BOOK III

 

THE 4E RÉGIMENT ÉTRANGERS

Posen was damp, the wind was keen, the sky was an open window, bright blue with cold. Here, Johannes and Wolfie were officially enlisted into the ranks of the 4e Régiment Étrangers: three battalions or thereabouts, mostly Prussian prisoners of war and deserters, plus a mix of variously criminal Danes, Swedes and Russians. In other words, Grande Armée cannon fodder.

They’d marched from Berlin; their shoes were wrecked. ‘And now we’re a hundred ’n fifty miles closer to being blown up,’ Wolfie said.

The first day was long and confused. The French shouted orders from their mounts, rode fast up and down the columns, their horses kicking divots of turf at the new recruits. From one endless line to the next, Johannes and Wolfie stood and waited, never quite knowing what they were waiting for. In one line, the rumour was food, boiled potatoes and schinken, but when they got to the front of the queue there was no schinken and the potatoes were only half cooked. In another line they were vaccinated for smallpox, the needle jabbed right through their sleeves by an old, unbuttoned orderly smoking a pipe and flanked by two grenadiers. (‘S’il vous plaît,’ he said in a monotone to every man, then, ‘Je vous remercie.’) Later, in the last line of the day, they were given uniforms: a green Prussian fusilier kollet with a red collar and white epaulettes, a white-plumed shako, green pants and red vest, hussar boots, white cross-belts and a brown leather knapsack, cartridge boxes, an infantry sword and scabbard, and a light musket of dubious condition (not that Johannes had any idea about muskets). Weighed down with their new uniforms and equipment, the men were then marched to a soggy green field on the outskirts of the city, where rows and rows of canvas tents marked a vast square alongside a riverbank. There were soldiers everywhere Johannes looked, standing in groups beside smoky braziers, muskets bayonet-racked in perfect spiky clusters around them, stern, empty looks upon their faces.

The chill off the fast-flowing river burned the men’s cheeks. The crisp breeze swayed the grass and rustled the linden trees. The sound of the river, the wind, the earthy, wet green smell of the grass kindled childhood memories that made the men feel very far from home. All of this was in the air, a foreboding, of winter approaching, of hardship down the line.

‘When do we run?’ Johannes said. Wolfie had promised him they would.

‘Soon,’ Wolfie said. He could see the fear in the boy’s eyes. He reached out and squeezed his shoulder. ‘We’ll be all right for now.’

LOVE IS REJECTION

Earlier in the year, a young Polish artist had come to paint Aunt Margaretha’s portrait. His name was Kasimir Wieczorkowski and he’d recently been making a name for himself in Berlin. He was a serious young man, temperamental, and barely spoke to anybody in the house (he’d stayed in the room where the général was now lodged). Elisabeth von Hoffmann never saw him smile the whole time. Each day he woke late and waited for a platter of bread and cheese to be brought to his room, together with a bottle of warm beer (conditions of his accepting the commission), and then he spent a lot of time over his breakfast, almost until noon. Aunt Margaretha sat waiting for him in the study, where the light was deemed best, and looked at herself in the large mirror opposite her chair, at first practising and admiring her different poses, then slumped a little in the shoulders as she grew tired of waiting for Wieczorkowski to appear. Eventually, he would come out to work, though this didn’t involve any actual painting. Mostly, at the start, he’d just sit there, staring at Aunt Margaretha, silent and brooding.

In fact, the artist didn’t pick up a brush for a whole week. ‘You don’t know how to sit!’ he’d say, tearing up the brief pencil sketch he’d made into the smallest pieces he could manage.

Rather than paint, he fussed for hours over the way Margaretha von Hoffmann sat. He adjusted her head, her arms, her shoulders, the folding of her hands in her lap, the folds of her skirts. He snapped at her in Polish if she moved. Elisabeth was shocked by how her aunt bore his insolence, and expected any day for the artist to be thrown out into the street by Günther. But vanity has terrific qualities of endurance.

And then, at last, during the second week of his residence, he began to paint.

Kasimir Wieczorkowski’s hair was long and the colour of wheat and he constantly flicked it out of his eyes with a quick movement of his head. He had long slender fingers, a fine straight nose and blue-grey eyes that were, if one were truthful, probably a little too close together. He was thin, his clothes hung loose on his frame, and his paleness must have been from all the cheese he ate.

