Lieutenant Tusimov’s expedition had started off well enough, but it had not ended propitiously. Not at all.
The Glogau valley at this point was very wide and very shallow, its breadth greater than the elevations on either side. At its centre was the Mala Panev, a tributary of the Oder, which at certain times of the year was a considerable torrent. It lay peaceably enough within its banks now, but Lieutenant Tusimov noted how high those banks were. He decided he would make the river the westernmost point of their progress, since in any case it marked the legal boundary between Silesia and Prussia, where they had no business to be. Not, at least, until Frederick Hohenzollern made himself such an irritant to the empire that it became necessary to set his teeth on edge.
Until then they were peacekeepers and guardians, not warriors and angels of vengeance. Desirous though he was of glory, Tusimov was content to let it come to him in its own time. He would scruple to vex the Fates with the overzealous prosecution of his duty, as though he were some questing knight of old.
He marched his unit through the village at a smart pace. He was tempted to order the double march at that point, but when he came to it there was no need. Once they came among the slovenly cottages and the gawking peasantry the men quickened the pace of their own volition, their clomping boots raising spume from the puddles and flecks of mud from the pressed earth. If there had been cobbles, they would have raised sparks.
There were a good few onlookers out on the main street. There were more still, Tusimov was certain, watching from behind sack curtains or through the cracks of doors. The faces that he saw wore a variety of expressions, mostly speculative or solemn. But a few scowled openly, as though the sight of the soldiers so emphatically treading down their thoroughfare were an affront of some kind.
Well, if it was an affront, let them open wide and swallow it down. Tusimov considered that he and his men had more right to walk this street than those who merely lived in its vicinity. They, after all, were the guarantors of its continued existence. Dancer paused as they left the village, raising her tail to drop a sizeable load of manure into the centre of the street. As she trotted on, an old lady in a black dress that swept the ground came running out, sack in hand, to claim the prize. She carried no spade; she just scooped the shit into the sack with her bare hands.
From Narutsin they marched on westward and downward, along cart tracks whose ruts were deep enough for a man to step in up to his knees. It was slow going, but the general mood seemed to be good. And in due course they reached the river, where they paused so the men could refill canteens and eat a little dried meat from their trail rations. More than half of them lit pipes too, and since he hadn’t expressly forbidden it, Tusimov was content to let it pass. There was something cheering about the grey clouds of their own making that soon hovered over their heads—a riposte to the larger and darker masses sitting on the peaks all around them.
After a decent interval they moved on, turning north now and keeping the river on their left hand. The ground was sodden and overgrown, the path merely notional in places, and Tusimov began to wish that he had taken a different route. He felt that he had better keep to it now, though. They would march to the head of the valley on this lower elevation, ascend the eastern slope via what was marked on the colonel’s maps as a wagon road, and so return to Pokoj along the flank of the mountain called Zielona Góra. The name (Green Hill) promised pleasant views. Better, at least, than their current surroundings, which were quickly becoming a morass.
Morale suffered accordingly, but it was nothing that wouldn’t mend as soon as the going got a little easier. Tusimov urged the men onward, staying in the van where they could all see him. After a while, and choosing his moment with care, he dismounted. Better they should see him slip and stumble in the mud than that they should view him as the sort of officer who made demands of them he wasn’t prepared to meet himself.
They slogged on like this for another hour. Tusimov kept his eyes peeled for a track that was further removed from the water, but the map showed nothing and nothing offered itself. Eventually he sent out scouts. They came back wet, discouraged and empty-handed.
Another hour brought them to the wagon track. It was nothing of the kind, unless the wagons in question were pulled by goats. Near-vertical in places, it was strewn with rocks that the men in front had to navigate with extreme care in order to avoid bringing them down on the heads of those behind.
Halfway up, the slope became so steep that their progress could no longer be called a march. It was a climb, and not an easy one. Dancer was doing her best, game old girl that she was, to pick her way through the scrub and furze and treacherous scree, but her own weight dragged her down two steps for every three she took, and it was only a matter of time before she fell and broke a leg.
