Valentina (13 page)

‘Listen to me,' she said. ‘I don't believe your Colonel's dead. He's not even wounded. I know it.'

‘How can you know?' Valentina asked her. ‘No Sandra. This time I'm right. My instinct tells me something has happened to him at last. I'm sure of it. This battle for Moscow—what's the date of that paper?'

‘September 20th. Don't you see that news is weeks out of date—the battle is fought and over long ago! Valentina, there were half a million men fighting for France—why should your Colonel be one of thirty thousand?'

‘I don't know,' Valentina said. She folded the paper and dropped it to the floor. ‘I don't know where or how it happened. Until now I was afraid for him, but not sure. Now I'm sure. Leave me alone, Sandra. Please.'

‘Very well.' Her sister got up. She stood looking down at Valentina. ‘I think you're being foolish, my poor little one. I've said all this to you before. I won't say it to you now. If he's dead, it may be months, a year or more even, before you will be able to find out. Meanwhile you sit here grieving, wasting your life! I can't do anything with you. God help me, I can't do anything
for
you, either. I'll leave you alone, if that's what you want.'

Valentina sat on until it grew dark, the news sheet lying on the floor at her feet. She didn't cry or move; the certainty that De Chavel was dead or mortally wounded was too strong to allow her the relief of tears. For the past three months the reports had been the same; Napoleon's army was advancing further and further into Russia without ever forcing the issue of a major battle. Disease and constant harrying by Cossacks along their route had cost the French enormous casualties. The Russians were setting fire to their own towns and villages, poisoning the water and destroying the crops so that not one grain of corn or blade of grass or cut of fresh meat was left for the invaders.

Even with the sparse information available, most of it presented in terms favourable to France, it was obvious that Napoleon's campaign was not going in the way he had expected. Valentina was not concerned with the outcome of the war; every skirmish was a threat to the man she loved, every rumour of dysentery and typhoid outbreaks among the French troops brought her the mental image of De Chavel lying sick and dying of the disease. The inactivity of her life at Czartatz was a torture to her; the days passed so slowly that their tranquillity drove her mad; all the pursuits she once loved, the long walks and rides, needlework and reading, and the stimulus of her sister's company, meant nothing to her now. She lived in a useless vacuum while the world beyond was blazing and De Chavel was fighting, perhaps falling under Russian bullets while she sat safe and idle. At least there had been no major battle until now; but thirty thousand had fallen at a place called Smolensk and when that report was written, the French and Russian armies were facing each other for the decisive battle before Moscow itself. And it was all over. The dead were mouldering unburied on the battle-field, victory or defeat had been decided weeks ago, and she knew nothing of the outcome. She had no guide but instinct, and for the first time that intuitive sense told Valentina that De Chavel had fallen, and she knew the premonition was true. When Jana came into the room she didn't look up or speak; the maid glanced at her anxiously and lit the candles, drawing the window curtains, and putting wood on the dying fire.

‘It's nearly supper time, Madame,' she said. ‘Her Highness says won't you come down?'

‘No, Jana.' Valentina shook her head. ‘I've no appetite tonight. I'll see my sister in the morning.'

‘I hear there's been a battle,' Jana said; she watched her mistress anxiously.

‘Yes, two battles by now. With heavy losses.'

‘And the Colonel, Madame …?' She hardly dared to ask the question.

‘There's no way of knowing,' Valentina said slowly. ‘And as long as I hide here I shall never know. I've made up my mind, Jana. I can't stay here like this. I'm going back to Warsaw.'

On September the 7th, very early in the morning, the battle of Borodino, which was to decide the fate of Moscow, began with the opening French bombardment from six hundred guns. The weather had deteriorated in the last few weeks; rain had turned the countryside into a blackened sea of mud where nothing grew and the miserable starving horses floundered, the wagons sinking to their ankles. For the last part of the advance the artillery had to be hauled by teams of exhausted men; morale was low and tempers, even among the Marshals, were dangerously short.

