Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (76 page)

At Quatre Bras the French are found . . .

“What?" muttered Strange. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to have disappeared hours ago!" He made Ormskirk's sign to disperse a magic spell and the bird flew off. In fact, rather to his consternation, a whole flock of birds took flight at the same moment. He glanced round nervously to see if any one had noticed that he had bungled the magic; but everyone seemed busy with military concerns and he concluded they had not.

He found a position to his liking - in a ditch directly in front of Quatre Bras farmhouse. The crossroads was on his immediate right and the 92nd Foot, the Highland Regiment were on his left. He took the hard-boiled eggs out of his pockets and gave them to such of the Highlanders as thought they might like to eat them. (In peacetime some sort of introduction is generally required to make a person's acquaintance; in war a small eatable will perform the same office.) The Highlanders gave him some sweet, milky tea in return and soon they were chatting very companionably together.

The day was intensely hot. The road went down between the fields of rye, which seemed, under that bright sun, to glow with an almost supernatural brilliance. Three miles away the Prussian Army had already engaged with the French and there were faint sounds of guns booming and men shouting, like the ghosts of things to come. Just before noon drums and fierce singing were heard in the distance. The ground began to shake with the stamping of tens of thousands of feet, and through the rye towards them came the thick, dark columns of French infantry.

The Duke had given Strange no particular orders and so, when the fighting began, he set about performing all the magic he used to do on Spanish battlefields. He sent fiery angels to menace the French and dragons to breathe flames over them. These illusions were larger and brighter than any thing he had managed in Spain. Several times he climbed out of the ditch to admire the effect - in spite of the warnings of the Highlanders that he was liable to be shot at any moment.

He had been diligently casting such spells for three or four hours when something happened. Out on the battlefield, a sudden assault by the French Chasseurs threatened to envelop the Duke and his staff. These gentlemen were obliged to wheel round and ride pell-mell back to the Allied lines. The nearest troops happened to be the 92nd Foot.

“92nd!" cried the Duke. “Lie down!"

The Highlanders immediately lay down. Strange looked up from the ditch to see the Duke upon Copenhagen
³
skimming over their heads. His Grace was quite unharmed and indeed appeared more invigorated than alarmed by his adventure. Helooked around to see what everyone was doing. His eye alighted upon Strange.

“Mr Strange! What are you doing? When I want a display of Vauxhall-Gardens magic I shall ask for it!
⁴
The French saw plenty of this sort of thing in Spain - they are not in the least disturbed by it. But it is entirely new to the Belgians, Dutch and Germans in
my
Army. I have just seen one of your dragons menace a company of Brunswickers in that wood. Four of them fell over. It will not do, Mr Strange! It simply will not do!" He galloped off.

Strange stared after him. He had half a mind to make some pointed remarks about the Duke's ingratitude to his friends, the Highlanders; but they seemed a little busy at the moment, being shot at by cannons and hacked at by sabres. So he picked up his map, climbed out of the ditch and made his way to the crossroads where the Duke's military secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, was looking about him with an anxious air.

“My lord?" said Strange. “I need to ask you something. How is the battle going?"

Somerset sighed. “All will be well in the end. Of course it will. But half the Army is not here yet. We have scarcely any cavalry to speak of. I know you sent the divisions their orders very promptly but some of them were simply too far away. If the French get reinforcements before we get ours, then . . ." He shrugged.

“And if French reinforcements do come, which direction will they come from? The south, I suppose?"

“The south and south-east."

Strange did not return to the battle. Instead, he walked to Quatre Bras farm, just behind the British lines. The farm was quite deserted. Doors stood open; curtains billowed out of windows; a scythe and hoe had been thrown down in the dust in the haste to get away. In the milk-smelling gloom of the dairy he found a cat with some newborn kittens. Whenever the guns sounded (which was often) the cat trembled. He fetched her some water and spoke to her gently. Then he sat down upon the cool flagstones and placed his map before him.

