Evil in a Mask (2 page)

It was not until Christmas that the French went into winter quarters, and the respite the Emperor gave his troops was all too short. His restless mind had conceived a new plan for getting the better of the Czar. Until Poland had been eliminated
as a sovereign State in the latter half of the last century, by the three partitions of her territories between Russia, Prussia and Austria, she had been a great Power; and her people were noted for their bravery. He would incite them to rebel against their Russian master, by offering to re-create an independent Poland under his protection. But Frederick William was getting together another army in East Prussia; and, if it were allowed to join up with the Russians, the French might be outnumbered; so Napoleon decided that he must move fast.

Even so, it was the Russians, being acclimatised to fighting in ice and snow, who moved first. The Czar's principal Commander, General Bagration, made a daring move westwards, in the hope of saving Danzig from the French. By ill luck he ran into Bernadotte's corps. Immediately Napoleon was informed of this, he directed his main army northward with the object of driving the Russians into the sea. Through a captured despatch, Bagration learned of the Emperor's intention. Swiftly he retreated towards Königsberg, but at Eylau he turned on his pursuers, and there ensued the bloodiest battle that had been fought in the past hundred years.

It was upon the field of Eylau, on the night of February 8th, that Roger lay stricken and despairing of his life.

The campaign had been the most ghastly that the
Grande Armée
had ever endured. Not yet recovered from its serious wastage at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, and its exertions during scores of mêlées while pursuing the Prussians, it was short of every sort of supply. The terrain over which it had been advancing was a vast, sparsely-populated area of plains deep in snow, and frozen lakes. At times there had been sudden, partial thaws, so that the land became a sea of mud in which the men's boots were frequently sucked off and could be retrieved only with difficulty. The cold was excruciating and the rations meagre to semi-starvation point. The officers no longer attempted to prevent looting and atrocities. The soldiers, desperate for food and warmth, had treated the wretched peasants in every village they came upon with the utmost ferocity, seizing their food, torturing them to reveal
hidden stores, pulling down their hovels to make camp-fires, then leaving them to die.

On the night of the 7th, after confused fighting, the Russians had been driven from the little town of Eylau and retired to a strong position formed by an irregular line of hills.

Dawn filtered through dark, heavily-laden clouds. The artillery on both sides opened fire as the French columns began to advance. Davoust's men pushed back the Russian left and Napoleon ordered Augereau's corps to attack the enemy centre. Battling against driving snow, his leading troops succeeded in seizing a slight eminence that could give the French a valuable advantage. But the Muscovites were strong in cannon. From their iron mouths there poured discharge after discharge of grapeshot, ploughing wide lanes of dead and dying through Augerau's infantry, until his corps was nearly annihilated. As it fell back, a horde of Cossacks came charging down on the survivors, completing its destruction. Davoust's corps fared little better, having been forced to retreat under the massed fire of the Russian batteries.

By midday the battle had degenerated into wild confusion. There were scores of small bodies of troops locked in bloody hand-to-hand conflict with, here and there, gallant but futile cavalry charges. Napoleon, now worried, but determined to be victorious, then launched eighty squadrons of cavalry against the Russian centre. With fanatical bravery, the Cuirassiers charged the Muscovite infantry, hacked a way through them and, reaching the enemy's cannon, began to sabre the gunners. But Bagration had not yet used his reserves. The fire from his second line of infantry halted the French horsemen. Only moments later, fresh
satnias
of Cossacks were launched against them, and they were driven back in disorder.

Meanwhile a body of four thousand Russian Grenadiers had emerged from the tangled conflict and, with a fanaticism equalling that of the French, fought its way through their lines straight into the village of Eylau.

The Emperor and his staff were standing there, watching the battle from a cemetery that stood on high land. Berthier,
his Chief of Staff, fearing that they would all be killed or captured, ordered up the horses. But Napoleon calmly stood his ground, while giving the signal for his grand reserve, the Imperial Guard, to go into action.

