The Charterhouse of Parma (7 page)

“She’ll think I’m a coward,” he realized bitterly, but he felt it was quite impossible to move: he would have fallen down. This was a terrible moment; Fabrizio was about to be sick. The canteen-woman realized this, jumped down from her cart and without a word offered him a shot of brandy, which he swallowed in one gulp; after that he could remount, and they continued along the path without speaking. The canteen-woman glanced at him from time to time out of the corner of her eye.

“You’ll fight tomorrow, my boy,” she said at last, “today you’re staying with me. You see now, you’ve still got something to learn about soldiering.”

“No, I want to fight right away,” exclaimed our hero grimly, which the canteen-woman took for a good sign.

The cannon-fire redoubled and seemed to come closer. The explosions now formed a kind of
basso continuo
, there was no interval separating the explosions, and against this
basso continuo
, which suggested the sound of a distant stream, they could now make out the regimental gunfire.

Just then the road sloped down into a grove of trees: the canteen-woman
caught sight of three or four French soldiers running toward her as fast as they could; she quickly jumped down from her cart and managed to hide fifteen or twenty feet off the road, crouching in a hole where a huge tree had been uprooted. “Now,” Fabrizio decided, “now I’ll find out if I’m a coward!” He stood beside the little cart the canteen-woman had abandoned and drew his saber. The soldiers paid no attention to him and ran past him through the grove to the left of the path.

“Those are our men,” the canteen-woman said calmly, returning quite winded to her wagon. “If your horse could gallop, I’d send you to the edge of the woods to see what’s out there on the field.”

Fabrizio did not need to be told twice; he tore off a poplar branch, stripped its leaves, and began whipping his horse with all his might; the mare broke into a gallop for a moment, then returned to her customary trot. The canteen-woman had whipped her horse to a gallop as well.

“Now stop there, whoa!” she shouted to Fabrizio.

Soon both of them were out of the woods; at the edge of the field they heard a dreadful racket, cannon-fire and muskets rattling on all sides, to the right, to the left, and behind them. And since the grove they had just left covered a hill some eight or ten feet above the field, they saw a corner of the battle quite clearly; but there was no one to be seen in the field beyond the woods. This field was bordered, about a thousand paces from where they were, by a long row of bushy willows; above these appeared some white smoke circling upward into the sky.

“If only I knew where the regiment was!” said the canteen-woman, at a loss. “We can’t cross this big open space. And by the way, you,” she said to Fabrizio, “if you see an enemy soldier, run him through, don’t bother trying to cut him down …”

At this moment the canteen-woman caught sight of the four soldiers just mentioned, coming out of the woods onto the field to the left of the path. One of them was mounted.

“There’s what you want,” she said to Fabrizio. “Hey, you there!” she shouted to the man on the horse. “Come over here and have some brandy.”

The soldiers approached.

“Where’s the Sixth Light?” she shouted.

“Over there, five minutes from here, on the other side of that ditch, behind the willows. And Colonel Macon’s just been killed.”

“How much do you want for your horse—will you take five francs?”

“Five francs! You’re joking, Mother—this here’s an officer’s horse I can sell for five napoleons any time I want.”

“Give me one of your napoleons,” the canteen-woman murmured to Fabrizio. Then, approaching the mounted soldier: “Get off quick,” she said, “here’s your napoleon.”

The soldier dismounted, Fabrizio leaped gaily into the saddle, and the canteen-woman unfastened the little portmanteau strapped to his mare. “All right, you men, help me!” she scolded the other soldiers. “Is this the way you let a lady do your work?”

But no sooner had the newly purchased horse felt the weight of the portmanteau than it began to rear, and Fabrizio, though an excellent rider, needed all his strength to control it.

“A good sign!” the canteen-woman said. “This fellow’s not used to being tickled by a portmaneau!”

“A general’s horse!” exclaimed the soldier who had just sold it. “A horse worth ten napoleons if it’s worth a sou!”

“Here’s twenty francs,” Fabrizio said to him, beside himself with joy at feeling a spirited horse under him.