He began to move the roads, lanes and villages to the south and east of the battlefield. First he changed the positions of two villages. Then he made all the roads that went east to west, run north to south. He waited ten minutes and then he put it all back the way it was. He made all the woods in the vicinity turn round and face the other way. Next he made the brooks flow in the wrong direction. Hour after hour he continued to change the landscape. It was intricate, tedious work - quite as dull as any thing he had done with Norrell. At half-past six he heard the Allied bugles sound the advance. At eight o'clock he stood up and stretched his cramped limbs. “Well," he remarked to the cat, “I have not the least idea whether that achieved any thing or not."
⁵

Black smoke hung over the fields. Those dismal attendants of any battle, the crows and ravens, had arrived in their hundreds. Strange found his friends, the Highlanders, in a most forlorn condition. They had captured a house next to the road, but in doing so they had lost half their men and twenty-five of their thirty-six officers, including their colonel - a man whom many of them had regarded as a father. More than one grizzled-looking veteran was sitting with his head in his hands, weeping.

The French had apparently returned to Frasnes - the town they had come from that morning. Strange asked several people if this meant the Allies had won, but no one seemed to have any precise information upon this point.

He slept that night in Genappe, a village three miles up the road to Brussels. He was at breakfast when Captain Hadley-Bright appeared, bearing news: the Duke's Allies, the Prussian Army had received a terrible beating in the fighting of previous day.

“Are they defeated?" asked Strange.

“No, but they have retreated and so the Duke says we must do the same. His Grace has chosen somewhere to fight and the Prussians will meet us there. A place called Waterloo."

“Waterloo? What a ridiculously odd name!" said Strange.

“It is odd, is it not? I could not find it on the map."

“Oh!" said Strange. “This was continually happening in Spain! No doubt the fellow who told you got the name wrong. Depend upon it, there is no such place as Waterloo!"

A little after noon they mounted their horses and were about to follow the Army out of the village, when a message arrived from Wellington: a squadron of French lancers was approaching and could Mr Strange do something to annoy them? Strange, anxious to avoid another accusation of Vauxhall-Gardens magic, asked Hadley-Bright's advice. “What do cavalry hate the most?"

Hadley-Bright thought for a moment. “Mud," he said.

“Mud? Really? Yes, I suppose you are right. Well, there are few things more plain and workman-like than weather magic!"

The skies darkened. An inky thundercloud appeared; it was as large as all Belgium and so full and heavy that its ragged skirts seemed to brush the tops of the trees. There was a flash and the world turned bone-white for an instant. There was a deafening crack and the next moment the rain came down in such torrents that the earth boiled and hissed.

Within minutes the surrounding fields had turned to a quag- mire. The French lancers were quite unable to indulge in their favourite sport of fast and dextrous riding; Wellington's rearguard got safely away.

An hour later Strange and Hadley-Bright were surprized to discover that there was indeed a place called Waterloo and that they had arrived at it. The Duke was sitting on his horse in the rain, gazing in high good humour at the filthy men, horses and carts. “Excellent mud, Merlin!" he called out cheerfully. “Very sticky and slippery. The French will not like it at all. More rain, if you please! Now, you see that tree where the road dips down?"

“The elm, your Grace?"

“The very one. If you will stand there during the battle tomorrow, I will be much obliged to you. I will be there some of the time, but probably not very often. My boys will bring you your instructions."

That evening the various divisions of the Allied Army took up positions along a shallow ridge south of Waterloo. Above them the thunder roared and the rain came down in torrents. From time to time deputations of bedraggled men approached the elm-tree and begged Strange to make it stop, but he only shook his head and said, “When the Duke tells me to stop, I shall."

But the veterans of the Peninsular War remarked approvingly that rain was always an Englishman's friend in times of war. They told their comrades: “There is nothing so comforting or familiar to us, you see - whereas other nations it baffles. It rained on the nights before Fuentes, Salamanca and Vitoria." (These were the names of some of Wellington's great victories in the Peninsula.)

