The atmosphere in the Flag, a cellar close to the shore of the bay, has grown lively. Two itinerant musicians, one with a hurdy-gurdy in his lap and the other with a fiddle by his hip, both wanted to set up and play for the crowd this evening and have turned their initial conflict into a collaboration. The crowd is streaming in to hear them, and soon there are people lined up all the way out to the stairs. Outside the air is raw. The evening fog is rising from the sea and groping its way towards the city. Winge and Cardell are eating their evening meal at a table next to the fire in order to avoid the draft from the door.
Cardell has a hearty appetite, Winge almost none. From the kitchen, there comes a steady stream of dishes: fishballs made of pike, a terrine of buttered and salted carrots, a plate of pork sausages, poached cod and fried herring, steaming turnips, crispbread and cheese, with a plate of gruel with orange slices and sugared rusks on the side. Cardell tucks in as if the meal is his last. Winge allows Cardell to slake his thirst and satisfy his hunger without interruption. For his part, he only pushes the food around with his fork and soon puts down his silverware in favor of coffee. Cardell, when he has finished eating, wrinkles up his nose at the smell of freshly ground beans and declines the offered cup.
“I’ve never seen what everyone sees in that muddy brew.”
“The taste may be a matter of habit but it clears the head immediately. Jean Michael, would you consider telling me how you came to lose your arm?”
“That is a story I’d do much to avoid telling, but I’ll grant you, it would be best if everyone could hear what Gustav’s Russian war was like so that similar campaigns could be avoided in the future. My role was neither heroic nor meaningful. A trivial player in a game beyond my control, destined for death, saved only by a stroke of fate. I lost my arm, but it saved my life.”
Despite his humble rank of noncommissioned officer, Cardell began to suspect almost immediately that the war had been entered into far too hastily. For five years, he served in the army’s artillery unit. Together with thousands of others, he was rowed across the sea by the Stockholm fleet to the Gulf of Finland around midsummer 1788. At the island of Hangö, they joined the many ships of the line which had set off from Karlskrona under the command of the king’s brother, Duke Charles. Cardell was shown aboard The Fatherland, a warship of sixty guns designed by Chapman and built in Karlskrona five years earlier.
“So you could say that we had an equal amount of experience in the service, The Fatherland and I. I took it as a good sign. As it turned out, I would be proven wrong.”
Cardell was standing on the deck of The Fatherland in the early-morning mist on the seventeenth of July when the front line of the fleet signaled that the enemy had been sighted. Half an hour later, Cardell himself saw the masts emerge from the fog to the east and felt the first pang of terror in his gut. Both of the lines were fairly even: seventeen Russian warships against about twenty or so Swedish.
“Hell, Winge, that was to be my first battle. At sea, everything goes painfully slowly. At the same moment that the naval forces sight each other, the maneuvering starts. You wait for wind and currents in order to get close enough and then get in formation with your battle line towards the enemy in order to give the guns room to play. On command, you shoot and shoot and shoot. All we see, we see through the gun ports when they are reloaded with fresh shot and powder. In the best case, you’ll catch a glimpse of bloody waves and floating wreckage, in the worst case there is a pristine line of guns ready to rake our own decks clean. We are every bit as much of a target as our enemy. It is abominable. The balls that fail to penetrate bounce against the hull and shake the entire vessel. Splintered wood carves through flesh and bone as if it were newly churned butter. Men are shitting and pissing themselves where they stand and the excrement is mixed with the blood under our heels. Even sweat smells different in the face of death, did you know that? Mix it all with gun smoke and you end up with the devil’s own perfume. If we had only had enough ammunition, the victory would have been ours.
“A thousand lives saw their end at Hogland, twice as many Russians as Swedes. As darkness fell, both sides were completely silent, and in the morning there was a Swedish retreat towards Helsinki, because without ammunition the battle could not continue. The Russians elected not to pursue. One ship was lost during the conflict, one taken in return: the Vladislav, a seventy-four-gunner.
“If we knew then what we know now, we would have sunk her on the spot. Vladislav nearly cost us the war all by herself. They had typhus on board, which we took with us to Sveaborg Fort. I stayed there over the winter while the ships returned to Karlskrona. We had to hack apart the pack ice with axes and pikes in order to open the harbor, and the ships carried the fever back to Sweden in their holds. That winter, Sveaborg turned into a circle of hell. The sick and dying were everywhere. We died like flies. In the beds of the infirmary, the men lay piled as high as five, with those on the bottom inevitably dead. Those who were the worst afflicted started to hallucinate. They widened their bloodshot eyes at things no living being could see, and screamed at the tops of their lungs. I saw men so struck with terror that they forsook their sickbeds to run naked into the snowstorm. I myself was spared the affliction, and by summer, war returned to the Gulf of Finland. We were massacred at Svensksund, we stood no chance at Viborg. And yet the war had hardly touched a hair on my head, I was unharmed by fever, splinters, or bullets. In May 1790, we had reinforcements from Åbo and I was one of those assigned to assist the newcomers. I was moved to the Ingeborg, a frigate. I hated her from the first. Chapman, who had built her too, had never sailed a day in his life, Winge. He was a mathematician who designed ships that were never intended for humans. She was one hundred and twenty feet long, with a dozen guns of which all but two shot twelve pounds. She leaked. The mold clung to the hull a handspan thick and could be cut with a knife. By and by we joined the main force.