Elisabeth von Hoffmann told her friends about Kasimir, though her version was far more flattering.

She entered his room one night (barefoot, her toes like ice) and closed the door carefully behind her. There was a brief metallic clack of the lock as she turned the key, and then she heard Kasimir sit up in bed. Elisabeth went over quickly, heart beating, breathless and yet relieved. She’d reached the peak of her courage and would now relinquish the event to the artist. He’d know what to do next.

In the dark, the bed creaked, the mattress bounced, blankets ruffled. She slipped in and lay down, the soft pillows billowing up around her ears (she felt his warmth in them, smelled his hair). Her excitement was intense, her skin alive. She closed her eyes and waited for the touch of his elegant hands.

But instead there was the sound of limbs sliding between the sheets, and again the intense creaking and bouncing of the bed. Breathing. Whispering? Then nothing.

Elisabeth said, ‘Kasimir?’

In a weak, croaky voice, the artist, who must have been standing beside the bed now, said, ‘Please go away.’

Elisabeth’s eyes adapted to the dark. There was a silhouette standing beside the bed, framed by the curtained window. Kasimir, obviously: but no. There were two silhouettes.

Again, the artist, in a whisper now, but firmly: ‘Please. You must go.’

The other silhouette cleared its throat.

Elisabeth went back to her room. The next day, the artist Kasimir Wieczorkowski ignored her completely. As did the family lawyer, Seidlitz.

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

In late December, Grande Armée in tow, Bonaparte sped from Berlin in his carriage, first to Posen, then to Warsaw, en route to Russia. Along the way, he met an eighteen-year-old Polish countess named Marie Walewska.

It was a coincidental first meeting, on a snowy New Year’s Eve. Bonaparte’s carriage was welcomed on the outskirts of Warsaw by a crowd of Polish nationalists, among whom was the fetching young countess in her red-amber fox fur hat. Fair and beautiful (and married to an old count), she was granted permission to approach the carriage, where she handed the Emperor a bouquet of flowers and so caught his wandering eye. Some historians argue this story was a romantic fabrication and that it was in fact Talleyrand who’d plucked her from his ‘pockets full of girls’ (Bonaparte’s own words) and delivered the young countess to Napoleon’s attentions, but no matter; the result remains the same.

The Emperor slept warmly during his brief Polish sojourn.

Countess Walewska moved into the Schloss Finckenstein (Bonaparte’s temporary headquarters) and nobody there could quite work the demure little countess out. She didn’t play cards, she didn’t drink or giggle or raise her voice, and she hid her voluptuous, pale Polish curves beneath unflattering clothes. Marie Walewska was not typical of Bonaparte’s lovers, and yet . . . and yet.

Her devotion and love for the Emperor grew fierce as his own fresh passion fired and burned during those winter weeks. But what would happen, what would eventuate . . . well, this was in hands other than her own.

True love relinquished all control.

The Empress Josephine, meanwhile, had been begging to join Bonaparte, sending numerous insisting letters. I am so miserable without you, she wrote, and always in tears. The balance of their love had shifted since the coronation and the change in Napoleon worried her deeply. She couldn’t give him a son. She would be abandoned, discarded, just like one of his many lovers. Her hand trembled over the pages, new letters begun as soon as the previous ones were sealed and sent.

I cannot breathe with you so far away. You must send for me.

From Warsaw, Bonaparte wrote: This is no time of year to travel. It is cold and the roads are bad and unsafe. So I cannot allow you to undertake so many trials and dangers.

Josephine was no fool but she suffered the rejection with less than her usual grace. One terrible night she even dreamed of the bouquet, of which she knew (as she knew of the young Countess Walewska and most everything else that involved her husband on campaign). In her dream she saw the bouquet on the carriage seat beside Napoleon who, as the horses began to pull away, tossed the flowers through the window and left them fallen on the snow, forgotten. In the dream, Josephine couldn’t tell what kind of flowers they were and was desperate to see, to know, as though this might dispel her distress, but the distance grew and the snow became silvered, then dark, and everything became strange and distorted, as so often happens in dreams. She woke and threw the covers off in a panic, felt she was suffocating beneath them. Later, after she left Mainz and returned to France, not even her magnificent gardens at Malmaison were able to ease her sense of dread.

