White-coated Austrians marched back up the Pratzen Heights to support the Russians. Realizing their mistake too late, the enemy had allowed Napoleon to seize the crown of the hill, and now needed to retrieve it or face disaster. Commander Thiébault ordered our three six-pound field pieces loaded with round shot. Cannonballs are hideously effective when skipped on hard ground, and the frozen earth of Austerlitz was perfect for murder. I watched the solid French shot drill holes in the Austrian lines as neatly as the bore of an auger. The enemy tramped bravely toward us anyway, closing their gaps, but you could see the formations quiver as they were pounded. The Austrians fired too soon, bullets whapping into the dirt in front of us. Then they gave a great shout from the cloud of smoke they’d conjured—“Gott in Himmel!”—and charged like berserkers, emerging from the haze with bayonets leveled. Our front line had been ordered down on one knee, so that my eyes were at the same height as their points. I can’t recommend the perspective.
“Steady!” Hulot cautioned. “Hold your fire. Hold. Hold . . .”
The Austrians were red-faced and open-mouthed, taking precious breath to yell as they sprinted up the slope. Their line grew ragged as some outpaced others, and still Hulot ordered us not to shoot. “Wait . . .”
My God, they looked ten feet tall, shoulders as broad as an ox’s, knuckles white from gripping their empty muskets, eyes crazed.
“Fire!”
A huge crash of shots enveloped us in smoke. Dimly seen, half the enemy seemed to collapse. We reloaded frantically, which is damned awkward while kneeling. A few of our own were overcome by instinct and stood to flee the Austrian charge. One was accidentally shot dead by a companion aiming from the rank behind.
“Fire at will!”
The shooting rattled like a drum. The battlefield was murky with smoke. Austrians fell, the survivors slowed, then stopped, and then seemed to be weaving like drunken men, some wounded and the others unclear what to do. We lit into them, me included, because once you’re in a battle, all you think is to shoot the other fellow before he can shoot you. I tried to aim but had no idea if I hit anyone. It was simply a race of firepower. Bullets sung by my ears and kicked gravel into my face. A supporting regiment was coming up behind the enemy, so the three French cannons went off again, cutting great gory gaps.
“Now—charge!”
We swept through as if they were straw. We’d butchered wounded Russians but made prisoners of the Austrians, who were civilized and worthy of ransom or exchange. We rushed another hundred yards before running into the massed fire of still another unit.
Screams, wet coughs, moans. More French fell around me. They spun, sagged, knelt. Survival was a question of cruel luck. Some looked surprised when shot, some horrified, and some seemed to fall asleep. Hulot’s head snapped on his shoulders, bits of skull flew, and he fell over. I looked anxiously for Gideon. Still standing! Our muskets empty and our line in disarray, it was our turn to retreat, this time uphill. My eyes watered from grit. My thirst was ferocious. I was sweating despite the cold. I grasped my canteen and took a swallow of watered wine before sharing it with Gideon. He gulped with a nod, and other hands reached. The canteen came back empty.
I looked about blearily. For miles on my left and my right, great clouds of smoke rose into the winter air. Huge formations of men tramped this way and that. Battle is a minuet turned into a stampede, with officers trying to direct herds of men in the right direction. Distant units crawled like ants, their movement as ponderous as barges. They’d drift close to each other, pause, and erupt in sheets of musket fire. Flags would shudder as if in a stiff wind. One side or the other would crack and give way, but not for long. Then a counterattack, and the slaughter would go on. Bodies entwined like lovers.
We endured three more attacks over the next half hour. By noon, the sun still low in the December sky, a third of the 14th Line was down. Wounded men observed their own blood with horrified curiosity, trying to tie off the leak. They curled in pain, or crawled, or groped. Sometimes friends helped. The dead sprawled in all kinds of improbable poses, dignity irrelevant. The blood was astonishingly bright, seeming to glow.
Enemy dead far outnumbered our own. Each time a Russian or Austrian regiment engaged one of ours in a duel of musketry, French speed and accuracy wrecked their formation. Allied cavalry made a charge at the 10th Line, next to us, and accomplished little but the massacre of their own members. Saddles were swept clear by disciplined infantry fire, then terrified horses thundered between the armies, looking frantically for an exit.