In the shelter of his umbrella Strange mused on the battle to come. Ever since the end of the Peninsular War he had been studying the magic that the
Aureates
used in times of war. Very little was known about it; there were rumours - nothing more - of a spell which John Uskglass had used before his own battles. It foretold the outcome of present events. Just before nightfall Strange had a sudden inspiration. “There is no way of finding out what Uskglass did, but there is always Pale's Conjectures Concerning the Foreshadowing of Things To Come. That is very likely a watered-down version of the same thing. I could use that."

For a moment or two before the spell took effect, he was aware of all the sounds around him: rain splashing on metal and leather, and running down canvas; horses shuffling and snorting; English- men singing and Scotsmen playing bagpipes; two Welsh soldiers arguing over the proper interpretation of a Bible passage; the Scottish captain, John Kincaid, entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow).

Then silence. Men and horses began to disappear, few by few at first, and then more quickly - hundreds, thousands of them vanishing from sight. Great gaps appeared among the close- packed soldiers. A little further to the east an entire regiment was gone, leaving a hole the size of Hanover-square. Where, moments before, all had been life, conversation and activity, there was now nothing but the rain and the twilight and the waving stalks of rye. Strange wiped his mouth because he felt sick. “Ha!" he thought. “That will teach me to meddle with magic meant for kings! Norrell is right. Some magic is not meant for ordinary magicians. Presumably John Uskglass knew what to do with this horrible knowledge. I do not. Should I tell someone? The Duke? He will not thank me for it."

Someone was looking down at him; someone was speaking to him - a captain in the Horse Artillery. Strange saw the man's mouth move but he heard not a sound. He snapped his fingers to dismiss the spell. The captain was inviting him to come and share some brandy and cigars. Strange shivered and declined.

For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magician- ship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past.

At about half past eleven the next morning the French guns began to fire. The Allied artillery replied. The clear summer air between the two armies was filled with drifting veils of bitter, black smoke.

The French attack was chiefly directed at the Château of Hougoumont, an Allied outpost in the valley, whose woods and buildings were defended by the 3rd Foot Guards, Coldstream Guards, Nassauers and Hanoverians. Strange summoned vision after vision into his silver dish so that he could watch the bloody engagements in the woods around the Château . He was in half a mind to move the trees to give the Allied soldiers a better shot at their attackers, but this sort of close hand-to-hand fighting was the very worst subject for magic. He reminded himself that in war a soldier may do more harm by acting too soon or too impetuously than by never acting at all. He waited.

The cannonade grew fiercer. British veterans told their friends that they had never known shot fall so fast and thick. Men saw comrades cut in half, smashed to pieces or beheaded by cannon- balls. The very air shook with the guns' reverberations. “Hard pounding this," remarked the Duke coolly, and ordered the front ranks to withdraw behind the crest of the ridge and lie down. When it was over, the Allies lifted their heads to see the French infantry advancing through the smoke-filled valley: sixteen thou- sand men shoulder to shoulder in immense columns, all shouting and stamping together.

More than one soldier wondered if, at last, the French had found a magician of their own; the French infantrymen appeared much taller than ordinary men and the light in their eyes as they drew closer burnt with an almost supernatural fury. But this was only the magic of Napoleon Buonaparte, who knew better than any one how to dress his soldiers so they would terrify the enemy, and how to deploy them so that any onlooker would think them indestructible.

Now Strange knew exactly what to do. The thick, clogging mud was already proving a decided hindrance to the advancing sol- diers. To hamper them further he set about enchanting the stalks of rye. He made them wind themselves around the Frenchmen's feet. The stalks were as tough as wires; the soldiers staggered and fell over. With luck, the mud would hold them down and they would be trampled by their comrades - or by the French cavalry who soon appeared behind them. But it was painstaking work and, in spite of all his efforts, this first magic of Strange's probably did no more harm against the French than the firing of a skilful British musketeer or rifleman.