At this moment a cannonball sliced along the row of willows, affording Fabrizio the odd spectacle of all those twigs flying to either side as though sheared off by a scythe-stroke. “That’s cannon-fire coming toward us,” the soldier told him, taking his twenty francs.

It might have been two o’clock in the afternoon.

Fabrizio was still under the spell of this strange spectacle, when a group of generals, followed by some twenty hussars, galloped past a corner of the vast field, on the edge of which he was still standing; his horse whinnied, reared two or three times, then pulled violently at the bit. “So be it, go!” Fabrizio decided.

Left to himself, the horse galloped off to join the escort following the generals. Fabrizio counted four gold-braided hats. Fifteen minutes later, Fabrizio understood from a few words spoken by a hussar near
him that one of these generals was the famous Marshal Ney. His happiness was complete; yet he could not tell which of the four was the Marshal. He would have given anything in the world to know, but remembered that he must not speak. The escort halted before crossing a broad ditch filled with rainwater from the night before; the ditch was lined with huge trees, forming the boundary of the field on the left, where Fabrizio had bought his horse. Almost all the hussars had dismounted; the side of the ditch was steep and slippery, and the water level was a good three or four feet below the brink. Fabrizio, wild with joy, was thinking more about Marshal Ney and glory than of his horse, which in its excitement leaped into the ditch; this raised the water level considerably. One of the generals was completely soaked by the sheet of water and swore aloud: “Damn the brute!”

Fabrizio was deeply wounded by this insult. “Can I demand an apology?” he wondered. Meanwhile, to prove he was not so clumsy, he tried to urge his horse up the opposite side of the ditch; but the slope was steep, and five or six feet high. He had to give it up, and rode upstream, the water up to his horse’s head, and finally reached a sort of ford where the cattle came to drink; up this shallow slope he easily reached the field on the other side of the ditch. He was the first man of the troop to appear there; he began trotting proudly along the edge: the hussars were still floundering at the bottom of the ditch, struggling for a foothold, for in many places the water was five feet deep. Two or three horses took fright and tried to swim, which created a dreadful confusion. One sergeant noticed the maneuver just made by this youngster who seemed so unsoldierly.

“Back on your horses! There’s a ford to the left!” he shouted, and gradually all the men clambered out of the ditch.

Upon reaching the other side, Fabrizio had found the generals there by themselves; the cannonade seemed twice as loud to him; he could scarcely hear the general he had just splashed shouting in his ear: “Where did you get that horse?”

Fabrizio was so distracted that he answered in Italian:
“L’ho comprato poco fa.
” (I bought it just now.)

“What did you say?” the general shouted.

But the racket now grew so loud that Fabrizio could not answer. We
must confess that at this moment our hero was anything but a hero. Still, fear was only his second reaction; he was chiefly outraged by this noise that was hurting his ears. The escort broke into a gallop, crossing a broad stretch of ploughed field on the far side of the ditch, strewn with corpses.

“Redcoats! Redcoats!” the hussars shouted with joy.

At first Fabrizio failed to understand; then he noticed that indeed almost all the corpses were wearing red. One circumstance made him shudder with horror: many of these wretched redcoats were still alive; they were obviously calling for help, and no one was stopping to give it to them. Our hero, a profoundly humane character, took all the pains in the world to keep his horse from planting its hooves on any redcoat. The escort halted; Fabrizio, who was not paying sufficient attention to his duty as a soldier, galloped on, glancing down at a pathetic wounded soldier.

“Halt right there, you fool” the sergeant shouted at him.

Fabrizio realized he was twenty paces to the right, out in front of the generals, and precisely at the spot on which they were focusing their spyglasses. Returning to line up with the other hussars who had remained a few paces behind, he saw the fattest of these generals speaking to his neighbor with an authoritative, almost scolding expression; he was swearing. Fabrizio could not contain his curiosity, and in spite of the advice not to speak, which his friend the jailer’s wife had given him, he worked out a very correct little French sentence and said to the man next to him: “Who is that general chewing out the one next to him?”

“Damn, that’s the Marshal!”

“Which Marshal?”

“Marshal Ney, you idiot! Damn, where’ve you been fighting till now?”