French artillery also gained a steady edge. Allied guns were systematically dismounted, broken, or abandoned. Others were captured and swung around to point the other way. As each minute ticked on, Napoleon’s advantage grew.
Men fired at each other point-blank, fenced with the bayonet, and warded off hundreds of galloping horsemen. The contest for Pratzen Heights raged for a good two hours, entire battalions dissolving like spring snow. At times we could pause as observers, gulping breath, loading our muskets and waiting our turn, and minutes later we’d be in the thick of it again. None of us completely understood what was going on—battles are confusion when you’re in them—but the enemy kept advancing and backing like the surf of a receding tide, each time leaving more dead and wounded in its wake.
Finally, along a hillside line two miles in extent, the Austrian and Russian lines broke toward the southwest. French cannonballs followed, skipping like stones on water. We watched a retreat become a route. The enemy was dissolving from army to panicked mob.
“Now—after them!” Baron Thiébault cried, his voice hoarse.
We stepped off in exhausted pursuit. We’d won. I’d survived. It was over. I was too weary to be joyous, but I was curiously proud. I stumbled on a clod of earth.
And then an enormous blow hit my shoulder.
I pitched forward into the crystallized ice of the dirt before fully realizing what had happened. My musket went flying, my hat tipped over my eyes, and my knapsack rode onto my neck. For long, anxious seconds I lay facedown, stunned. At first I couldn’t draw breath, and then I took in a hesitant, shuddering inhalation, wincing from pain.
I’d been shot.
The shock made me dizzy, and the strength had left my legs. My head was downhill from my feet, and I felt annoyingly helpless. I lifted my head to cry for help and managed a strangled “ack,” spitting dirt.
Gideon was standing protectively over me, aiming his musket back uphill in the wrong direction. Had we been surprised from behind? He fired.
I heard a grunt, and a thud.
Then he turned to me. “Are you dead?” My new friend knelt, his face black as an African’s from powder burn. He probed my shoulder and I gasped in fear, fury, and outrage.
I gritted my teeth to answer. “I don’t think actual death is this painful.”
In heroic stories, characters fight through their wounds, excitement giving endless energy. I, alas, felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. A musket ball as wide as a kidney bean and heavy as a gold piece had torn through my body. I had the twin sensation of finding it agonizing even to take breath, on my right side, and shocked numbness on my left.
“Be still, my friend.” Gideon took out his briquet, a large camp knife, and cut off my pack straps and empty canteen, casting them aside.
“Please keep my civilian clothes,” I had the presence of mind to gasp.
“You’re hoping to change?”
“Exactly.”
The Jew considered a moment, shrugged, and added my belongings to his own. “Now I have a double load,” he said. “Your left shoulder was hit from behind, cracking your shoulder blade. A few inches different and it would have hit your heart and spine. Murderous bastard.”
“Behind?” I coughed, some of the spittle bloody. “I was facing forward.”
He rolled me onto my right side while I roared. “Our battle is over. Come, can you walk? I see no promised flying ambulance, so let’s get you to a field station for vinegar and a bandage. I think the ball went clean through. You’re lucky at more than cards.”
He had a strange definition of luck.
He got an arm around my torso, braced the butt of his musket for leverage, and heaved me up. I almost blacked out. I swayed, my legs like pudding, and wanted nothing better than to pass out. After all, I’d already practiced being dead.
But Gideon wouldn’t let me. “Stay awake, Digeon! Go to sleep and you die! Now walk, or you’ll kill both of us! Bullets are still flying!”
“I’m not Digeon.”
“Don’t babble! Save your strength!”
“I’m an American named Ethan Gage.” If I died, I wanted him to get word to Astiza. He paid no attention.
So it was with superhuman effort that I took a step, and then another. My legs were indeed unharmed, and as the advisability of getting treatment penetrated my brain, some strength returned. My vision began to clear. Survive, to see your wife and son.
“Don’t trip on the shit.”
I looked down. It was the bully Cheval, grimacing from being shot dead through the chest. He seemed to be giving us a last evil eye, despite no longer seeing anything. He clutched his musket, ramrod in the barrel—he had been killed while trying frantically to reload. I realized that when I was shot in the back, Cheval had been only a few paces behind.
And that Gideon had then fired in his direction.
These weren’t the first acts of revenge committed on a battlefield. Having waited all day for a Russian or Austrian to shoot me, Cheval had finally got to it himself.