Davoust and Murat had quarrelled violently; they had never liked each other and the contrast in personalities between the dour, brave professional soldier and the flamboyant Gascon King irritated both into childish displays of spleen and futile arguments. The Emperor himself was gloomy and suffering from lack of sleep. On that September morning he had a heavy cold and a low fever. The terrain was marshy with low hillocks and the ribbon of the Moscova River ran to the left. Borodino itself was a village, and the Russian forces were estimated at one hundred and twenty thousand with more artillery of heavier calibre than the French. They had entrenched themselves in a series of redoubts along the right of the land where the road to Moscow lay, their positions were protected by scattered woodlands and the hummocks of ground and treacherous marshes. For hours the two artilleries bombarded each other; the noise was intolerable and there were not many in the French ranks with enough stomach left to enjoy the overture to the play in which they were soon going to be the principals. The French had been advancing through one of the worst countries in the experience of any veteran among them. Major Macdonald's comparison with Spain was more than justified; the men had been bedevilled by scorching heat before the drenching rains, by flies and the accompanying diseases where water was in short supply and the horses perished in thousands. There was no food or shelter; the Russian peasants fled, or were driven away by their own troops; the villages were set on fire, and everywhere they marched the sky was dark with the smoke of burning crops. There was no livestock; what couldn't be evacuated was slaughtered on the spot and left to putrefy; often the carcasses were thrown into the streams so that man or beast who drank from them was poisoned. And at night when they were tired and hungry the mounted Cossacks struck, harrying and raiding, so that the exhausted men got little sleep. Stragglers were found with their throats cut; sentries mounted guard in twos and threes for fear of the lightning attacks by bands of Russians, who struck and then galloped off before a shot could be fired at them.

There had been no pitched battle, at which the French excelled, no opportunity to vent their frustration and their misery upon the ever-retreating enemy, and the lack of fighting affected discipline. Of the half a million men who had crossed the Niemen that hot day two months ago, only one hundred and eighty thousand were left fit to do battle. The rest had died of disease, had been cut down at the rear, or killed at Smolensk where the hopes of forcing a decision had been lost when the Russians once again withdrew after a bloody engagement and huge casualties, before Napoleon could beat them decisively.

Countless thousands had deserted, only to be hunted down and killed by the Russians.

And yet the heart of the French army, the élite fifty thousand of the Old Guard, was untouched. The Emperor had kept them in reserve at Smolensk.

At dawn the French bugles could be clearly heard in the Russian redoubts blowing the ‘advance' and across the uneven ground the first lines of French troops made their attack against the smaller redoubts; the major forces were concentrated against the great redoubt in the centre. A wind of gale force blew over the battlefield.

De Chavel took his troops against the great redoubt that morning; the attack on it was led by Marshal Ney, one of the best soldiers De Chavel had ever served under, and a man of complex and emotional character. He was the son of a cooper from Alsace Lorraine, and his peasant ancestry was in the sturdy build, the square face and the stubby features of the great Marshal. Essentially he was a man of action, a man with Teutonic qualities always at variance with his French temperament; happy to carry out a direct order no matter how impossible the odds, completely without personal fear in combat, a General whose men would follow him anywhere. Sensitive to a pathological degree about his origins, Ney was irritable, always suspecting slights, and without political good sense.

De Chavel admired and understood him; he preferred the touchy lion-hearted soldier to someone equally brave like Murat. Only last night Murat had called him over during an inspection and asked him whether he didn't wish himself back with his little Countess in Danzig and then passed on, laughing. De Chavel had scarcely thought of Valentina except when he was restless for a woman, and it was always her face and body that came to mind, and the memories of holding her that haunted him. He would have given his soul for the chance to take her in his arms during the last few weeks; but this was lust for her and not love; love had no place in his emotions any more. He had resented Murat's jibe with unreasonable bitterness. It reminded him suddenly of his wife Liliane, and how the night before a battle he used to write her long letters full of tenderness and passion, as if she were a kind of talisman against death. Murat had been her lover; perhaps in his heart he had never forgiven him, more than any of the others who had enjoyed his wife.

