them at all, and Klaes himself was not usually required to mix with them much; still, the atmosphere of a posting was subtly different when they were present. It wasn’t that they were demanding, exactly. Dame Osterhilis, the colonel’s wife, was well accustomed to the privations of military life, and she kept the other two in line. But there was always a certain awkwardness when they were around. Klaes himself was never quite sure how to address the ladies. He often thought Dame Osterhilis and Tusimov’s wife, Konstanze, looked down on him for some reason: his provincial accent, perhaps, or his Protestant origins.
It was Dame Margarethe who met him in the upstairs corridor: Lieutenant Pabst’s wife, the youngest of the three, a thin, pale lady with freckles and a hesitant manner.
“Oh, Lieutenant,” she cried as soon as she saw him. “There is a bird in Konstanze’s room. We cannot get rid of it. Would you be so kind?”
It was a starling which must have got in through the roof somehow and was nesting above the beams. They had discovered it, apparently, when it flew into Dame Konstanze’s coiffure. She sat on the bed, grimacing and patting at her high-piled hair while Klaes chased the bird around the room and Margarethe watched from the corner with little cries of warning and encouragement. By the time he had wrestled open a window and shooed the starling through it (he would have to send someone up to deal with the nest later), Konstanze was asking if he could find her a looking glass. Klaes began obligingly to search through the closets and chests in the empty rooms, whereupon Dame Osterhilis appeared with a request for more blankets. Klaes had considerable respect for the colonel’s wife: he had never heard her complain in the face of discomfort or hunger, but she would not tolerate dirt. It appeared that some of the bedding she had been given had fungus growing on it.
Klaes took on this new duty with good grace. Bowing low, and with heartfelt apologies, he took the offending blankets and escaped downstairs with them, promising to return in due course with better ones. The kitchen was empty except for Private Hulyek, Molebacher’s third orderly, who was sweeping the floor listlessly with a threadbare broom. The quartermaster had gone into the town to make some special purchases for the officers’ supper, the man said. Klaes gave the dirty blankets to Hulyek and ordered him to fetch some clean ones from the officers’ stores. Then he hurried back upstairs.
He’d have to make over his own bedroom for Dietmar and his wife, he decided, and find a different billet for himself further down the corridor. He swept the floor and brought in another pallet, involuntarily checking his movements whenever he heard any of the ladies’ voices in the corridor outside. When he was finished he went back down for the clean blankets Hulyek had brought and was assailed by more female voices, chief among them the raucous laugh of the puppet girl, Drozde—there seemed no way of containing the woman! She was gossiping loudly with a group of camp followers, clustered around the well outside the kitchen. Klaes opened the door to issue a general reprimand, and recognised Dame Osterhilis’s maid, Carla, among the noisy group. His appearance broke up the party at once: the maid started upon hearing her name called and ran to him, curtsying nervously, while the others scurried about their business.
“Take these to your mistress for me,” Klaes told the girl, thrusting the blankets at her. He watched her go with the closest thing to satisfaction he had felt all day and, finally released, headed once again for the billiard room, which the colonel had designated as his headquarters.
Jursitizky was leaving as he arrived, and he and Klaes met in the doorway. Looking past him into the big square room beyond, Klaes saw that the billiard table was scattered with papers, gloves, cups, even a punch ladle, set out to show the positions of town and river, the most likely points of approach of the Prussian army and the possible placement of the guns.
“Let them come!” August said to Jursitizky’s departing back, ushering Klaes in with an expansive gesture. “With a hundred pounds of cast iron at our backs, I don’t give much for their chances.”
The colonel seemed to be in a genial mood. He insisted on sitting the lieutenant down while he heard his report, and listened attentively, nodding when Klaes mentioned the burgomaster’s near-total ignorance of national affairs as if this confirmed everything he had suspected. Klaes was as full and circumstantial as he could be. At the end of his recital the colonel looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“A very clear summary of the conversation,” he said. “And now?”