The Countess Walewska might have feared worse, had she endured such a dream, for it was in fact her own bouquet that was tossed from the carriage window. And, indeed, the dream would have proven prophetic; months later and pregnant with the Emperor’s illegitimate son, she waited in vain for Bonaparte to send for her in Warsaw, while instead he set about in earnest search of a worthy wife among the royal families of Europe. But neither the Countess Walewska nor the Empress Josephine could really claim the dream. In truth, the dream was Napoleon’s. It was he who’d conquered their sleep.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY

There was the carriage driver and Mr Hendrik, Wesley Lewis Jr and the Prussian, Krüger, who’d come along at the last.

They got to Oschersleben easily enough, but a few miles short of Wolfenbüttel (it was dusk, foggy) they were held up by bandits.

Four men with pistols rode out of the trees and surrounded the carriage. The chestnut gelding and the mottled grey mare reared and sent everyone inside lunging suddenly forwards and then backwards. They were summoned from the carriage and directed to kneel on the ground.

‘Move swiftly,’ one of the bandits said, pointing his pistol. A red kerchief hid his face (the others wore kerchiefs in different colours). He remained on his horse while his colleagues dismounted and patted down the prisoners for wallets, weapons and blades. They found nothing but the driver’s apple knife and his sad little pigskin of small silver and coppers (they completely missed Mr Hendrik’s knife, the sheath tucked up in his armpit). Then they climbed up onto the carriage and threw the luggage down from the roof, opened the trunks and tore through the bags and spilled everything over the ground. They unhitched the two horses as well and led them away.

Wesley Lewis Jr watched as one of the bandits used the hilt of his sword to break the lid of the smallest chest. It had been under the seat in the carriage with them. The bandit tore the splintered wood away and tipped everything upside down. It was the chest with the false bottom, where Mr Hendrik had hidden their travel money for the way over and now the money for the electrical eels, all of Claus von Rolt’s beautiful shiny gold coins. Captain van der Velde had given it to them at the start of the journey, showed them how it worked. The false bottom came away as the bandit cracked the chest against the ground, but he didn’t notice; and, anyway, there were no gold coins in there. He threw the shattered timbers away, went to work on another of the trunks.

Where was the goddamn money? Wesley Lewis Jr turned to Mr Hendrik. ‘You black son of a bitch.’

The man on the horse said, ‘Shut it!’

Afterwards, when the thieves had ridden away, a light rain began to fall. Krüger stood up and helped Mr Hendrik to his feet. The driver brushed the grass and dirt from his knees and swore. They were still miles from the next way-laying inn, and now they were horseless and stuck.

Wesley Lewis Jr watched Mr Hendrik. He waited for him to say something, but the Negro wouldn’t even look at him.

Finally, Wesley Lewis Jr said, ‘So where is it?’

Mr Hendrik began to pick up some of their things from the ground. He had to stick his lame leg out a little to the side, stiffly, each time he bent down.

‘You’ll not tell me?’

‘It’s safe,’ Mr Hendrik said.

The rain was still only a faint drizzle, but the clouds had darkened. The cool mist was sweet with the smell of trees, and rich, luxuriant soil.

‘You son of a bitch,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said again. ‘What if something happens to your black carcass? What then? I’m out with the beggars?’

Mr Hendrik ignored him.

‘We’ll have to spend the night,’ the driver said, draping a coat over his shoulders. ‘Unless somebody comes along and finds us.’

Wesley Lewis Jr stood there, didn’t move, didn’t speak, anger swelling in his chest and squeezing his throat.

‘I’ll try for the next village in the morning,’ the driver said.

Wesley Lewis Jr booted one of the empty trunks across the grass.

When the rain started properly, they sat in the carriage and listened to it pummel the roof. The floor inside was wet and muddy, and there were places where the carriage leaked and the water trickled down onto the seats and everybody had to sit slightly forward. Krüger balanced a few books on his lap, wiping them clean with a rag. One of the bandit’s horses had trampled them into the ground.