All day these veterans of a hundred fights had sullenly remained idle. Now, fresh and vigorous, the finest troops in the
Grande Armée
, they rushed to the attack, fell upon the Russian Grenadiers and massacred them.

As dusk drew on, the outcome of the battle still remained uncertain. The best hope for the French lay with Davoust. His troops had succeeded in clinging on to a village they had seized that morning. From it he threatened the enemy's flank; a determined drive against it could have brought victory. But it was not to be. At the urging of Scharnhorst, the Prussian General Lestocq with a division of eight thousand men, had made a forced march from Königsberg. They arrived just in time to check the attack that Davoust was about to make.

When the battle opened, Ney's corps had been many miles distant from the main army. At the sound of the guns he, too, had made a forced march in that direction. Only his coming up in time could save Davoust's near-exhausted men from destruction by the newly-arrived Prussians.

The forces engaged had been approximately equal: some seventy-five thousand men on either side. Nightfall brought only semi-darkness, owing to the snow. Over a great area it had been churned up or trampled flat by batteries changing position, charging cavalry and struggling infantry. In innumerable places it was stained with the blood of horses and men. Here and there the white carpet was broken by dark, tangled heaps of corpses several feet high. Others were scattered in pairs or singly where they had been shot or struck down. Fifty thousand men lay there in the snow; dead, dying or seriously disabled. Roger was one of them.

During that day he and his fellow
aides-de-camp
had galloped many miles carrying scrawled messages from the Emperor to corps and divisional commanders. Several of them had not returned, others were bleeding from wounds received while carrying out their missions. Roger had remained unscathed
until the terrible battle was almost over. Night was falling when a galloper arrived from Davoust to report the Marshal's desperate situation. During the day Ney had sent several messages to say that he was on his way. The arrival of his corps was the only remaining hope of saving Davoust. Napoleon cast a swift glance at the now much smaller group of officers behind him. Unless his messenger made a great detour, he would have to pass a wood still held by the Russians, and time was precious. His eye fell on Roger. As he was personally known to every senior Commander in the
Grande Armée
, in his case a written message was superfluous. Raising a hand, the Emperor shouted at him in the harsh Italian-accented French habitual to him:

‘Breuc! To Ney! Tell him that I am counting on him. That without him the battle may yet be lost.'

Instantly Roger set spurs to his horse. He was no coward and was accounted one of the best swordsmen in France. He had fought numerous duels and was prepared to face any man in single combat with sword or pistol. But he loathed battles; for during them, without a chance to defend oneself, one might at any moment be killed or maimed by a shot from a musket or by a cannon ball. Nevertheless chance, and at times deliberate fraud, resulting from his activities as a secret agent, had made him the hero of many exploits, with the result that he was known throughout the Army as ‘
le brave Breuc
'. Napoleon undoubtedly believed him to be entirely fearless and that, he knew, was why he had been chosen for this dangerous mission. Much as he would have liked to take the detour behind the village of Eylau, he had no choice but to charge down the hill and across the front of the position still held by the Russians.

Crouching low over his mount he had followed a zigzag course, at times swerving to avoid wrecked guns and limbers, at others jumping his mare over heaps of dead and wounded. As he came level with the wood, his heart beat faster. Hating every moment, he urged his charger forward at racing speed. Along the edge of the wood muskets began to flash, bullets whistled overhead. One jerked his befeathered hat from his head. Sweating with fear, he pressed on. Suddenly the mare
lurched. Knowing the animal to have been hit, he made to throw himself from the saddle. But he was a moment too late. Shot through the heart, she fell, bringing him down with one leg pinned beneath her belly. He felt an excruciating pain in his ankle and knew that it had been broken by the stirrup iron, caught between the weight of the mare and the ice-hard earth.

For a few minutes he had lain still, then endeavoured to free himself. Had his ankle not been broken, he might have succeeded in dragging his leg from beneath the mare's belly. But his pulling on it resulted in such agony that he fainted.

