They had been promised pardon and safe conduct.
Georges Cozanet had heard it himself. Within his earshot General Lazare Hoche, the young commanding officer of the victorious Blue army in the Quiberon campaign, had promised that all the royalist prisoners, both emigré and Chouan, would live. But either Hoche had lied or, more likely, other counsels had prevailed in Paris and other orders had been sent to the west. There had been military tribunals, mere pretences with only one inevitable verdict. Many good men, many loyal Chouans, had already been summarily shot. The young and valiant Marquis de Sombreuil, come too late to the campaign to do anything but die, was gone. Cozanet’s old second in command, Yves de Montargis, was gone too. Both had acquitted themselves bravely before the firing squad, as had every Chouan who had met the same fate. Now it was to be Cozanet’s turn. Not for him the more eminent place of execution at Vannes, where some of the other Chouan and emigré leaders had gone and both Sombreuil and Montargis had met their ends. No, Cozanet would die with the common men of the Chouanerrie here at Auray, and he was proud that it would be so. These were his people, the stock from which he had sprung, and he preferred to die with them than with the strutting, arrogant emigrés.
He had faced a military tribunal of sorts, held in the redundant chapel of a former convent in the small town of Auray. They were an unimpressive court, half a dozen evidently bored scrapings of the Blue army ranging from a fat, drunken captain down to a mere corporal. But they could have been the old Parlement de Paris itself for the difference it might have made. The evidence against him was overwhelming and he could not, would not dispute it. He could not deny that he had been a colonel in the Catholic and Royal Army and that he had been in arms against their so-called French Republic, supposedly one and allegedly indivisible, for the best part of three years. He could not deny that most recently he had been in arms in the hated red uniform of France’s eternal enemy, disembarked from British warships, to fight in an expedition instigated by the British prime minister and accompanied in person by a British lord of the Admiralty. The verdict was never in doubt and undoubtedly justified by any standards, let alone those of the revolutionary republic. Instead, Georges Cozanet reconciled himself to dying for his king and a better France, and in the hope that death would bring the blessed reunion with lost loved ones that Holy Church promised.
Three lots of prisoners had already been led out by small detachments of Blue troops, and after a few minutes in each case, those left in the cells had heard distant volleys of musket fire. Now it was the term for Georges Cozanet and his brothers-in-arms. As he and a dozen others were herded together by the guards, ready for their final journey, Georges thought of his fleeting but charged encounter with Leonore Kermorvant at the Chateau de Brechelean. Would that remarkable woman weep for him when she learned of his death? He hoped so. She was so different to his dead love, his wife, Therèse, yet perhaps in another time, in another world…
But he had seen the looks exchanged between her and her brother-in-law, the Vicomte de Saint-Victor, and knew his dreams could never have been. Another world indeed. So be it. Dawn was not long past. Birds were singing, the late summer sun was shining. It was a beautiful day to die.
Only a few minutes passed, then another detachment of Blue troops arrived to escort the next batch of prisoners, the batch including Georges Cozanet, from their prison quarters in the dormitories of the old convent out to the execution ground, a rough meadow on the edge of town. He walked with his erstwhile captain, Kerouac, who was still fulminating bitterly over the calamitous outcome of the campaign.
‘Damn the English,’ said Kerouac. ‘They brought us to this. Made all sorts of promises, but did they send any of their own troops? Ha. Merde. Made us fight in their fucking red uniforms, then abandoned us to the Blues. Betrayed us. Pitt, that weasel Wilden, every damn one of ’em. Fuck ’em all.’
Georges knew the Quiberon expedition had failed for many other reasons, but he sensed that when the French histories of the debacle were written, it would be Kerouac’s view that would prevail. England had always provided a very convenient scapegoat for Frenchmen’s own failings. The red uniforms would serve for all eternity as the emblem for the utter fiasco that had been the affair of Quiberon, and the presence of the English envoy, Lord Wilden, would be another.
‘Let it pass,’ he said to Kerouac as they entered the meadow where the sentence of the military tribunals would be carried out. ‘Think of nothing but prayers now.’
‘Prayers, Colonel? Look at who commands the firing squad, then tell me prayers do any fucking good.’
Cozanet looked in the direction where Kerouac was pointing. The commander of the firing squad saw him and grinned brazenly. It was Lafontaine, sometime drill sergeant of the Regiment de Dresnay of the Catholic and Royal Army, formerly attached to the Regiment de Cozanet to teach it proper drill. He was back in the blue uniform that he evidently found far more comfortable than the red one he had abandoned. The one consolation in the appearance of the man who had turned his coat so many times was that it exonerated Georges’ own Chouans, who had not, after all, silently slit the detested sergeant’s throat and fed him to the pigs.
Perhaps there was a lesson to be drawn from Lafontaine’s triumphant smile. The men of loyalty to their causes, the men of valour and worth, were being slaughtered on the killing grounds of Vannes and Auray, or in the case of the Blues, on the battlefields of the Rhine and Italy. Somehow, though, the Sergeant Lafontaines of the world would always survive. One day, theirs would be the victory.
As they bundled him into position and the sentences of the military tribunal were read aloud, Cozanet was able to study the crowd of onlookers standing at the edges of the meadow, a substantial crowd being held back by blue-uniformed National Guardsmen. Most were women and children, the menfolk probably dead or else away fighting for one allegiance or the other. As he scanned the faces, Georges saw every emotion depending on the sentiments of each individual spectator: grief, weeping, frozen disbelief, revulsion, indifference, exultation, delirious happiness. Some were chattering excitedly to each other, no hint of solemnity in their demeanour. These were the people he had tried to fight for, the people and the world he was about to leave. He and his comrades were being shot to death as an example to these people, but what example would that be? A warning of the fate that befell those who fought against the Republic, the lesson that the Blue officers and their principals in Paris undoubtedly wished to be drawn? Or the legacy of a glorious martyrdom in the cause of the rightful King of France, who would surely one day return to his own? But the world of the future no longer held any relevance at all for Georges Cozanet. He took a deep breath to compose himself.
One of the others, at the far end of the line of doomed royalists, began reciting the mass for the dead.
‘Libera me, domine, de morte eterna…’
Cozanet heard Lafontaine’s order to the firing squad to present their muskets, saw and heard the cocking of the weapons.
‘Apprêtez armes!’
‘Ah, fuck it,’ said Kerouac.
Cozanet’s last sight was of three children, two boys and a girl, in the centre of the front row, their expressions at once sad and curious, their presence so reminiscent of his own lost family. The three children were staring directly at him. He repaid them with a smile, then heard Lafontaine give the order to open fire.
‘Feu!’
Georges Cozanet smiled no more and heard no more.