Fabrizio, though extremely sensitive, had no thought of taking offense; he stared, lost in childish admiration of this famous Prince of the Moskova, “bravest of the brave.”

Suddenly everyone galloped off. A few moments later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead, a ploughed field that seemed to be strange in motion; the furrows were filled with water, and the wet ground that
formed their crests was exploding into tiny black fragments flung three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noticed this odd effect as he passed; then his mind returned to daydreams of the Marshal’s glory. He heard a sharp cry beside him: two hussars had fallen, riddled by bullets; and when he turned to look at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort. What seemed horrible to him was a blood-covered horse struggling in the furrows and trying to follow the others: blood was flowing into the mire.

“Aha! Now we’re under fire at last. I’ve seen action!” he kept telling himself, with a certain satisfaction. “Now I’m a true soldier.” At this moment the escort began galloping at breakneck speed, and our hero realized that these were bullets tearing up the earth. Though he tried to see where they were coming from, there was nothing but white smoke from the battery a great ways off, and amid the continuous roaring of cannon-fire he seemed to hear explosions much closer to him; he could make nothing of it.

At this moment the generals and their escort rode down into a little path filled with water five feet below the level of the field. The Marshal stopped and stared through his spyglass once again. Fabrizio, this time, could examine him at his leisure: he was very blond, with a huge red face. “We don’t have faces like that in Italy,” he said to himself. “Pale as I am, and with such dark hair, I’ll never get to look like that,” he concluded sadly. For him these words meant: “I’ll never be a hero.” He stared at the hussars; all but one had yellow moustaches. If Fabrizio stared at the hussars in the escort, they certainly stared back, and this stare made him blush. To put an end to his embarrassment, he turned his horse toward the enemy. These were long lines of red-coated men, but what astonished him most was how tiny these men appeared. Their long files, which were regiments or divisions, looked to him no higher than hedgerows. A line of red cavalry was trotting toward the sunken path where the Marshal and his escort were riding, stumbling through the mud. Smoke kept them from making out anything from the direction in which they were advancing; sometimes men on horseback were silhouetted against that white smoke as they galloped past.

Suddenly Fabrizio saw four men from the enemy lines galloping
toward him. “Ah, now we’re being attacked!” he told himself; then he saw two of these men speaking to the Marshal. One of the generals on the latter’s staff galloped off toward the enemy, followed by two hussars of the escort and the four men who had just arrived. After everyone had crossed a ditch, Fabrizio found himself beside a sergeant who seemed friendly enough. “I must speak to this fellow,” he decided, “maybe then they’ll stop staring at me.” He pondered a long while. “Monsieur, this is the first time I’ve seen battle,” he finally said to the sergeant, “but is this a real battle?”

“Real enough. Who’re you?”

“I’m a brother of the captain’s wife.”

“What’s his name, your captain?”

Our hero was dreadfully embarrassed; he had not foreseen such a question. Fortunately the Marshal and his escort galloped off again once more. “What French name shall I say?” Fabrizio wondered. Finally he remembered the name of the innkeeper where he had lodged in Paris; he rode close to the sergeant’s horse and shouted as loud as he could: “Captain Meunier!”

The man heard little enough because of the cannonade, and answered: “Captain Teulier, is it? Well, he’s been killed.”

“Fine, it’s Captain Teulier: I must look sad,” Fabrizio decided, and exclaimed: “Killed! Oh my God!” and assumed a woebegone expression.

They had left the sunken path and were crossing a little field, galloping through the hail of bullets, the Marshal heading for a cavalry division. The escort was riding over corpses and wounded men, but already such a spectacle made much less of an impression on our hero: he had other things to think about.

While the escort halted, Fabrizio noticed the little cart of a canteen-woman, and his affections for this worthy occupation prevailing over all else, he galloped over to join her.

“Stay where you are, damn you!” the sergeant shouted at him.

“What can he do to me here?” Fabrizio decided, and continued galloping toward the canteen-woman. As he spurred his horse on, he had some hope that this was his companion of the morning, the cart and horse being quite similar to those he remembered, but it was an entirely different owner that he approached, and our hero found her
quite unwelcoming. As he came near, Fabrizio heard her saying: “… and such a good-looking one, too!”