Klaes was confused. “Now, sir?”
“By your account, Lieutenant, there is more to discover. The maidservant burst into tears, you say, and was dismissed from the room. And the mayor didn’t so much as ask how long we would be here, which is suspicious in itself. He used to be a butcher. He could have sought favour—and profit—by offering to provide us with meat. He could have tried to offload his neighbours’ clapped-out oxen on us. He did neither. Depend on it, the man is keeping his head down.”
“I cannot imagine that any of them have suspect intentions, sir,” Klaes ventured. “Their very ignorance, surely—”
“—would not prevent them from trying to deceive us if they have something to hide,” August interrupted him. “Go back to them, Klaes. I suggest you start with the girl; she seems the most likely to give something away. Sweet-talk her, man! Make love to her if you need to. She certainly won’t be a virgin.” His lips twitched. “And your sabre will need to lose its edge somewhere.”
Hot-faced, Klaes gave a stiff nod and got to his feet. “I’ll pursue the matter further, sir, as you instruct.” He stalked out of the room, barely waiting to be dismissed. It was almost insubordination; he half-expected to be summoned back and rebuked. But it seemed nothing could dent August’s good humour today. As he carefully closed the door behind him, he could have sworn he heard the colonel laugh.
Klaes was at least spared the need to go back into Narutsin immediately by the announcement only a few minutes later that the artillery party was approaching. The guns could be felt before they were seen or heard: the weight of the gun carriages and the drumming hooves of the horses pulling them made the ground shake.
Their arrival was far more momentous than yesterday’s. August himself came out to see them: Lieutenant Dietmar galloping ahead, and in the lead cart, against all precedent, his young wife, cushioned and parasoled, attended by her maid and followed by a guard of ten men marching in step. Behind them came the guns. There were ten of the smaller cannons, six-pounders, and four impressive twelve-pounders, each with its own cart and an escort of a dozen men. And finally there was the monster, the thing that had caused the earth to shake.
“This is Mathilde,” Sergeant Jursitizky said with pride as the outsize cart rumbled to a halt. It had taken six horses to pull it. “She’s a twenty-four-pounder; you won’t find a bigger.”
It was more like a siege engine, Klaes thought. He couldn’t imagine what use it would be here, out at the edge of the forest. But Dietmar wheeled his stallion and came up alongside the great cannon, patting its black iron barrel with affection. “She’ll see us right,” he said. And August, standing to attention as the guns were arrayed in front of him, nodded in heartfelt approval.
The great guns, it became immediately clear, required more attention than the ladies. Dietmar’s new wife, Dame Feronika, was handed over to Klaes to be taken to her quarters while everyone else, Dietmar included, clustered around the cannons. The young lady chattered to Klaes all the way to the house, mostly about the hardships of the journey and her concern for a silk robe that she feared had been damaged in transit. She had a high giggle and suspiciously golden hair. Klaes found himself comparing her unfavourably with the maid at the Weichoreks’, who at least had something rational to say, even if she spoke out of turn. But that thought, recalling his new instructions, plunged him into gloom. Luckily Dame Osterhilis appeared to take charge of the new wife, who fell silent at the sight of her—in awe, Klaes supposed. He wished he could inspire anything similar.
By the time he returned, the smaller guns had already been brought inside the house to a makeshift storeroom. The twelve-pounders were being housed in one of the stables, opposite the donkey stall, and Mathilde stood imposingly next door, a team of privates already hard at work building a shelter around her.
”What are we meant to do with a gun that size?” Klaes asked Lieutenant Pabst, who was supervising the building. He found Pabst a little more approachable than the other two; at least he didn’t routinely twit Klaes with his lack of experience. But the lieutenant could not give him an answer.
“They do some damage, I can tell you that,” he said. “I’ve seen twenty-four-pounders in action: a single ball from one of these could most likely level that old church in Narutsin.”
“But as we’re not planning to level it, what use is the cannon?” Klaes persisted.