“I’m going down and around,” Tusimov told Strumpfel. “I’ll meet you on the lee slope.”
“Yes sir,” Strumpfel said, loosening his grip on a clump of couch grass to essay a clumsy salute. Tusimov led Dancer back down the precipitous incline even more slowly than they had ascended it. The men watched him go, wordless and unhappy.
“Stick to it, lads,” he exhorted them as he passed. “Nearly there.”
Approached from the other side, the mountain held fewer pitfalls, but whoever had called it Zielona Góra was bloody colour blind. It was grey gravel and grey scrub all the way up to a crown that was bald and gaunt. He actually got there before the men, whose route had taken them around a spur a half-mile to the west and back again to what counted as the summit.
“And there,” Tusimov said, when everyone had struggled to the top and could see where he was pointing, “is Prussia. Like a boil on the arse of Europe.” The men nearest him laughed despite their exhaustion, but he suspected it was only because they were in his line of sight. There was silence from behind him, which goaded him to further verbal flights. “The abscess of syphilis, no doubt,” he suggested, raising his voice. “Morbus gallicus, my lads, the French disease. Young Frederick has turned Berlin into a brothel, after all. So who should wonder if he turns his country into a tart’s welt?”
This got a cheer, despite the train of ideas being a tenuous one. What Tusimov was thinking was that this was murderous terrain from which to launch an invasion. Unless the Prussian maps were a bloody sight better than his own, a general could wander up and down these sheep runs for days and not find an actual road. And while a company could go two or three abreast at need, an army couldn’t. He defied anyone to hold a line of march through this sopping wet cunt of a country.
Tusimov liked glory, and the radiant furniture of military adventure. But he was greatly deficient in physical courage, by means of which glory is usually procured. His beguiling fantasy, in moments of leisure, was a commendation for valour won without any personal risk at all. In the absence of that, he was happy to find himself defending a position that was unlikely to be attacked.
“We’ll give those cabbage farmers hell, my boys, just won’t we? If they drag their muddy feet across our borders, we’ll teach them manners at a bayonet’s end and make them clean up their mess before we send them home again, by gravy!”
A murmur of assent rose from around him. Buoyed up by it, Tusimov tugged hard on Dancer’s reins to make her rear—a hazardous operation on this tilted tabletop of a landscape, but he knew what a dashing figure he cut when her hooves slashed the air like that. “For Maria, Austria and God!” he cried, and the men huzzahed.
That mood sustained them, for a while at least, as Tusimov led the way back down into the valley. He had abandoned the map by this time, finding that his own eyes served him better, but ironically they betrayed him when they were back on more level ground. Dancer stepped into a rabbit hole, stumbled and pitched onto her side. Fortunately the horse’s collapse was gradual enough to enable Tusimov to jump clear.
The leg seemed to be broken—or at least, Dancer was unable to right herself again, but Tusimov felt for the break and couldn’t find it. Utterly wretched, he decided to put her out of her pain but was unable to finish her off himself. He deputed Strumpfel, who in turn rapped out an order to one of the privates at the head of the line to load his musket.
Tusimov watched, dismayed, as this was done, but then cried out “Halt there!” as the soldier took aim. “It may be she’s just hurt,” he explained to Strumpfel. “I’d hate to kill her if there’s no need. I’ll wait a while and see if she rallies.”
“Yes, sir,” Strumpfel said. “As you say, sir. Orders for the men, sir? Shall I tell them to fall out?”
No, Tusimov decided, that wouldn’t do. He’d raised their spirits up on the crown of the mountain. Now they’d see him waiting, passive, unable to move or to command. That would be the image they’d carry away with them, and the thought appalled him. He ordered Strumpfel to take over and lead the men back to Pokoj himself, and once there to have another horse sent out. It might be that Dancer, recovered, would be able to trot but unable to carry his weight. Or it might be that she’d have to be shot and he’d require another mount to bring him home.
Strumpfel relayed these orders to the unit and got them moving again quickly. Some glanced back over their shoulders at their commander diminishing into the distance behind them, shipwrecked on dry land. Most were more concerned by this time about the leaks in their boots or the pains from injuries sustained in that precarious climb. All were muddied, and more than a few bloodied besides. Huzzas notwithstanding, they were not in an ebullient mood.