When he came to, the Russian fusillade aimed at him had ceased and he could hear only distant, sporadic firing. Again he attempted to wriggle his leg from under the dead mare, but with each effort stabs of pain streaked up to his heart, making him, in spite of the appalling cold, break out into a sweat. At length he was forced to resign himself to the fact that, without help, he must remain there a prisoner.

Whether Ney had arrived in time to save Davoust he had no idea; nor who had proved the victors in this most bloody battle. As far as he could judge, it had been a draw, so any claim to victory could be made only by the side that did not withdraw to a stronger position during the night. At least it seemed that in the Russians Napoleon had at last found his match, for they were most tenacious fighters. As he had himself said of them. ‘It is not enough to kill a Russian. You must then push him over before he will lie down.'

But Roger was no longer concerned with the issue of the war. It was not his quarrel, and he was now silently cursing himself for his folly in taking part in it. After Trafalgar, he could perfectly well have remained at home in England and settled down as a country gentleman. Although he was generous by nature, he had inherited his Scottish mother's prudence about money; so he had saved a great part of his earnings and these, together with the money left him by his father, the Admiral, amounted to a respectable fortune. It was not even the call of duty that had caused him to go abroad again, but simply restlessness and discontent.

As he lay there in the snow, his head in the fur hood of his
cloak, muffled against the biting cold, he thought back on the events that had driven him to his decision. Georgina, he admitted, could not really be blamed; yet it was a whim of that beautiful, self-willed, tempestuous lady that had led to his again having himself smuggled across to France.

He had been married twice and had had many mistresses; but Georgina, the now widowed Countess of St. Ermins, had been his first love and remained the great love of his life. To her indignation he often twitted her with having seduced him when they were in their teens; but that had been on a long-past afternoon just before he had run away from home to escape having to become a Midshipman. Four years had elapsed before he had returned from the Continent. By then she was married, but had taken him as her lover. In the years that followed, he had spent many long spells abroad, but always on his return they renewed their passionate attachment. There had even been a night when both of them had decided to marry again then, with wicked delight, had slept together. After both of them had been widowed for the second time, whenever he had returned from one of his missions, he had begged her to marry him. But she contended that it was not in his nature to settle down definitely and that, even if he did, their being together as man and wife for any considerable time must inevitably take the edge off the wondrous joy they had in each other when, for only a month or two, they were reunited after a long interval.

At length he had accepted that; so, on their return to England after Trafalgar, he had not again pressed her. But he had expected to be a frequent warmly-welcomed visitor at her lovely home, Stillwaters, near Ripley, where they had so often known great happiness together.

Alas for his expectations. The unpredictable and impetuous Georgina had suddenly become serious. Just as at one time she had declared herself to be utterly weary of balls, routs and a score of beaux constantly begging her to sleep with them—and, overnight, had metamorphosed herself into a model wife interested only in country pursuits—so now she announced that everyone owed a debt to the Navy that had
saved England from the horrors of invasion, and that she intended to pay hers.

Her plan was to buy a big house near Portsmouth and convert it into a convalescent home to accommodate from fifty to a hundred seamen. She would engage a doctor and a staff of nurses and herself become the matron. Under her supervision relays of these poor, wounded heroes should be nursed back to health and strength and taught some trade that would later enable them to earn a wage in civil life sufficient to support them.

Roger had heartily applauded her idea, for in those days Britain's treatment of men invalided from the Services on account of serious wounds was a scandal that cried to heaven. No sooner were they able to walk on crutches or, still half-blind, able to make their way about, than they were put out of the hospitals near-penniless, to fend for themselves. Thousands of them now roamed the streets of the cities, begging their bread.

Georgina's great wealth enabled her without delay to carry out her project. Roger helped her find a suitable mansion, assisted in furnishing it suitably and engaging staff. By February, the first inmates were installed and Georgina, relinquishing the fortune in jewels, unadorned by which she was normally never to be seen abroad, and exchanging her gay furbelows for more sober attire, had entered enthusiastically on her new role as ministering angel.