There was Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Maria Stuart and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. There was Hilde’s copy of Hyperion; oder, Der Eremit in Griechenland, too, and he also had Mr Hendrik’s Bible in his lap, a leather-bound copy in Dutch that Captain Willem van der Velde had given him for the journey (‘So they won’t think you’re a dirty black heathen,’ he’d said).

The rain drummed the carriage and it was cold now and getting darker and each man had a blanket over his shoulders.

Wesley Lewis Jr pointed at the books in Krüger’s lap. ‘If we had a candle, you could read us all a fucking bedtime story.’

LOVE IS UNPREDICTABLE

Général Fourés thought about Elisabeth von Hoffmann all the time. He thought about her in the morning and throughout the afternoon, and of course he thought about her at night, too. He played out in his mind any number of fantastic scenes between them, erotic and banal, though mainly erotic. He was exasperated, living under the same roof, and yet thrilled at the same time, because he could see her so often and without contriving to. The tensions of propriety (there had been none in his seduction of Letizia) were providing an unexpected satisfaction.

Elisabeth was short-tempered with him, especially if Günther was around. But, as the days passed, their brief interactions grew longer. She’d ask him a question or two now, just simple things, yet their conversations gradually took up a little extra time and so the moments between them lingered, acquired space. She still frequently bruised his brightness with her youthful, contemptuous dismissals of him (that look!), but soon it was done with a solicitous smile, brief, casual, intimate because it was almost unnoticeable, though the général noticed. He noticed everything to do with Elisabeth von Hoffmann, the smallest detail and slightest change in the air.

Except of course the night she came into his room and slipped into the bed and grabbed his hand and put it to her breast. All day, all week, he hadn’t noticed a thing that might have predicted the occasion.

She’d squirmed up against him, gathered his feet in hers. She’d said, ‘You know what to do, Général, don’t you?’

OBJETS D’HISTOIRE

Claus von Rolt held the square of bloodstained cloth in the palm of his hand. There was a vague swirl to the pattern, yellowish where it thinned out to the edges of the fraying material, and a rich red brown everywhere else. It looked like nothing, like a patch that had been used to dress a wound maybe, and Rolt was mildly repulsed by it, thinking of pain and blood, the stink of bandages. He held it up closer to his nose, expecting something pungent, but detected only a vague mustiness, and the slightly sweated odour of cold bedsheets. He touched a corner of the cloth with the tip of his little finger and couldn’t help but marvel at how close he was to history.

It was exactly things like this that thrilled him.

‘What do you think?’ Christophe Bergerard asked.

‘There’s the question of authenticity,’ Rolt said.

Général Fourés’s aide-de-camp carefully took the piece of cloth from Rolt’s palm and placed it back inside a small, velvet-lined box. ‘I assure you, sir,’ he said, ‘the article is genuine.’

Rolt smiled. ‘Yes, well, you may say it . . .’

Christophe Bergerard had been given Rolt’s name by his father, who’d heard it from a London taxidermist and dealer in rare species. Now, in Berlin with Général Fourés, Bergerard had sought the Prussian out. He was a young man with a tendency to live beyond his means, a tendency often requiring redress.

‘I do not part with it lightly,’ he said, frowning at Claus von Rolt. ‘And even now question myself.’

The cloth in its special box had been a gift from his father, a good luck charm. The blood of the guillotined queen, Marie Antoinette, soaked up in a fishmonger’s apron, right off the cobblestones of the place de la Révolution, moments after her head had rolled into the basket and the blood had surged from her severed neck. Not having enjoyed much luck since it had come into his possession, Christophe Bergerard thought it was about time for Queen Marie to deliver.

‘My father was there,’ Bergerard said. ‘He saw the sun glint off the poised blade, he saw the Queen’s elegant neck placed in the choke, and then the blade’s sudden, swift descent. Pffft! He heard the roar of the crowd as her head fell into the basket and saw the blood flow in torrents, down off the boards and over the ground. And then the filthy peasants all ran up with their aprons and dresses and shirts and sheets, fought each other and wrestled in the blood, kneeled and sopped it all up in a frenzy, like animals.’

