The General's Mistress (48 page)

A
t noon they rolled in, striking again most heavily on the left end of the line, on Michel’s troops and the left section of Moreau’s. I watched from the village, from a second-floor room of a house that was now division headquarters.

The real division headquarters was with Michel, wherever he and his aide Ruffin were on the field between the river and the wood, but this was where I had the maps laid out on the table and found some food for when they would need it. There’s never such a thing as an unwelcome potato soup. With some onions and dried herbs in it, it was pretty good and would keep as long as it needed to over the fire. They would be hungry, wounded and unwounded alike.

By late afternoon the snow was more than knee-deep, and it showed no signs of stopping. It was too much. The Austrians withdrew.

Michel came in at nightfall, Ruffin and his senior officers with him, stamping the snow off his boots, his coat steaming before the fire. There was blood all over his cloak, and no way to clean it just now. His buff pants were almost brown.

He ate some soup, and I got him to change clothes and lie down for a few hours. He had been going since before four in the morning in the cold. He lay down on a bed upstairs, where I had a fire going, and slept until midnight.

I didn’t sleep. I stayed downstairs, getting soup for the others who came in, serving it out with Barend and a couple of others.
When I ran out, I went into the cellars to see what I could find. More potatoes, more onions, the householder’s winter stores. Enough to make another big pot of soup, because the hungry men just kept coming. I wanted bread, and there was flour, but I had never learned to make bread. Fortunately, there was a private from the Somme whose father was a baker, and I set him to making bread in as large a quantity as possible. With cheese and apples from the cellars, it would manage a substantial dinner and breakfast. I left the sausages. We would get to them later.

I wasn’t sure how many of the men had figured out that I was a woman, and how many thought that I was simply the general’s body servant. It didn’t seem to matter. Barend did what I told him, and the rest seemed to assume that I had the authority to arrange the provisions and quartering, whether as the general’s woman or as an orderly duly deputized. Or perhaps nobody cared, as long as there was food.

At midnight Michel came down and ate some bread and an apple and some soup with a cup of very hot coffee. He had a clean shirt and pants, though I had been able to do nothing about his coat or cloak. He went straight back out to the lines.

The room quieted. There was no sound but the snores of sleeping men and the crackling of the fire. I sat on a stool beside the fireplace, nodding.

Something brushed against my ankles, a big gray cat with green eyes that reflected the flames. She purred, and brushed past me again. The household’s cat, I thought, hiding somewhere all day and now come out when the house was quiet. I petted her and gave her some scraps of cheese. She ate them delicately, as though she wasn’t very hungry, stopping to watch me with her enormous eyes. I ran my hands along her back, sweeping over her soft fur. She purred.

The Egyptians thought cats were magic, I thought. Perhaps
they were right. This one looked as though she had something to tell me. She leapt into my lap, kneading and purring. I pressed my face against her soft fur. “I’m sorry, dear,” I whispered into her pointed ears, “your people will be back soon, when the battle’s over. They’re probably safer somewhere else right now, you know.” The cat in my lap, I watched through the small hours of the night.

In the morning, the great battle began.

Hohenlinden

I
n the night, Moreau had sent off about half his force, nearly twenty-five thousand men under Richepanse. They pulled back quietly and marched away to the east, cavalry to the fore and guns last, the cavalry taking one of the footpaths through the forest. Ney, Moreau, and General Grouchy formed a bastion about the town of Hohenlinden, with General Legrand, whom I did not know, in reserve. Given the talk of flanking maneuvers, I assumed that this was the plan—to somehow get around behind the Austrians using the poor trails through the forest. By morning the snow was fourteen inches deep, and still coming down in occasional flurries. I didn’t think this would make it easy.

Michel came in right after dawn and ate some soup. The potatoes had cooked to bits by now, but it tasted wonderful. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

I nodded. “It’s a good thing I learned to cook,” I said. I wondered if he would say any of the things I hoped he wouldn’t, things about if something happens or just in case.

He didn’t. “Very useful,” he said. He didn’t touch me, and there was nothing affectionate in his manner, nothing inappropriate for a servant, except his expression, the warmth in his eyes when he looked at me. If any man in the room didn’t guess, they certainly thought it was an interesting relationship with Charles. If they cared, which at the moment I doubted anyone did.

And so I did not say good luck, good-bye, or any of those
other things that women in stories say on the cusp of a battle. What could I say that I hadn’t said in soup?

He went out as though it were a bit of business he meant to attend to, a battle of a hundred thousand men on which might rest the Republic. In an hour they were all gone, all the men who had crowded in overnight and through breakfast. There was no one left except nearsighted Barend, whom I set to washing up. I sat by the fire and had a bowl of soup myself.

Three years ago, I would not have cared if the Republic fell or flourished. Governments come and go, kings and princes, committees and consuls, up and down on Fortune’s Wheel, with no real difference between. But there was. Here I had liberty, the freedom to be who I truly was with no censure, no fear. I could have my own money in the bank. I could rent rooms without fear that a man could take them away. I did not belong to Jan. I was more than a vessel for wealth, more than an ornament whose education was to the glory of her husband and sons.