“For the second time, the Swedish ships were positioned like sheep for the slaughter in Svensksund, badly injured, pursued by the Russians, and isolated from the naval fleet that was helplessly cut off at Sveaborg. Only the end remained. There was nowhere to flee and battle seemed the only alternative. And the king wanted to do battle.
“They came at us out of the dawn at around seven. It took them four hours to get within range, and those four hours would have been the worst of my life if it hadn’t been for those that followed. We had no doubt that death itself was coming towards us, divided into three hundred vessels. Many men had already tried to desert. Men had been left by the thousands in the breakers in the flight from Viborg, and that morning in Svensksund, many said they could hear the voices of their drowned comrades on the wind, calling out for company. When the Russians arrived, they fell into our right flank, which we defended. We worked the guns for hours.
“The weather changed at midday: a breeze rose out of the southwest, first a mere whisper and then a roar. With it came a much rougher sea of waves with white ruffled crests under heavy storm clouds. The cannonades from the Swedish vessels, at anchor and lashed together, were far more effective than those of the Russians, who found themselves firing in vain, at the mercy of the heaving sea. A smaller group of Swedish ships broke away in order to attack the Russian flank from behind. The latter broke into panic at the sight of the Swedish attackers and beat a retreat. The left flank took the sign of their comrades’ retreat as a general order and soon followed. The center stayed put, alone. They were shot to pieces as night fell over Svensksund. One by one, the ships all sank and left their dying and their wounded floating on the tide that was now a boiling red mess. When the last remaining vessels finally tried to turn and flee it was too late. The storm took them and they were lost, one by one, on the Finnish reefs.
“And what about me? Ingeborg was hit by a Russian gun in the afternoon. The shot tore the twelve-pounder beside me from its carriage and continued through the hull out the other side. A score of gunners were immediately shredded into pieces. Those who were not in the path of the ball itself were crushed into a pulp when the gun barrel came rolling. Our enemies had heated their ball red-hot before it was fired, and it ignited whatever wood it came into contact with. When our own guns could no longer be used for defense, I ran up on deck, where complete chaos reigned. Our only possibility to save the frigate—which was now sinking—was to pull up anchor and ride her aground. We were struggling with the anchor when our gunpowder supply exploded. The entire capstan was shot away and those of us who were not mangled in that moment were thrown over the railing. I landed on a part of the deck that was still intact. The air was knocked out of me and then the anchor chain came rustling in a bow of iron and landed on my left arm. It fettered me to the deck, and while my friend drowned, I was kept aloft. I was found later that night by a dinghy on its way back to join the main force. They made a tourniquet out of rope and then severed my arm below the elbow. And thus ended the war for Mickel Cardell. I convalesced at the tent camp in Lovisa. A hospital transport took me back to Stockholm, where I have lived for three years as you see me now.”
Cardell knocks on the table with his wooden limb.
“You know of course that the war lacked any purpose and that the victory did not win us anything. One thing has stayed with me in particular, Winge. In the early summer of 1790, I became acquainted with a young officer by the name of Sillén. He told me about a curious event right after our skirmish outside Fredrikshamn earlier that year. King Gustav and his retinue were on their way back to his ship, the Amphion. A certain Captain Virgin announced himself and gave a report regarding his failed attempt to take control of the nearby Russian shipyard. As if to emphasize his defeat, he showed the king his damaged hand and pointed to his first mate, who was sprawled on the deck of the ship in a tangle of his own intestines. The king pointed to the body that was still twitching, and jokingly told the other officers that the man’s corpse reminded him of a stuffed mannequin from his own opera, Gustav Wasa, whereupon the king and his retinue laughed and applauded the witticism. Such was the man we fought for, and such the thanks that we got.”
Winge absorbs his words and drinks the last of his coffee. Cardell wipes his brow with his sleeve.
“So what now?”
“I have a name for you, Jean Michael, the name of a person who may lead you somewhere if luck stands on our side. I will take on the question of the fine cotton fabric in which Karl Johan was sent to his final rest. You know where my room is. Look me up when you have something to report.”