Rolt wondered how many times the boy had told his father’s story.

‘The filthy rabble,’ Christophe Bergerard said. He opened the box again, allowed Rolt a second look at the cloth. It was all true, every detail. His father had been among the crowd and then followed one of the women who’d brought her linen bundles with her for the soaking up. They’d been at it all week with the lesser aristocrats, but the Queen’s blood was the prize that day and the rush to the foot of the guillotine was as intense as any charge of dragoons.

‘Her name was Madame Sulzer and she was a fishmonger’s wife,’ Bergerard said. ‘She refused to sell my father the whole apron. Only this one portion.’

‘A shrewd businesswoman,’ Rolt said.

‘You need not doubt its authenticity.’

What I don’t doubt, Claus von Rolt thought to himself, is the power of the idea. He might even keep the piece for himself.

He made a generous offer and the happy young French aide-de-camp accepted.

DRUM

Training.

Johannes Meyer fired the musket and again completely missed the target. He’d also tamped too much powder down the barrel and almost blown his own head off. His cheek was hot and blackened from the exploding flintlock and his ears were ringing painfully. He dropped the musket to the ground. For the moment, the whole world was a giant tuning fork.

The sergeant instructor was yelling at him, but Johannes had his back turned and couldn’t hear a thing. Furious, the man began to stride over, whacking a long cane against his boots as he walked. The two soldiers on either side of Johannes backed away. Wolfie, further along the line and seeing what was happening, stepped out and stood to attention as the sergeant approached, hoping to distract him with a question, but the sergeant just pushed him roughly aside. Johannes, his hands clasped to his ears, turned to see the sergeant instructor suddenly right there in front of him. In the next instant, the sergeant’s cane went up and Johannes went to his knees, ears still ringing and now fresh pain exploding through his shoulder.

‘Get up!’ the sergeant instructor said. He’d hit Johannes so hard the cane had snapped in two and fractured the boy’s collarbone. ‘On your feet!’

Just then three horses galloped down the line of men: a French officer, flanked by two aides-de-camp. When they were level with the sergeant, the officer reined his horse hard and the animal whinnied and spun around, a huge chestnut stallion with black legs and a white blaze. The aides-de-camp pulled their animals up too, churning up the ground, and now all the men with their muskets could see the officer was a colonel-en-second, his plumed shako with a gold-braided chinstrap, his blue pelisse intensely buttoned, a dolman cape over his shoulder. Large silver spurs shone immaculately on his black hussar boots.

‘What’s going on here?’ he said. ‘What has this man done?’

The sergeant instructor stood to attention. ‘He is incapable of firing a musket, Colonel.’

‘Since when has it been taught with a cane, Sergeant?’ The colonel-en-second’s name was Josse-Fridolin-Jacques-Antoine-Félix-Séraphin-Stanislas de Freuler. He despised the barbaric Prussian disciplinary methods and had opposed the practice being maintained in the Grande Armée, but the Emperor had been convinced to allow his foreign regiments to keep their traditions.

‘I believe he is purposely refusing to obey simple instructions, Colonel,’ the sergeant said. He was a brute (that much was obvious), short and gnarled, with phlegmy grey eyes.

The colonel-en-second looked down at Johannes, crumpled and holding his shoulder, unable to stand up. For a moment he thought to spur his horse on, leave the matter alone. There was so much else to do today, tomorrow, and all the days following. But he turned to one of the aides-de-camp on his left. He’d had an idea and, when they came unbidden like that, he always regarded them as gifts. They had never denied him pleasure and reward, as he’d never failed to act upon them.

‘Have this man attended to,’ he said, pointing at Johannes. ‘And bring him to me in the morning.’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘He’s to be our new regiment drummer. Understood?’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

Colonel-en-second Freuler swung his horse around and galloped away, pleased with himself and his magnanimity.

RESOLUTIONS

In the morning, the oak trees were dark with rain and shrouded in mist. The birdcalls were soft, tentative, the world still and contained, like a church.

One by one, they stepped out of the carriage, weary and silent, only the creak of springs to disturb the quiet, as the carriage leaned in and out of the shifting weight.

The driver wanted to head immediately for the next village to notify the authorities and hire fresh horses.