Should Michel have been a cooper? Should he have been a sergeant all his life, doomed to the lot of his forefathers because he was born a peasant with no hope of advancement? I knew now that the stiltedness of his letters was because he had ended school when he was twelve. What use would the son of a peasant have of more knowledge? Everything he knew, everything he was, he had won himself out of pure desire.

The same was true of every man here. Their dreams were different—glory or money or the esteem of a girl—but everyone wanted something that would have been denied, and now saw it within their grasp. Dreams are a thing worth fighting for. Worth dying for. A good many of them would die today, their dreams still unfulfilled.

Not Michel.

I bent my head over my soup.

I had never really prayed, never really understood the form and the need to recite elaborate passages or to spend hours on one’s knees; but now I felt my whole self yearning, concentrating in two words:
Not Michel.
Anyone else. Just not Michel.
Let him be right. Let it be true that he leads a charmed life, that he is protected by angels.

I closed my eyes, reaching for that presence I had felt in Lebrun’s rituals. I knew the words, I had been taught them.
Archangel Michel, Guardian of Battles, of the South and of Fire, Patron of warriors and all those who fight for others, watch over your namesake! Guard him with your sword. Keep him safe.

And then I felt better. Not wild with the ecstasy of battle as I had before, but just better. Not buoyed up by divinity, but calmer, as though my heart was now the mirror of my face. I got up to wash my soup bowl.

With a roll like distant thunder, the guns opened up.

The front of the Austrian advance had come out of the woods straight into the field of fire of Moreau’s guns. Caught between their advancing column and the French guns and infantry ahead and the dark forest, the Austrians did the only sensible thing. They charged.

I ran outside and looked, but I could see nothing. There was too much smoke from the batteries, too many men rushing about, and the buildings of the town blocked my view. I glanced up. Even from the second-story windows of the house, I should see nothing. The church stood between it and the road, as well as other houses on the other side. The tower was filled with our men, no doubt, spotters who could send messages to Moreau. The church itself had been made ready as a hospital, the priest and several nuns who normally tended the town’s sick waiting for the wounded of both sides. As yet, the town was safe. We were not in range of the Austrian guns.

From the sound of the batteries crashing, I doubted that many of the Austrian guns were in play yet. They would have to be dragged clear of the woods and unlimbered, and I had seen what a laborious process that could be. To do it under fire in fourteen inches of snow would take quite some time, if they did it at all.

I wanted to go nearer, but I didn’t. If it was an artillery duel, or the rush on guns by infantry against our infantry, there was nothing useful I could do. Here, at least, there was. I went back in the house and started making a sausage soup.

The sun flirted with the clouds, now coming out for a few minutes, then disappearing again.

For a few moments near noon it seemed the battle was over. The Austrians had backed off to the edge of the woods, unable to make any headway, and the field was covered with the dead and dying. They could not advance and get their wounded, while ours fell near our lines and could be pulled to relative safety. It was only a respite. The young Archduke rallied his men again and charged. From the street I could see little, save that the left was fully engaged.

I would have heard if Michel had fallen. Someone would have said. Messengers were coming and going, and the wounded were being brought back to the church. If something had happened, I would know it.

I chopped up onions and fried them in butter, making a base for the soup. I fried the sausages and found plenty of sage, some barley to go in the pot that would plump up and give it all some body as it cooked.

The snow began again.

I went back out in the street. Now there was something new. Men in the uniforms of the 103rd were escorting prisoners, dozens of them, back away from the town and across the river. Tired and bloody, there were scores of them. No, I thought as
I got a better look, hundreds. Hundreds of prisoners were sheltering in the byres across the river, guarded by our men, their paroles given. Hundreds.

It couldn’t be long. And it wasn’t.

The snow changed into sleet. There was a new sound. Far away, just on the edge of hearing, the answering booming of guns. Richepanse was somewhere in their rear, and his guns marked his position.

The Austrian front collapsed. Pullback became retreat became rout. By the end of the afternoon, Ney’s nine thousand men had taken ten thousand prisoners and eighty-seven guns, and the Austrian army had completely disintegrated. Units fled into the forest, while a small number retreated in order. All in all, we had more than twenty thousand prisoners.

Our losses were comparatively small, by military standards—a few thousand, a few hundred of whom were Ney’s. He would count every one.

H
e did not come in until midnight. The sausage soup was gone. I thought that I had seen every hungry man in the division. I’d made onion soup with some bacon in it. When that ran out, we were back to potato soup again.

Michel came in from the dark, ice glittering on his hat from the sleet that still came down. The kitchen was full of men, most of them grabbing something to eat before going back out.

He looked at me and I looked at him. I could see the shadow of that exaltation on his face, the last bit of that passion that transported me beyond myself, that had lifted me on the wings of eagles.

I ladled out a bowl of soup and brought it to him with a wooden spoon.

He took it as though I had handed him the Host. “Isn’t this the same soup?” he asked, his eyes meeting mine over the steaming bowl.