A lasting peace! How we all want it, or think we do! Napoleon was the first one to talk about it, invading Russia in its name, and many is the war since that has been waged on its account, and many the government persuaded to part with enormous sums of money, thinking that perhaps this will be the last time, this’ll show them, this will keep them in their place! Only of course it never does. Peace may look good to governments but is only the quiet time an army needs to recover from the last war and prepare for the next. It can’t be expected to last, and perhaps it shouldn’t. Peace is good for agriculture, but bad for the economy, bad for love, and bad for civilian morale. Civil unrest, blasphemy, discontent and crime flourish in times of peace. No matter! Napoleon got all the way to Moscow, saying peace when he meant war, with the Russian army retreating before him. Sometimes they couldn’t retreat quickly enough, and the armies met up and pride demanded a battle, or an incident, as the politicians had already learned to call it. Sixty thousand Russians died in one particular incident-packed sixty-mile stretch of retreat. Clausewitz described these as ‘trifling losses’. (A matter of comparison. No one ever managed to count the Russian army, it was so very numerous.)
A quick description of the Battle of Borodino, on the way to Moscow? You can bear it? The ins and outs of it have been fascinating owners of lead soldiers and the players of computer war games ever since. Does that tempt you? This sector against that: this wildly shifting line of artillery, that scramble up this slope, this thundering cavalry, that roar of mighty cannon? The Russians lost 58,000 men, more than one in two. The French lost a further 50,000 from their remaining 130,000. The cannons, we know, fired 120,000 times (someone had been counting) and corpses of every European nationality lay so close together it was impossible to walk without treading upon them. Ditches were overflowing with the torn bodies of horses and men. The chief surgeon of the Grand Army performed 700 amputations, and 74 per cent were successful. Not bad! And the Russian wounded, they said, didn’t let out a single groan. The French were much criticised for screaming and moaning when wounded. When darkness came these wounded and dying were abandoned. But still, but still, let us remember with Joan Lumb that the manner of living is more important than the manner of dying.
Napoleon moved on to Moscow. He chivalrously waited at the gates for the Russian army and its refugee entourage to move out of Moscow before making his triumphal entry into the city. The times, you see, were changing. PR was important. The world must witness triumph, not carnage: and such few citizens as were left in Moscow obligingly turned out to cheer. People will always cheer soldiers, no matter what side they’re on. It was unfortunate that much of the city burned down once Napoleon was installed in the Kremlin. The Russians blamed the French for the fire. The French maintained it was Russian arson. The argument as to whose was the responsibility of the burning of Moscow continues to this day.
Napoleon waited for an emissary from Alexander to acknowledge his victory. But no one came. What was he to do? There he was, camped with his 80,000 remaining men, all exhausted, the end of a wedge driven 120 miles into Russia, in a hostile, burning, starving city: the troops unharvested, winter coming – how was this war to be brought to an end? Wars must end, do end, always had ended – people parley, give in, acknowledge they were wrong. One side submits: the other goes home, victorious. Pieces of paper are signed: trumpets sound, peace reasserts itself, hands are shaken, courtesy visits exchanged. But the Russians just weren’t playing by the book.
And the snow got nearer. The Grand Army, which was composed of Germans, Poles and Italians as well as the French, were a long way from home. They were hungry and dirty and bored: they stopped being an army and turned into a nasty rabble, and Napoleon noticed it. He tried writing to Alexander, but Alexander, safe in St Petersburg, wouldn’t even answer the letters.
Alexander did issue a proclamation. ‘Let no one despair. Indeed, how can we lose courage when all classes of the realm are proving their courage and constancy?’ Despair, courage, constancy. They fly like a flock of noisy birds, these abstract terms, these appeals to the unreal, over smoking ruins, over legless men, over howling women and blasted children, over the clawed hands of the burned; they drop their shit, and are gone.
The Great Army pulled itself together, picked up all the available loot left in Moscow – silver, gold, coins, ornaments, jewellery, icons, whores – and set off relieved and singing back towards Smolensk. ‘Your hunger will finish at Smolensk,’ Napoleon told his troops. The man was an idiot. How could it? He had passed through the place before. Every last chicken had long ago had its neck wrung. Such crops as had survived in the rancid fields had rotted. How do the dead and dying achieve a harvest home? The bureaucrats who went ahead of the army sold everything and anything edible that was left and made off with the money. Oh, glorious Napoleon, great conqueror, crazed with self-esteem! Did you think Nature would slow its pace, people change their natures, for your convenience?