‘Some apples and walnuts,’ he said, handing over a bucket that he kept for his now-stolen team. Then he took two or three quick pulls on the bottle of brandy he kept under the seat for himself. ‘I’ll leave you this, too.’

‘You’re a kind man,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said, taking the bottle.

‘Well, hopefully I won’t be too long.’

‘Shouldn’t we all go?’ Krüger said. ‘Together?’

‘I’m not walking anywhere,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said. ‘And Mr Hendrik’s got his lovely limp to contend with.’

The carriage driver said, ‘There’s no need. And I’d appreciate an eye on the carriage.’

It had been an uncomfortable night and they’d been robbed and his horses were gone, but as the driver cut through the woods to reach the road, there was some sense of relief. He was glad to leave the strange trio of men behind.

They stood around the carriage eating the apples and cracking walnuts.

‘How long do you think he’ll take?’ Krüger said.

Mr Hendrik shrugged.

‘Years,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said and threw his half-eaten apple into the trees. Then he took the bottle of brandy up into the driver’s seat and stretched out across it, an arm behind his head. ‘Wake me up when he gets back.’

Mr Hendrik and Krüger cracked more walnuts and looked out into the trees.

Nobody spoke and each man drifted into his thoughts. Krüger saw Hilde, Mr Hendrik his sister. Wesley Lewis Jr swigged at the brandy with his eyes closed and resumed his contempt for everyone and everything, particularly the Negro.

Slowly the mist burned off and the sun rose bright and glassy, making the dew-beaded leaves glisten and sparkle. Krüger decided to take a walk through the oak grove. Mr Hendrik, feeling the stiffness in his leg and wanting to lie down, took a blanket and spread it over the ground in a patch of sunshine not far from the carriage. He stretched out on his back, put Captain van der Velde’s Bible under his head and stared up into the sky. Soon his eyes grew heavy and he fell asleep.

When he heard Mr Hendrik begin to snore, Wesley Lewis Jr climbed down from the driver’s seat and searched through everything the bandits had left behind. But there were no false bottoms in the other trunks, no secret compartments. He looked through the clothes, felt every pocket and squeezed every lining, collar, hem and sleeve, turned everything inside out, but there was nothing there either. Nothing anywhere.

He sat in the carriage and watched Mr Hendrik through the open door. The Negro’s got the money on him somewhere, he thought. He must have. Son of a bitch.

Wesley Lewis Jr worked at the bottle. Mr Hendrik slept. The ground steamed a little in the sun, warm as fresh dung.

In life, it was important to determine goals and hold to them, if you were ever to taste success. He remembered how his father used to say, ‘You think Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour didn’t know exactly what he was doing?’

Well, Wesley Lewis Jr thought, I know exactly what I’m going to do.

I’m going to kill the Negro.

I’m going to take Captain van der Velde’s money.

I’m going to sail back to Paramaribo and find Josephine and take her away and fuck her forever.

No more hunting and trading animal hides, no more sweating through forests, no more goddamn mosquitoes. And no more Mr Hendrik.

Wesley Lewis Jr tipped the bottle to his lips and drank to his new resolution.

LOVE IS REVOLUTION

Général Fourés fell quickly in love, of course. At his age, these were miracles and not to be denied their due and devotion.

After the first shocking, phenomenal, impossible occasion, the young Prussian beauty visited him every night she could, which was most nights (the von Hoffmann house was full of old people who slept and dreamed like the dead, never stirring until the morning) and in the golden candlelight and beneath the warmth of goose-down quilts, in the thrall of her sweet-scented skin and smooth heat and willing youth, the sound of her pleasure, her naked breath in his ear, he was a lion. Insatiable and born again in love, a creature fully possessed of itself. He was beyond the intoxications of wine, it had no power over him: Fourés could consume oceans now and balance a sword on the tip of his tongue. He was cured and immune to common men, their misdirections and illusions, to common ailments, to fear, to frost, the beating sun; his joints were supple, his muscles lean and strong, his stomach an iron drum no food could defeat. Kings’ sons did not have what he had, not his own sons. He had everything, the world, distilled through loops of copper and a thousand years contained in each drop, just one under the tongue enough for a lifetime, and the général with a cellar full of barrels.