And Strumpfel was not assertive enough or loud enough to be an effective shepherd of the human species. In truth, he was one of the most complaisant and soft-hearted sergeants ever seen. In the presence of senior officers he could summon a halfway-effective bellow, but the men of the company knew that it was the reverberation of a bran tub rather than the voice of the thunder.
They were therefore rather more relaxed on the return journey than a good line of march required. Those most eager to get back to their billets and take a little solace in hot rum or clean clothes drew ahead of the mass. Those most debilitated by sodden boots and turned ankles fell behind.
It was in this besmirched and enfeebled state that the soldiers of Lieutenant Tusimov’s unit retraced their steps through Narutsin, an hour shy of sunset. The villagers who had watched them with resentful or fearful eyes on their outward leg watched them again now with barely concealed grins as they limped and straggled home.
The bedraggled troopers were well aware of this amusement. They felt it keenly, because the prevalence of dirt in and around the village made up a large part of their perceived superiority to the local population. They had joked about the nourishing meals that could be made from sheep dung, and for what price mud (depending on its purity and consistency) might sell in the regional markets. Now, carrying some of that sheep dung and mud on their own persons, they were obliged to parade themselves for the entertainment of smirking farm boys and dullard prentices. It was hard to bear.
Most quickened their pace, wanting the shame to be over with sooner. But some of the disaffected stragglers at the tail end of the line took a different tack.
“What are you looking at, hayseed?” Private Renke demanded of a man who was leaning on a walking stick outside an open front door (presumably his own). Renke had chosen his target with some nicety. The man was more than twice his age, overweight and dignified. He was probably a pillar of the community, so insulting him meant something.
Possibly Renke expected the man to look away or mutter an apology. Instead he laughed. “I was hoping you could tell me that,” he said jocularly. “Something that came up out of the wetlands—fairy or changeling, maybe, for I never saw a woman’s son look so wild!”
Renke was incensed. “You a gleaner, grandad?” he demanded.
“Well you’re going to be gleaning your fucking teeth once I spread them over the street. Look away, you old shite. Seriously, look away or I will break the fucking grain of you.”
The old man gave him a look of contempt, shook his head—and dropped his gaze to the ground. Good enough. Renke resumed the march.
He and his comrades—a round half-dozen of them—were the very last of the unit. The rest were not in sight. A number of village men were, though, and some of them appeared now to have condensed into a tight knot in the middle of the street ahead of the soldiers.
Renke was for walking right through them, and devil take the hindmost, but Private Lehmann and Private Schottenberg contrived to lead him off at an angle, avoiding a direct collision.
“Bloody yokels,” Renke observed, loudly enough to be heard. “Faces like cracks in a bloody wall.”
They walked on.
But one of the village men answered him as he passed by, “Well if I had a face as pretty as yours, I’d keep it indoors on weekdays, swear I would.”
It wasn’t the words that made Renke stop, it was the burst of laughter that followed them. He turned to face the little knot of men. “Which one of you said that?” he demanded.
“Piss off,” one of the villagers replied equably, “you arse-faced lackwit.”
Renke took a step forward. Private Lehmann interposed himself hastily. “Nobody here wants a fight,” he urged.
“Why’d you join the fucking army then?” one of the village men sneered. “Do you just like dressing up?”
Lehmann threw the first punch, and was put down by the second, his lower lip split wide open and one of his teeth rattling loose in his mouth. By the time he staggered upright again, soldiers and villagers were in a rolling ruck along the street, brawling and battling in the dirt.
Anton Hanslo was on his way back from delivering an oak doorknob to Meister Kolchek at the posthouse when he heard the shrieks and curses from the main street. He ran to the end of the path, rounded the corner and stared open-mouthed at an astonishing sight. It looked at first as though some blow from heaven had struck a dozen men at once with desperate convulsions. Then he realised that they were fighting each other. And some of them were in uniform.
“Jesu!” he gasped.