As the Grand Army retreated, the Russian army now advanced. What a Pas de Deux that was! The Russians at least had food. They brought it with them from the South. Armies go less hungry than peasants. The French were, simply, starving. They ate their horses. Then they ate each other. The road to Smolensk was scattered with emaciated bodies and the limbs were gnawed away, observers said, and not by rats. The French dragged hostage prisoners with them: few survived, they were shot, bayoneted, or clubbed if they staggered or lagged behind. Russian serfs, men, women and children, were recruited to ambush, harry, hack down and exterminate the French. (They did this with alacrity, thus worrying their masters somewhat. You shouldn’t let a tiger get the taste of human blood. They were right to worry, as it turned out. Look what happened next!) The French army had long ago abandoned its loot, its baggage, its guns, its sick, its wounded. And who had the energy left for a whore? They passed through Borodino, scene of the great battle. The plain was covered with the rotting remains of horses and stiffened men half-eaten by wolves; it was littered with broken weapons, and rusty sabres. Oh magnificent Battle of Borodino!
It was mid-November before the limping Grand Army reached Smolensk, and of course found no food. They took the hungry, icy road back to Paris. But now the snow had begun. At one point 7,800 infantrymen and 450 cavalry, together with 8,000 dispossessed non-combatants – old men, women, children, who thought they were safer with an army, any army, than anywhere else – all under General Ney, were surrounded by the Cossacks and asked to surrender.
‘What, me?’ asked Marshal Ney. ‘Surrender? Never!’ and chose to escape over the iced-over Neiper river. Brave Ney stepped first on to the ice (it cracked but held). On, on, he cried. And those behind cried forward and those in front cried back! And over they went! Ney made it to the other side, and so did 800 of the troops. But some 7,000 souls fell through the ice and died; and the 8,000 helpless – the sick, the wounded, the women and the babies – were left on the wrong side of the Neiper, to be slaughtered by the Cossacks. Which they were. Oh, brave General Ney, who wouldn’t surrender!
One more river to cross. The Berezina, this time.
‘Unbelievable,’ said Clausewitz once again, when his boss, General Wittgenstein of Prussia, attacked what was left of Napoleon’s army on the snowy banks of that particular river. Ten thousand died there. Another classic battle, much played and replayed by enthusiasts. The battle plan? I could give you a map but I won’t. You’ll find accounts of it in any library, much thumbed.
While the Battle of Berezina waged, the Great Army engineers tried to keep the bridges open for the retreat. But they were jammed up by thousands of undignified and undisciplined non-combatants pushing, struggling, screaming for a foothold, tearing, panicking. The Cossacks approached, hacking as was their fashion from their vantage point of horseback height. This one’s head, that one’s arm – and meanwhile, as cannon fire shredded men by the dozen, the bridges collapsed. Hundreds were trampled underfoot and suffocated in the blood-stained slime.
‘Unbelievable,’ wrote Clausewitz, but why he should have found it so I really don’t know. War was his trade, his pride. Or did he just like the troops to die more cleanly, with grace and style, and the non-combatants not getting in the way? ‘Defence,’ wrote Clausewitz, ‘is the strongest form of combat.’ Attack the best form of defence. Well yes, sometimes. Sometimes not. The sheer swing of the words gives the Clausewitzian phrase the force of gospel. Clausewitz is to the military as the Bible is to Christians and Das Kapital is to Marxists. Marx sat in the British Museum and projected a future from the past, as was the fashion at the time, and these writings, these uneven gropings towards understanding, became the law of nations, because they were so admirably, if lengthily, expounded. Writers can’t resist the heady swing of language: ceaselessly they subordinate truth to a good phrase. ‘All happy families resemble each other—’ Tolstoy. Pschew! Nonsense! Clausewitz looks over a campaign or so and says, ‘War is a continuation of policy by other means.’ And neo-Clausewitzians take it as gospel and a million missiles spring and the whole world cowers. ‘Unbelievable,’ says Clausewitz, when he looks at actual war, at the remnants of Napoleon’s Great Army. Oh, the intoxication of words, the vulnerability of flesh at the word’s mercy!