DRUMMER BOYS ARE LOVED

The drum was battered and scratched, fringed in black-and-gold bands and a few thin tassels still hanging by a thread. The calfskin was brittle, yellow, the white leather straps worn and stained. There was a bullet hole in the brass shell too, entry and opposite exit, both now stopped with cork and patched with gum and leather. The drum had been captured from an Austrian regiment during the Battle of Austerlitz, and it was how the Austrian drummer boy had died, shot through the brass and then bled to death, an artery severed in his groin. Some of his dried blood was still in the tassels.

The corporal said, ‘Christ, try it again.’

There was much to learn: the March, the Quickstep, the Charge. There were coded beats encompassing orders to move formations across the battlefield (played from drummer to drummer, down the hill from where the maréchals watched, mounted, beside the Emperor), and tunes that made the men laugh, whether to ease the prelude to battle or lighten the epilogues of blood and loss. Everything had to be snapped out crisp and clear, resounding. Ears, hands, heart, mind, legs simultaneously stepping across the cannoned terrain, the body in perfect, cold balance. It was vital not to cock it up.

The corporal said, ‘Stop cocking it up!’

The 4e Régiment Étrangers was marching out soon and Johannes Meyer didn’t have a lot of time left in which to learn.

Behind him, in a huddle, the grimy fifer boys watched.

‘Who gave him the drum?’

‘Some fool.’

‘He’s too old!’

‘Too tall!’

‘The snipers will pick him out easy.’

‘He’ll get his head blown off for sure.’

The drum was luck, you see, a talisman of hope, the regiment’s beating heart, not to be lost. It marked the safe path through the blinding smoke and fire of battle. The boys who drummed were loved and tossed coins the soldiers had kissed and muttered quick prayers over. The drummer boys were loved like favourite nephews, and looked like them too, for every man, eventually.

The drummer boys were fragrant yellow apples!

The fifers kept their voices low, out of misfortune’s ear, lest they made things worse than they already were.

‘We’re all done for.’

‘Shut up!’

‘Better it’s said.’

‘Then say it somewhere else.’

‘Too late!’

‘Arsehole!’

Nobody liked the look of Johannes Meyer.

THE WORLD THROUGH A TUNNEL

The carriage driver still hadn’t returned and neither had the Prussian.

Wesley Lewis Jr was covering the distance (action! poise!). He restrained his stride and placed his feet carefully. There was a length of oak in his right hand, a branch about the size of an axe handle, thick and hefted. He’d picked it clean of leaves and loose bark. It was a terrific piece of wood.

The sun was high now. It was a crisp, beautiful day. Mr Hendrik was still asleep.

Wesley Lewis Jr was sweating and his mouth was dry.

CAPTAIN VAN DER VELDE’S BIBLE

Captain van der Velde had inherited the Bible from his wife’s first husband, who’d brought it to Paramaribo from Holland. It had been specially crafted for him by a bookbinder in Antwerp. The leather-bound boards had been made thicker than usual, and the bookbinder had cut a cavity into the boards, creating a sleeve beneath the endpapers.

‘Nobody ever steals a Bible,’ the first husband had explained to his wife. ‘It will protect our stake better than any iron box under lock and key.’

In one sleeve alone, there were enough flat, lozenge-shaped gold ingots to purchase an abundance of land, slaves, barges and connections in Paramaribo.

Captain van der Velde liked to read to the slaves from this clever holy book, but a few days before Wesley Lewis Jr and Mr Hendrik departed for Europe with the barrel of electrical eels, he’d called Mr Hendrik into his study and shown him the hidden sleeves beneath the endpapers.

‘The American needn’t know.’

And he still didn’t know, though Wesley Lewis Jr was much closer, closer than he’d ever been. He stood over Mr Hendrik and watched him for a moment, asleep, his head resting on the Bible. Then he tapped the Negro’s lame leg with the oak bough in his hand.

‘My daddy used to say bad dreams at night when you doze in the day,’ he said. ‘So time to get up now.’

Mr Hendrik blinked at the sun flashing over the American’s shoulder. It made a bright haze around his head.