Perhaps that was why he resented the remark about Valentina, and why on this particular day he was glad that Ney was his commander and not the Marshal King of Naples. He had a strong presentiment that he would never fight another battle, and he felt very calm. He was not afraid to die; he no longer actually sought death as he used to do, now he could merely meet it and feel indifference. It was the best frame of mind for any soldier, this placid acceptance that the day would be his last. He had made ready during the bombardment, inspected his men and had a bottle of wine with Major Macdonald. The two had become friends. He was in his place with his troops when the order to advance against the great redoubt was given.

Again and again the troops rushed the entrenchment, only to be driven back down the slopes by blinding fire from the Russians, and then counter-attacked by the enemy. The fiercest hand-to-hand fighting with bayonet and sword took place that morning and on into the afternoon, until at last the French had overwhelmed the first line of entrenchments, and then the second and third were taken and the redoubt fell. It was within the last twenty minutes of that final assault that a Captain Nikoliev leapt down from the third escarpment and threw himself on the French officer who was leading his men up from the second line. For a moment they came face to face, and De Chavel brought his arm down in a sweep of steel that met bone and sinew and was torn out of his hand as it wedged in the Russian's body. In the moment before he fell and died, Nikoliev fired his pistol at point-blank range and De Chavel met the red flash and the excruciating pain for a second of consciousness before he pitched down on top of his enemy. The troops fought round them and over them and then passed on. By mid-afternoon the left-hand redoubt had been taken by the French and the redoubt on the right was evacuated, its Russian forces fleeing back. A savage counter-attack gave the central redoubt back to the Russians, and towards late afternoon the final French assault was launched upon it, led in person by Marshal Ney. Bodies lay thick upon the scarred and blackened ground. Bodies sank in the stinking marshes and lay in the woods and the scorched ruins of Borodino itself, shattered cannon and dead horses shared the battlefield with mounds of dead and wounded, and it was thickest on the slopes leading to the great redoubt, where at last the French flag was flying in what was to be the costliest victory of the whole campaign. In his tent the Emperor sat with bowed head, counting the appalling total of his losses, and the dusk came, covering the frightful sight of war all round the countryside, while searchers began moving over the field looking for wounded, and often mercifully killing those too badly hurt to be moved. Major Macdonald himself and an orderly found De Chavel's body, half covered by a dead infantryman, with the corpse of a Russian Captain underneath him. The ground was sodden with blood, and nobody moved or groaned.

‘He's dead, Sir,' the orderly said. He bent down to the Colonel and placed a hand on the other side of his shattered chest and arm. He had been shot at a range of a foot or less, and someone had sabred him afterwards, probably when he made a movement.

‘Is there no heart-beat? Nothing?' Macdonald demanded.

‘So slight it's hardly worth the trouble of bringing him in,' the orderly said. ‘He's as good as dead already. Leave him, Sir. I can hear a man groaning over there—may I go to him?'

‘Yes, go,' the Major said. He bent down and tried to feel some murmur of life in the still body of his Colonel. It was growing darker, and it would soon be too late to pick his way among the bloody debris on the field.

On an impulse he heaved De Chavel up and lifted him upon his back. If he was dead when they got back to the encampment it would hardly matter. Nothing mattered to Macdonald after that frightful day in which he had lost so many friends and a full three-quarters of his men, except that the man he had come to love and admire during the whole hellish campaign shouldn't be left to rot like a dead dog upon that filthy field.

The surgeons had set up improvised hospitals, and these were full of wounded and dying men; they were rough tents pitched on the bare ground, and the doctors worked by the light of pitch torches. The sounds and smells were indescribable; Macdonald himself carried De Chavel to the nearest centre, and though he was a hardened veteran of war and not much moved by the bloody aftermath of battle, he almost vomited at the scene inside the tent flaps. Men lay on the earth, groaning and screaming; the smell of blood was so overpowering it was like an abattoir; orderlies moved among the wounded, stepping over them, stumbling over bodies, trying to bandage gaping wounds. At the far end of the tent two army surgeons in crimson aprons operated on tables by the flickering torch lights. Arms and legs and severed hands and feet lay underneath like offal at the butcher's. An orderly came up to the Major.