‘What ghastly scenes have I witnessed here,’ he wrote home to his wife, after Berezina. ‘If my feelings had not been hardened, it would have sent me mad... I saw only a small fraction of the famous retreat, but in this fraction all the horrors of the movement were accumulated. A man crawled to the broken bridges, the red stumps of his legs leaving two red trails in the snow: a woman who had fallen half through the ice had frozen there, one of her arms half-severed, the other clutching a breathing, suckling baby.’ Reader, I know it isn’t easy. But if I can write it, you can read it. It is important to consider the detail of these things from time to time, and still take seriously Joan Lumb’s premise that the manner of living is more important than the manner of dying. The man with the stumps may well have had a glorious war until that moment. Who are we soft liberals, readers and writers, to deny it to him? If Clausewitz himself, while experiencing horror at the carnage, did not turn his back on it, but went on to enjoy it, and make a system out of it, and manage it, so shall we. Destruction is liberating to the spirit, both of the destroyer and the destroyed, and there’s the nub of it. Turn over the stone of disgust and a little bright, shining, mystical insect crawls away. It is the soul. If there is no reality left, no houses, no bridges, no bags of flour; if all the people are mashed into pulpy shreds only then can there be the pure energy of being left, the soul, and that soul is heroic—
Would you like a verse from Homer’s Iliad, in the Richmond Lattimore translation? Joan Lumb hasn’t read it: she doesn’t read poetry. But most of the young students who attend the Shrapnel Academy have been brought up to admire it, and understand very well what Homer says.
‘So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it? Patroklus also is dead, who was better by far than you are. Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime when some man in the fighting will take the life from me, also, either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring.’ So he spoke, and in the other the knees and the inward heart went slack. He let go of the spear and sat back, spreading wide with both hands; but Achilles drawing his sharp sword struck him beside the neck at the collar-bone, and the double-edged sword plunged full length inside. He dropped to the ground face downward, and lay at length, and the black blood flowed, and the ground was soaked with it.
But I don’t suppose the dead young woman with the severed arm and the still living suckling baby had read the Iliad or could take much comfort from Homer. I wonder if the baby lived? Unlikely, with the temperature as low as it was. But you never know. Perhaps Clausewitz himself took pity on it, and waded through the icy torrent to rescue it, and it was a little girl, and she grew up to be a Mills & Boon heroine? Oh, you never know. And the mother’s misfortune the baby’s good fortune? Such things happen.
Napoleon managed to get 80,000 people over the river: but 40,000 of these perished in the next stretch of road, from cold. Frostbite removed hands, feet, noses, ears. Skin turned purple, then blue-brown, then black, as it rotted from living bodies. Fingers and toes snapped like dead twigs. No food was so rotten or disgusting as not to find someone to relish it. No fallen horse remained uneaten: no dog, no cat, no carrion, nor indeed the corpses of those that died of cold or hunger. Men even gnawed at their own famished bodies. Some went insane. Some just lapsed into lethargy, known as the Moscow Depression.
The Russians, pursuing, suffered as much as the French. The temperature fell to 40° below zero. Napoleon tried to turn and rally his men, but a further 12,000 had perished by then, and what good were those who were left? Gunmen with their hands frozen off! Infantrymen with no feet! Weapons are a great deal more reliable than people: the lesson was learned. Progress, progress! More and better weapons, of a non-labour-intensive kind, that’s what’s needed in modern warfare, that’s what we’ve got today, not human flesh with its propensity to rot and disintegrate. It took six miserable men to fire a single Gaundeval 12-pounder cannon, with its lethality index of 940. And only six brave but (at the time) happy men to drop one 120 KT bomb over Hiroshima, with its lethality index of 4,908,600. Mind you, these latter six were well-educated and highly trained, and their aircraft kept warm for them.
Okay?
Now it is time to get on with the story, to turn our attention back to the startled group in the hall of the Shrapnel Academy, that shrine to the memory of Henry Shrapnel, who invented the exploding cannonball in 1804. The temperature is dropping slowly but perceptibly. The great basket of logs, chopped and split by Hastings, is all but empty. Joan Lumb wishes she had not been so extravagant with both wood and coal in her early attempts to drive out the unwelcome cooking smells which had plagued the evening, and the reason for which had now become apparent.