The older man shrugged. “Who knows? Never question the commanding officer, lad.”
Klaes received an answer of sorts at supper that night. The colonel had instructed Molebacher to cook a special meal for the officers and their wives, and Molebacher had excelled himself: fennel and mushroom soup, veal with cream sauce and chestnuts. Even the wine was good, although not remotely comparable in quality to the brandy he had been served at the burgomaster’s house the previous day.
“So, Dietmar,” Tusimov said over the veal. “What’s the story with your new mistress?”
Dietmar, whose temper was uncertain at the best of times, turned scarlet. His wife went pale. Tusimov addressed her before Dietmar could speak.
“Don’t fear, madam! It’s just my rough tongue; the rapscallion loves you too well to stray! But for all that, he has another love. Big girl. Made of metal. Name of Mathilde?” He laughed uproariously, joined by Pabst and August. Dietmar seethed for a moment, then subsided and gave a reluctant chuckle. The ladies politely echoed him, Dame Feronika’s giggle sounding somewhat forced. Klaes tried to look entertained.
“But in all seriousness,” Tusimov said to Dietmar, still sounding anything but serious, “why such a great lady? What walls do we have here to blow down?”
If Klaes had asked such a question, there would have been laughter at his naivety. But Dietmar nodded, acknowledging the point.
“It’s to show them we mean business,” he said, and tapped the side of his nose as if to say there were deeper reasons he could not reveal.
August cut in impatiently. “Its purpose is to crush the enemy before they start,” he said. “You were never in the Turkish campaign, Tusimov.”
“Deployed too late,” Tusimov said. Klaes thought he caught a note of satisfaction in the man’s tone; the Turkish defeats were still recent enough to sting.
“It wasn’t pretty,” August said. “Pabst, you remember the attack at Grocka?”
“I’ll never forget it!” Pabst assented.
Molebacher, coming in with a small apple cake and a jug of cream, deposited both on the table with an unnecessary clatter and said, “Grocka, sirs? That was a hellhole and no mistake!”
Usually such a brazen attempt at familiarity from a sergeant would be met with cold silence, if not an outright rebuke. But Molebacher too had served against the Turks. August turned towards him, his expression animated.
“Of course!” he said. “You were our quartermaster there too, Mole.”
No one but August was permitted to call Molebacher that. If one of the lieutenants tried it, he would refuse to hear them. But now he nodded vigorously, drawing himself up a little straighter. “Not that there was much time for cooking, as I recall. I never saw such a shambles, if you’ll excuse the freedom, sir.”
“We lost at Grocka because we were not sufficiently prepared,” August said flatly. “That won’t happen this time.”
August’s face was full of fervour, and it was mirrored in the expressions of the other officers and Sergeant Molebacher.
“By God, we will!” cried Dietmar. “A toast, gentlemen! May the Prussians get here fast—so we can drive them away even faster!”
They all rose to acknowledge the toast. “Tails between their legs!” Molebacher shouted, and he poured himself a glass of the table wine and downed it in a single gulp. August clapped him on the back.
“Well spoken, Mole!” he cried.
Klaes could hear the drink in his commanding officer’s voice, and he was a little taken aback by it. This sort of jingoistic rapture came over his fellow officers with moderate frequency, and it was a sentiment of which August heartily approved. But the colonel had a certain reserve which set him apart from those under his command, and he did not often join in with their brazen rhetoric.
The lieutenant shifted awkwardly in his seat. The atmosphere of celebration around the table did not sit well with him. It was all so thoughtless: the praising of big guns to high heaven, the talk of cold steel and hellfire. To men like Tusimov, Dietmar and August, it was what war meant. Klaes could not help but feel that there was more to it than that. But the whole table now was in a blaze of triumph, as if somewhere in the darkness outside the Prussians were already fleeing. Even the ladies were flushed and laughing, and the colonel was loudest of all. So Klaes raised his own glass, and joined in the cheering.