Women were keening from the sidelines as the men hurled themselves against one another, punching and cursing. In the doorway of the burgomaster’s house at the other end of the street, Silkie was staring at the scene. Another soldier, an officer by his uniform, stood beside her. His mouth gaped like a fish, and he seemed rooted to the spot, one hand raised as if to begin a call for order which had frozen on his lips. Then Meister Weichorek himself barged past them and came running towards the disturbance. His wife and son were at his heels, at least at first, but Jakusch’s youth and vigour told over the distance. He arrived first.
“Stop them!” the burgomaster yelled. And it may be that this was Jakusch’s intention. But at the moment when he reached the skirmish, one of the soldiers was holding Matheus Vavra’s face down in the dirt and seemed to be trying to throttle him. Jakusch launched himself at the man and sent him sprawling.
Weichorek was now at the outer fringes of the fight himself, but he stopped dead when he got there, unable to find a place into which to insert his authority. “For the love of God!” he pleaded. “Stop them, somebody! Separate them!”
The anguish in that cry galvanised Hanslo. He sprinted across the street and laid hands on the first man he could reach, a villager, hauling him away from his opponent by main force. Other men were running too, from the houses all around. A few seemed to want to get their own blows in but most, like Hanslo, were trying to stop the fight. If the soldiers took a few more buffets in the process, so did the village men they were battling with.
And now women were intervening too, with greater effect. Two opponents pulled out of each other’s reach would try to find each other again as soon as they were released. But where a woman stood in the way, weeping and wringing her hands, they were hindered as they tried to find a way around her—and then as often as not, some sense of themselves and of their surroundings would come back to them and they would lower their hands, abashed.
Like oil stirred into water, the melee gradually separated out again into its two distinct ingredients. All the men were battered and filthy, and all were still furious, but for the moment neither moved against the other. They only stood and panted and eyed each other with defiance and hatred.
In another moment the battle would surely have flared again around some real or imagined insult. But fortunately the officer—a lieutenant—intervened at this point and with a string of shouted orders made the soldiers back away from their former enemies into a tighter group. And Meister Weichorek was in his proper element now. He knew how to handle truculence and block-headedness. It was only violence that baffled him.
“Now by Christ,” he said in ringing tones, “I am ashamed to be a Schliesener! If this is what we breed, I had rather have been born a Turk!”
He let his gaze sweep one man after another, full of stern reproach. “Aye, you may hang your head, Sivet Ulsner. Jan Puszin. Martek Luse. Is this how you were taught? Piek Lauvener, how would it grieve your mother to see you brawling and biting like a dog in the street?”
“I’m right here, Berthold Weichorek,” Dame Lauvener said from behind him. “And I can tell you it grieves me a fair deal!”
Her tone as she said this was so ferocious that her son Piek actually hid from her behind another man. A ripple of laughter ran through the village men, sheepish and in a way relieved. A mother telling off her son put this violent outburst into another perspective. It made them feel like children, whose faults might be pardoned, rather than like men who had broken the civil peace.
Berthold Weichorek was not so sanguine about this, but he knew that sometimes the best way to save your salt is to throw just a little of it in the devil’s eye.
“You may be sure, Lieutenant Klaes,” he said, turning to the officer by his side, “that all here will be sorry for this day’s work. I wasn’t appointed burgomaster to see my village descend into chaos and licence. Nor will I stand for it. There will be punishment and shame for all who took part in this disgraceful riot.”
He was grimly determined to be as good as his word, knowing that a great deal might depend on it. He sent a boy to fetch the priest, who in the absence of a clerk could be relied on to write down the names of all involved.
Father Kazen, looking very unhappy to be performing in this civic arena, solemnly recorded on the inside back cover of a hymnal the given and the family names of every man who had taken part in the fight. This took a long time, during which the malefactors might easily have slipped away, but they stood by patiently and endured the shame.
The soldiers, meanwhile, fell in behind their officer and limped away with many backward glances and dark threats. They had given as good as they got, but the accounting in such affairs is seldom to the complete satisfaction of anyone concerned.