‘Up now, sweetness.’ Wesley Lewis Jr laughed. ‘Plenty of time for sleeping when we’re dead!’

Mr Hendrik saw the length of wood in the American’s hand. He frowned and began to lift his head, tucked his elbows in close to his body in the effort to get up.

‘On second thoughts . . .’

Wesley Lewis Jr put a boot to Mr Hendrik’s chest and pushed him back flat. He swung the length of wood up high and then grunted and brought it down as hard as he could on the Negro’s hamstrung leg.

DEBUT

The sound of it, the way Wolfie bit into the sausage, the way the skin around it popped in his teeth and then the chewing with his mouth open, all of it turned Johannes Meyer’s stomach.

‘Eat something,’ Wolfie said. ‘It’ll do you good.’

Johannes looked away. They’d left Posen and marched across eastern Prussia and then they’d marched across Poland. Endless days, endless weeks of marching. Along the way, Johannes had practised and practised, the March, the Quickstep, the Charge, but the fifer boys still kept their distance.

There was the boom of cannon fire all around and the drum rattled beside him on the ground.

‘They said he came through the night before,’ Wolfie said, meaning Bonaparte. He was trying to distract the boy, get him talking and not thinking about the battle. He bit into the sausage again, spoke with his mouth full. ‘Wonder if we’ll see him?’

‘I have to go,’ Johannes said and picked up the drum.

‘See you for breakfast, boy,’ Wolfie said after him. ‘We’ll have us some good Russian kolbasa!’

Johannes smiled nervously, nodded, and walked off. He went in search of the fifers but couldn’t find them anywhere.

The Battle of Heilsberg began that night, at ten o’clock. Johannes drummed the orders, standing on a hill not far from a line of officers, all of them mounted on jittery horses, boots shiny black and silver-spurred, reins in gloved hands. They said Bonaparte was on the next hill along. The Emperor spoke through Johannes’s hands, in rolls and raps and rat-a-tat-tats.

The sky flashed with cannon fire, the ground rumbled, shards of iron exploded through the flaring darkness. Infantry and cavalry clashed. Within an hour, the brave but headstrong Maréchal Jean Lannes, Duc de Montebello (who should have waited and held the attack but simply couldn’t restrain himself) lost over two thousand of his men. The battle ended by petering out, a mess of bodies and horses, each side exhausted and without honour, flaying blindly through the morning, until the Russians retreated and the French gave chase.

Four days later, as dusk fell, Colonel-en-second Freuler said, ‘Forward!’, and this time Johannes Meyer wasn’t up on a hill but inside the turmoil on the ground. He hit the drum and began to walk (his legs shaking uncontrollably) and a battalion of the 4e Régiment Étrangers followed him into the Battle of Friedland.

Within seconds of starting the Quickstep, the battle had swallowed them whole, like a huge, grinding, red-bloody mouth.

There were soldiers everywhere, dead, crawling, running, limbless, gutted, thousands of soldiers. The cannons thundered.

‘Keep moving! Forward!’

He wasn’t a coward, but the world was being torn apart, its heart ripped out. It was just like Goethe’s story of the island with its magnetic mountain and the ships that sailed too close, all the iron torn from their timbers, nails and bolts and braces, and the ships collapsed and broke apart, the sailors killed by falling spars and yards. The battle was a force all its own and drew everything into its centre, grinding relentlessly through the thirty thousand men who eventually lay dead and injured.

The impossible noise, the soldiers everywhere, the drum at Johannes’s hip, smacking his leg as he marched and drummed, onwards, or was it in circles, who could tell?

And then he was running.

It was as though his body had willed it and not his mind, running, and the drum like a man at his leg, trying to pull him down, and Johannes panicked and ran as hard as he could, he’d never run so fast.

Maybe he was a coward.

The air burned his lungs and ahead of him were more soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, French or Russian he couldn’t tell, and they cried out and died and were torn by explosions, and then up ahead he saw the shadowed darkness of trees and they were very still and quiet and nobody called out and nobody shot him and the trees were there, a miracle. Johannes Meyer almost wept at the sight of the trees, they were so close, and he was running towards them and he couldn’t believe the trees, and then suddenly he was there, inside the trees, he was there, and he believed them.