‘Dog!’ Victor exclaimed, when Murray appeared pale and trembly from the bathroom. ‘You mean we’ve eaten poor Harry in the sandwiches?’
‘It can’t have been our Trish or Trixie,’ said Muffin, thankfully, ‘because they’re away at the kennels.’
Muffin had prevailed upon Joan Lumb to have the two house dogs sent away for the Wellington Weekend. They were liver spaniels. Although perfectly accustomed to trousers and well-polished shoes, they became over-excited by pale high heels, fine stockings, beige silk shirts and gold bangles, and could, and often did, muddy and score the fronts of the lady guests in the enthusiasm of their welcome. Joan Lumb had resented the necessity of shutting the animals away, while yet recognising it existed.
‘Perhaps they’re not in the kennels at all,’ said Joan Lumb, her courage quite restored by this attack on dumb animals. ‘Perhaps they were in the caribou patty – oh, I could throttle them all with my own hands!’
And so she would, had the servants been rash enough to get their necks in the way. To balance the death, even the possible death, of Joan Lumb’s dogs, at least a dozen men and women would have to die. This is an attitude common to those who feel they have a divine right to power. Only put them in a situation where they can exercise it and they will. My inconvenience, your major misfortune! Caligula of Rome avenging the death of his horse, Heydych of Holland, getting even for his burst tyre, caused the deaths of thousands. Beware of anyone saying ‘I’d like to wring their necks.’ They would if they could.
The General took command, Joan Lumb having been disqualified by those signs of distress and hysteria which earlier had underlined her female state – it is no use being proved right after the event. You have to seem to be right all the time, if you are not to lose credibility – and Victor having disqualified himself by virtue of his decision at the age of twenty-three to go into business, and not the army. Baf was too wild and too young for command, and Sergei and Panza had no gift for leadership, nor claimed to have. Murray was currently too ill to be considered, although his expertise would no doubt come in useful. They were most grateful to have him amongst them. Ivor was a servant. These matters they settled swiftly and easily amongst themselves, some things being said, others thankfully left unsaid. Mew prepared a speech which went ‘But this is sexism. I can see that Joan Lumb is a token man, but you haven’t even mentioned Muffin, Shirley, Bella or me,’ but prudently she didn’t deliver it.
Baf wished to make a battering ram out of a settee in the hall and break down the green baize door, but the General would have none of it. A posse of armed servants might well be waiting on the other side of the door for just such an event. Although those at the top of the stairs would of course have the advantage of height, those below outnumbered those above to an unknown factor—
—at which Joan Lumb interjected, ‘We have thirty-six servants on our pay-roll. Though I think on occasion they do have their friends to stay. But I’m a generous employer. I don’t fuss too much about detail—’
—to which Muffin replied, ‘Joan, if you ask me, there are three thousand down there—’
—and Joan Lumb said, ‘I didn’t ask you.’
—anyway, an unknown factor, and although there was no evidence of arms—
—at which Victor interjected, ‘They have the kitchen knives. If they can kill Harry and make us eat him, they can do anything—’
—no evidence of arms, as the General repeated, but lack of evidence was no guarantee they didn’t have them. So the storming of Downstairs was out—
Baf contented himself with aiming a few hefty blows and leaping kicks at the green baize door. Panza pointed out that the servants might erupt up the stairs at any moment with heaven knows what weapons, or what intent. So a party was organised to move a heavy bureau bookcase, which contained a complete set of Samuel’s Military History, 1860–1900, impenetrable volumes if ever there were such things, in front of the door which divided Upstairs from Downstairs. Another party – the egress group – was sent to confirm what already most knew, that snow to the depth of between four and six feet now made all exterior doors unopenable, and that escape from the Shrapnel Academy was impracticable. A further group went up to bring down Shirley and the children, and check that all other rooms in the Shrapnel Academy were empty – all were – and no bands of aggressors hiding in the upstairs territory – none were. Shirley wept a little, and said, ‘If they are capable of leaving innocent children alone and unprotected, they are capable of anything.’
The egress group came back to report that the only access to Downstairs was via a single laundry chute in the extension wing, on the south-west corner of the building. They had listened, but all was quiet. Yes, a person could wriggle up – or down – with difficulty. Ivor was sent to man the chute, and report back at once any signs of activity.