We went on. I tried to stick to stoic silence, but every step was a stab of flame, and my mutterings and curses were scalding. Some wounded do better, I suppose.
At the summit was Napoleon. I assumed I remained safely unrecognizable from my smear of powder smoke, blood, and dirt. I was one of hundreds of wounded limping to the rear, my right arm around Gideon’s shoulders. But I still shrank while the emperor surveyed like a god, even as some of the maimed shouted in exultation. That’s how much you get your blood up in battle.
I was conspicuous in my silence. My shoulder seemed loud enough.
The emperor swept the battlefield with his spyglass, his expression one of grim satisfaction. He was surrounded by half a hundred officers and couriers poised to race off with orders. There was a rumble of hundreds of drums from the far side of the hill, and giant French grenadiers in bearskin hats rocked into view, rank after rank, cresting the bloody battlefield to march on down the eastern side. They were as precise as a chorus line and as unstoppable as a glacier. They stepped over the dead and wounded as primly as if on parade. It was the Imperial Guard, being sent to deliver the coup de grâce to a smashed and demoralized enemy. Gideon and I stopped to catch breath and look back at the carnage, like looking down on a map.
The Allies seemed to have evaporated from the battle’s center. French blue stretched toward Austerlitz as far I could see. To the north, Murat’s cavalry was pushing back the enemy, and to the south the French were herding the fleeing armies toward a frozen stream and ponds. The ice on the ponds was beginning to shatter from French cannon fire and the weight of refugees, and I could see green-coated Russians disappearing into freezing water. They were drowning.
“The enemy is routed, mon empereur,” said a general to Napoleon. “No victory has ever been more total. They will run all the way to Hungary.”
“Easier to kill them here,” Bonaparte replied. “Get the cavalry forward before we lose the light.”
Indeed, it would be dark in a few hours. I wondered how many wounded would die of cold.
“Shall we take Olmütz?”
“Francis and Alexander will plead for an armistice before then,” Napoleon predicted. “The war is won, cousins.” He stood in the stirrups, stretched his frame as his white horse shifted under him, and proudly watched his Imperial Guard file into the smoke below. His face was radiant as a bride’s, his posture erect, his bicorne turned to emphasize the width of his shoulders. In a single day, Trafalgar had been avenged. The coalition Britain had assembled to fight Napoleon was shattered. He would redraw the map of Europe like a child with a pencil.
I wondered if England would quit.
“It’s a beautiful sun we have this day, is it not?”
“Yes, mon empereur.”
Napoleon slowly swept his arm along the view as if freezing it in his mind. He’d risen from nothing, proven unbeatable, and had a thousand plans and strategies. Since the dawn of civilization, governing had been granted through birth, justified by the theory that the leisure of the aristocracy separated the highborn from the muddled motives of lesser men, giving them time to learn and apply wisdom. Churchmen were sheltered for the same reason.
Napoleon had replaced these privileged classes with tradesmen and strivers, elevated by cunning and courage. Europe was turned upside down. The future would be a frenzy of the ambitious and able, the ruthless rising and falling like flames. No man would relax. Any could triumph.
And me? I was wounded, penniless, cut off from my family, a fugitive from all sides, and wary of the French spy Comtesse Marceau. I was a modern man like Napoleon—self-made, but a parody of success.
“It was exactly a year ago that I crowned myself emperor,” Napoleon said to his companion. “That was a noble day, though a damned uncomfortable one in those coronation robes.” He laughed and turned to his other officers. “But this day, cousins, the day of Austerlitz, is the best of my life. The best day, after the best night. Our army is invincible, and these wounded will gladly return to it as soon as they are able.” He swept his arm again, taking us all in. “Your wounds are a badge of honor!” he called. “I salute your courage!” For just a moment I felt his gaze stop on me, and I braced for recognition. His eyes narrowed. But then a heartbeat later his eyes moved on, me a tick in his surveillance. He muttered something to one of his aides. Then he nudged his horse forward and passed us. “And now we look to the future.”
Did he glance my way once more?
I realized I was wet. I looked down. My torso was soaked from a blot of blood that had browned as it clotted. I’d been shot, I reminded myself, my breathing labored. I felt nauseated. The battlefield began to whirl.
“We must get away from that man,” Gideon muttered of Napoleon.
And then all went dark.