‘Shall I just pop in and look at the children?’ asked Shirley of Victor. She had changed into a flowered linen dress. She looked clean and decorous, pretty but not glamorous. She had three children under seven. She had shelved all that other for the time being. One day, one day!
‘You’d only disturb them,’ said Victor.
‘I expect you’re right,’ said Shirley. She wanted a drink; not badly, but enough to be conscious of it. She tried not to drink, and mostly managed not to. She did not want to be like her sister, Valerie. Shirley had opened a closet in Valerie’s house, mistaking it for the bathroom door, and empty gin bottles had tumbled out. Some had broken. It had been embarrassing. Valerie said she was saving them to make indoor tropical gardens to give to people at Christmas, but the explanation was not convincing.
‘Shall we go downstairs?’ she asked Victor. She thought he looked particularly handsome, and said so. He put his arms round her and gave her cheek a little peck.
‘I have a funny feeling,’ said Shirley, ‘that something not very nice is going to happen.’
‘We might be snowed in,’ said Victor, peering out of the tall windows. ‘That might not be very nice.’
‘I bought snow chains,’ said Shirley, virtuously. ‘You know there was a hitchhiker on the road? I nearly stopped.’
‘But you didn’t stop,’ he said.
‘I feel bad about it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she’d run out of petrol, perhaps she was a genuine case.’
‘Perhaps she was part of an organisation which kidnaps senior executives and holds them to ransom,’ he said. He was part-joking, part not. Such things happened. He had put on a dark grey suit, silky to the feel. His socks were dark red.
‘Hardly after dark on a country road,’ she said.
‘Mostly after dark on a country road,’ he said.
‘Anyway,’ said Shirley, ‘the children were asleep. She’d have woken them up getting in.’
‘Quite so. First, we must look after our own: after that, if there’s a surplus, we can look after other people. Our children must sleep, and she risk rape. That’s the way it goes. Besides, when they’re awake they’re very noisy children. It’s safer for you to drive while they sleep.’
‘I think I should have stopped, all the same,’ said Shirley.
‘It was somehow an unlucky thing of me to have done, not to have stopped.’
‘Not-stopping is not doing something,’ said Victor, ‘it is merely failing to do something.’
‘All the same!’ said Shirley, and shivered.
Victor and Shirley went downstairs to join Joan and Murray, locking the door behind them, though this was not customary in the Shrapnel Academy, where a high standard of honesty normally prevailed. But those who steal are always anxious about being stolen from: and Victor was the thief of other men’s life and labour, as it is almost impossible for men in industry not to be.
Now. Your appetite for facts has perhaps returned? Your documentary indigestion has abated? You are ready for Napoleon, the greatest military genius of all time? (Joan Lumb places Henry Shrapnel above him but that is surely just perversity. Shrapnel was an inventor, a scientist, not a leader of men. Joan Lumb would argue that a leader is nothing without weapons, which is true enough, but what are weapons if there is nobody to organise their deployment?) During the Middle Ages there had been yet another decline in battle management. Charlemagne and Gustavus Adolphus were forgotten. Armies now simply met head on in pitched battles: Agincourt, Cressy, Sedgemoor, and so forth. Opposing forces, some mounted, some on foot, would sway this way and that over a confined patch of ground (armies 100,000 strong would be deployed against one another in areas of only a few square kilometres) slashing and hacking over terrain which became increasingly difficult as the dead and dying piled up underfoot. Death was for the most part by trampling, crushing and asphyxiation. Who actually won was hard to determine. Napoleon found this battle-system barbaric. A great general needs to exercise great skill. He changed the face of warfare once again. He went to battle with flair, style and skill. Casualty rates fell sharply during the Napoleonic wars, as compared to early wars. The average casualty rate in 1600 was 30 per cent for the defeated and 20 per cent for the victors. By 1820 it had fallen to 23 per cent for the defeated and 19 per cent for the victors. (That is if you leave out the French adventure in Russia in 1812, when the death rate was 80 per cent for the defeated and 90 per cent for the victors, but that was an exception, and it is unfair to count that in the statistics – in the same way that it is unhelpful to average out a child’s exam results, when the child gets 90 per cent for English and 10 per cent for Maths. What you do not have here is an average child!) Napoleon did not wish to win at any cost, but to keep that cost down as far as possible and still achieve a victory. Therein, according to Napoleon and his successors, lies the skill, charm and achievement of warfare. The quest is for bigger, better weapons, inflicting maximum casualties on the enemy, but minimum damage to your own troops. (The casualty rate for civilians goes for the most part uncatalogued by army historians. They do not find it interesting.) Even so, at the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, horses still slipped in the blood and dismounted their riders, so that important messages never got through.
This failure in communications was one of the factors which led to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and his successors (generals learn by their defeat) have been perfecting codes and communication devices ever since. The other factor was the sheer weight of man and gun power which opposed him. The relative combat power of the attacker (Wellington and the allies) against the defender (Napoleon) was 1:·79. Heavy odds against Napoleon! On the other hand, French combat effectiveness (that is to say, the efficiency with which Napoleon deployed men and weapons) was far greater than that of the English: to the ratio of 1:·61. The French had superiority in leadership, training, experience and what the military are pleased to call ‘intangible variables’. Nevertheless, they lost the battle; too few men by far faced too many, and communications failed. Generals ever since have done their best when in a conflict situation to avoid these two eventualities. In the First World War, between England and Germany, thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men were poured in by either side, in the attempt to outnumber the other: and how the Morse coders clicked and semaphores gleamed so there was no danger to the lines of command by messengers slipping in blood and mud. The French, by the way, claim victory at Waterloo. They inflicted more casualties on the allies than the allies did on them. Victory and defeat is a matter of interpretation, and what happens next.
At the Shrapnel Academy there was a whole Napoleon wing, but most of it was closed for redecoration during the Wellington Weekend. Victor and Shirley were in the only part of it which remained open; and there was a strong smell of paint in the rooms, particularly in the bathroom. They were glad to close the door behind them.