The General then called a Council of War. The Council – which included the female members of the group – sat around that same table where lately they had celebrated the rather indigestible rewards of peace. The ceiling of the dining-room was low, and offered the illusion that it was a little less cold here than anywhere else. They sat in the same order as they had at the Eve-of-Wellington dinner. Joan Lumb thought there was something missing, and presently realised what it was. It was her adoration of Murray, which had been, she now realised, an almost tangible presence at the meal. Now it was as if the spirit of Jesus had abruptly vanished from the Last Supper. She felt bereft, and shivered, not just from cold, but foreseeing that the spirit of love would not touch her again in this world. Her courage had failed: she had turned it away. She had had her chance, and blown it.
Blankets and quilts were brought down from above and the Council wrapped themselves in these. A few nuts and raisins were discovered in cupboards, and the General generously had his bottle of Laphroaig brought down. But all remarked on how the sealing of the green baize door had reversed the normal order of things – now Downstairs had everything – at least in the way of food, drink and warmth – and Upstairs had nothing!
But Joan Lumb said, ‘Hardly nothing! We have brains, expertise, training, discipline, organisation. We are a crack corps, they are an undisciplined rabble!’
Mew had another speech prepared, to the effect that perhaps Murray was in error in believing that the sandwiches were filled with dog meat, that the non-response of the servants to the bell and telephone was coincidental, as was the lack of heat and light, that the green baize door had merely jammed, and that they should all just go to bed and see what things looked like in the morning. But she didn’t deliver it. She didn’t like the way Joan Lumb kept looking at her, and occasionally muttered to the General, behind her hand, rather rudely. Mew had been brought up not to whisper in public. Her mother had been only patchily insane: in the good patches she was an excellent mother.
Joan Lumb said, ‘Did you say something, Miss—er—’
Mew replied, ‘No. Except I suppose it was dog meat.’
Murray retched again; Muffin, with Baf as escort, went to fetch him some Kaolin and Morphine from her bathroom cupboard. They returned promptly – the exigencies of the situation, alas, ensuring it – and when they did Baf was carrying his knife box. Eyes turned towards it: those who knew what it contained, and those who didn’t.
It was late, but no one was tired. Adrenalin trickled out its silver threads of energy and excitement. They had been taken by surprise, when the lights went out. Even Joan Lumb had lost her nerve. Never again! Now their task was to puzzle out, somehow, what was in the enemy mind.
‘We must have information,’ said Baf, ‘because information is power.’
‘To predict their actions,’ Murray said, ‘we must understand their motives.’ The Kaolin and Morphine was making him feel worse, not better.
‘We must know their numbers,’ said Panza, ‘because that will inform their actions.’
Each statement seemed as convincing as the last. If only words were weapons, how strong they would be!
Bella sniffed. ‘What a horrid smell,’ she said. And indeed there was. Trails of black, stinking smoke were beginning to drift under the dining-room door. The party took candles, and traced the smoke back to its source, in the drawing-room. Even in the dim light it could be seen that gusts of the disgusting stuff were billowing back down the now almost cold chimney, and swirling like fog into the room. They were under attack! They were to be choked to death! Suffocated! The women withdrew at once to the foot of the stairs.
Murray seized a rosewood occasional table, snapped it into pieces and flung it on the embers to restore the fire. The room was evacuated, and the door slammed shut. Joan Lumb ripped one of the best tapestries from the dining-room wall and stuffed it into the gap between door and floor. Muffin was sent to the library to fetch sticky tape – only she knew where it was – and the door was taped firmly around. Fortunately, the door was well made, and a good fit. No trails of escaping gas could be seen: the attack had failed. They were safe!
In fact the smoke had stopped flowing from its source. What had happened was that the stockpot had finally boiled dry, and Harry’s bones had been charring nastily. There is nothing horrider than the acrid, oily smell of burning bones. No wonder the fumes were construed as enemy action! If you had smelt them, you would think the same. The stench had woken Matilda, who had gone to the kitchen to see what was happening. She had moved the pot, and plunged it under cold water – holding her nose – and gone back to bed, not without a quick, nasty pinch of Acorn’s smooth young cheek as she passed. Strait-jacketed and unconscious on the kitchen table, he could do her no harm.