Choosing his moment with care—the men of the detachment busy erecting their tents and pavilions, his wife no less engaged in the retrieval and sorting of her wardrobe—Colonel Jander August retired to a room with a serviceable table in it (it was a billiard table, but that didn’t trouble him) and wrote an entry in his journal.
The hour was perfect. The windows, thrown open, let in the slanting light of late afternoon, and the fresh scent of earth awoken by the rain which had just started to fall outside. The autumn sun was not profligate, but it was no miser. He needed neither candle nor fire as he set out ink and pens and blotting sheet, found the page, chose and fitted a nib.
With a profound sense of peace and rightness, he dipped the pen and began. He had no illusions in this. He knew that he wrote for his own posterity only, not for the future generations of humankind. But his own posterity was not a small thing: Augusts not yet born would know him through these pages, and his thoughts would become their thoughts. It was dizzying. It was, in a complex and bounded way, immortality.
In the business of empire, he wrote:
As in many other businesses, great care must be given to borderlands. A border is where the logic and cohesion of your endeavour will be tested. It is where, if there are loose threads, the processes of unravelling and wearing into holes will be seen to begin. Rome was sound at the centre but rotten at the edges, and so Rome fell. If our empire unravels, it will unravel from the east.
I have been set at the head of a small detachment—two hundred regular infantry, together with a hundred artillerymen who bring ordnance of every size up to the very largest. No cavalry, alas, but that is because of the nature of our orders.
We are to fortify a section of the border and guard it with unceasing vigilance. Similar units are being stationed even now at intervals along this whole contested front of two hundred miles or more, in the first place to discourage the Prussian monarch from pressing his absurd claim to Silesia and in the second place, should he venture a foray across the Oder (or its tributary the Mala Panev, which marks the border where we are), to make him understand how costly any such adventure would be to him.
Is it an honour to be chosen for this assignment? No. It is not. My general does not think, and nor do I, and nor does any man of sense, that Prussia will presume. It would be as if a small, fierce dog should bite the tail of a lion. Of course, if circumstances changed and the lion was beset elsewhere by tigers or bears, then the dog might take his chances. But for the moment it is unlikely we will be too much troubled—and certainly not before the spring, for what fool would invade with all the worst of winter to come?
Still, I do not regard this posting as a waste of our time. Far from it. Given my remarks above on the subject of borders, you will easily understand that I interpret my role here more broadly than my official letters of commission would suggest.
If the centre is to hold, the extremities must be reinforced with pillars of stone and columns of men. While the Prussian hangs back and waits his moment, we must shore up the house of Habsburg, the seat of our archduchess, with stout timbers. And any timbers that are rotten we must cast into the fire.
The colonel sat back and read over what he had written. It started well, but this last section would not do at all. He had talked of pillars of stone in one sentence, but in the very next he had switched from stone to wood. And rotten timber wouldn’t burn well: if it were rotten on account of damp it would spit and sputter and resist the fire.
With the edge of his penknife, using the cover of another book as a rule, he carefully excised the page and began again. To be forgotten and ignored by those who came after him seemed to him a terrible thing, but to be remembered as an imbecile would be worse still.