‘At what, that falcon?’
‘Never mind the falcon, she’s as strong and brown as a cow.’ Hoche could see nothing, but he knew what Patrick could see. He had paid a tart to undress in a field some fifteen miles away, and placed his men at regular intervals with their red flags.
When he left for France he took Patrick with him.
At Boulogne, Patrick was usually to be found, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a purpose-built pillar. From there he could look out across the Channel and report on the whereabouts of Nelson’s blockading fleet and warn our practising troops of any English threat. French boats that strayed too far out of the harbour radius were likely to be picked off with a sharp broadside if the English were in the mood for patrolling. In order to alert us, Patrick had been given an Alpine horn as tall as a man. On foggy nights this melancholy sound resounded as far as the Dover cliffs, fuelling the rumour that Bonaparte had hired the Devil himself as a look-out.
How did he feel about working for the French?
He preferred it to working for the English.
Without Bonaparte to care for I spent much of my time with Patrick on the pillar. The top of it was about twenty feet by fifteen, so there was room to play cards. Sometimes Domino came up for a boxing match. His unusual height was no disadvantage to him and, although Patrick had fists like cannonballs, he never once landed a blow on Domino, whose tactic was to jump about until his opponent started to tire. Judging his moment, Domino hit once and once only, not with his fists but with both feet, hurling himself sideways or backwards or pushing off from a lightning handstand. These were playful matches, but I’ve seen him fell an ox simply by leaping at its forehead.
‘If you were my size, Henri, you’d learn to look after yourself, you wouldn’t rely on the good nature of others.’
Looking out from the pillar I let Patrick describe to me the activity on deck beneath the English sails. He could see the Admirals in their white leggings and the sailors running up and down the rigging, altering the sail to make the most of the wind. There were plenty of floggings. Patrick said he saw a man’s back lifted off in one clean piece. They dipped him in the sea to save him from turning septic and left him on deck staring at the sun. Patrick said he could see the weevils in the bread.
Don’t believe that one.
July 20th, 1804. Too early for dawn but not night either.
There’s a restlessness in the trees, out at sea, in the camp. The birds and we are sleeping fitfully, wanting to be asleep but tense with the idea of awakening. In maybe half an hour, that familiar cold grey light. Then the sun. Then the seagulls crying out over the water. I get up at this time most days. I walk down to the port to watch the ships tethered like dogs.
I wait for the sun to slash the water.
The last nineteen days have been millpond days. We have dried our clothes on the burning stones not pegged them up to the wind, but today my shirt-sleeves are whipping round my arms and the ships are listing badly.
We are on parade today. Bonaparte arrives in a couple of hours to watch us put out to sea. He wants to launch 25,000 men in fifteen minutes.
He will.
This sudden weather is unexpected. If it worsens it will be impossible to risk the Channel.
Patrick says the Channel is full of mermaids. He says it’s the mermaids lonely for a man that pull so many of us down.
Watching the white crests slapping against the sides of the ships, I wonder if this mischief storm is their doing?
Optimistically, it may pass.
Noon. The rain is running off our noses down our jackets into our boots. To talk to the next man I have to cup my hands around my mouth. The wind has already loosened scores of barges, forcing men out chest deep into the impossible waters, making a nonsense of our best knots. The officers say we can’t risk a practice today. Bonaparte, with his coat pulled round his head, says we can. We will.
July 20th, 1804. Two thousand men were drowned today.
In gales so strong that Patrick as look-out had to be tied to barrels of apples, we discovered that our barges are children’s toys after all. Bonaparte stood on the dockside and told his officers that no storm could defeat us.
‘Why, if the heavens fell down we would hold them up on the points of our lances.’
Perhaps. But there’s no will and no weapon that can hold back the sea.
I lay next to Patrick, flat and strapped, hardly seeing at all for the spray, but every gap the wind left showed me another gap where a boat had been.
The mermaids won’t be lonely any more.
We should have turned on him, should have laughed in his face, should have shook the dead-men-seaweed-hair in his face.
But his face is always pleading with us to prove him right.
At night when the storm had dropped and we were left in sodden tents with steaming bowls of coffee, none of us spoke out.
No one said, Let’s leave him, let’s hate him. We held our bowls in both hands and drank our coffee with the brandy ration he’d sent specially to every man.
I had to serve him that night and his smile pushed away the madness of arms and legs that pushed in at my ears and mouth.
I was covered in dead men.
In the morning, 2,000 new recruits marched into Boulogne.
Do you ever think of your childhood?
I think of it when I smell porridge. Sometimes after I’ve been by the docks I walk into town and use my nose tracking fresh bread and bacon. Always, passing a particular house, that sits like the others in a sort of row, and is the same as them, I smell the slow smell of oats. Sweet but with an edge of salt. Thick like a blanket. I don’t know who lives in the house, who is responsible, but I imagine the yellow fire and the black pot. At home we used a copper pot that I polished, loving to polish anything that would keep a shine. My mother made porridge, leaving the oats overnight by the old fire. Then in the morning when her bellows work had sent the sparks shooting up the chimney, she burned the oats brown at the sides, so that the sides were like brown paper lining the pot and the inside slopped white over the edge.
We trod on a flag floor but in the winter she put down hay and the hay and the oats made us smell like a manger.
Most of my friends ate hot bread in the mornings.
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
But I’m not a child any more and often the Kingdom of Heaven eludes me too. Now, words and ideas will always slip themselves in between me and the feeling. Even our birthright feeling, which is to be happy.
This morning I smell the oats and I see a little boy watching his reflection in a copper pot he’s polished. His father comes in and laughs and offers him his shaving mirror instead. But in the shaving mirror the boy can only see one face. In the pot he can see all the distortions of his face. He sees many possible faces and so he sees what he might become.
The recruits have arrived, most without moustaches, all with apples in their cheeks. Fresh country produce like me. Their faces are open and eager. They’re being fussed over, given uniforms and duties to replace the yell for the milk pail and the insistent pigs. The officers shake hands with them; a grown-up thing to do.
No one mentions yesterday’s parade. We’re dry, the tents are drying, the soaked barges are upturned in the dock. The sea is innocent and Patrick on his pillar is shaving quietly. The recruits are being divided into regiments; friends are separated on principle. This is a new start. These boys are men.
What souvenirs they have brought from home will soon be lost or eaten.
Odd, the difference that a few months makes. When I came here I was just like them, still am i
n many ways, but my companions are no longer the shy boys with cannon-fire in their eyes. They are rougher, tougher. Naturally you say, that’s what army life is about.
It’s about something else too, something hard to talk about.
When we came here, we came from our mothers and our sweethearts. We were still used to our mothers with their work-hard arms that could clout the strongest of us and leave our ears ringing. And we courted our sweethearts in the country way. Slow, with the fields that ripen at harvest. Fierce, with the sows that rut the earth. Here, without women, with only our imaginations and a handful of whores, we can’t remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy. Bible words again, but I am thinking of my father who shaded his eyes on those sunburnt evenings and learned to take his time with my mother. I am thinking of my mother with her noisy heart and of all the women waiting in the fields for the men who drowned yesterday and all the mothers’ sons who have taken their place.
We never think of them here. We think of their bodies and now and then we talk about home but we don’t think of them as they are; the most solid, the best loved, the well known.
They go on. Whatever we do or undo, they go on.
There was a man in our village who liked to think of himself as an inventor. He spent a lot of time with pulleys and bits of rope and offcuts of wood making devices that could raise a cow or laying pipes to bring the river water right into the house. He was a man with light in his voice and an easy way with his neighbours. Used to disappointment, he could always assuage the disappointment in others. And in a village subject to the rain and sun there are many disappointments.
All the while that he invented and re-invented and cheered us up, his wife, who never spoke except to say, ‘Dinner’s ready’, worked in the fields and kept house and, because the man liked his bed, she was soon bringing up six children too.
Once, he went to town for a few months to try and make his fortune and when he came back with no fortune and without their savings, she was sitting quietly in a clean house mending clean clothes and the fields were planted for another year.
You can tell I liked this man, and I’d be a fool to say he didn’t work, that we didn’t need him and his optimistic ways. But when she died, suddenly, at noon, the light went out of his voice and his pipes filled with mud and he could hardly harvest his land let alone bring up six children.
She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god.
Like God, she was neglected.
New recruits cry when they come here and they think about their mothers and their sweethearts and they think about going home. They remember what it is about home that holds their hearts; not sentiment or show but faces they love. Most of these recruits aren’t seventeen and they’re asked to do in a few weeks what vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather up their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death.
They don’t know how but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their bodies and all they have instead is lust and rage.
It was after the disaster at sea that I started to keep a diary. I started so that I wouldn’t forget. So that in later life when I was prone to sit by the fire and look back, I’d have something clear and sure to set against my memory tricks. I told Domino; he said, ‘The way you see it now is no more real than the way you’ll see it then.’
I couldn’t agree with him. I knew how old men blurred and lied making the past always the best because it was gone. Hadn’t Bonaparte said so himself?
‘Look at you,’ said Domino, ‘a young man brought up by a priest and a pious mother. A young man who can’t pick up a musket to shoot a rabbit. What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we’re still alive, and say you’ve got the truth?’
‘I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.’
He shrugged and left me. He never talked about the future and only occasionally, when drunk, would he talk about his marvellous past. A past filled with sequined women and double-tailed horses and a father who made his living being fired from a cannon. He came from somewhere in eastern Europe and his skin was the colour of old olives. We only knew he had wandered into France by mistake, years ago, and saved the lady Joséphine from the hooves of a runaway horse. She was plain Madame Beauharnais then, recently out of the slimy prison of Carmes and recently widowed. Her husband had been executed in the Terror; she had only escaped because Robespierre was murdered on the morning she was to follow him. Domino called her a lady of good sense and claimed that in her penniless days she had challenged officers to play her at billiards. If she lost, they could stay to breakfast. If she won, they were to pay one of her more pressing bills.
She never lost.
Years later, she had recommended Domino to her husband eager for a groom he could keep and they had found him eating fire in some sideshow. His loyalties to Bonaparte were mixed, but he loved both Joséphine and the horses.
He told me about the fortune tellers he’d known and how crowds came every week to have their future opened or their past revealed. ‘But I tell you, Henri, that every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There’s only now.’
I ignored him and kept working on my little book and in August when the sun turned the grass yellow, Bonaparte announced his Coronation that coming December.
I was given immediate leave. He told me he’d want me with him after that. Told me we were going to do great things. Told me he liked a smiling face with his dinner. It’s always been the way with me; either everyone ignores me, or they take me into their confidence. At first I thought it was just priests because priests are more intense than ordinary people. It’s not just priests, it must be something about the way I look.
When I started working for Napoleon directly I thought he spoke in aphorisms, he never said a sentence like you or I would, it was put like a great thought. I wrote them all down and only later realised how bizarre most of them were. They were lines from his memorable deliveries and I should admit that I wept when I heard him speak. Even when I hated him, he could still make me cry. And not through fear. He was great. Greatness like his is hard to be sensible about.
It took me a week to get home, riding where I could, walking the rest. News of the Coronation was spreading and I saw in the smiles of the people I travelled with how welcome it was. None of us thought that only fifteen years ago we had fought to do away with Kings for ever. That we had sworn never to fight again except in self-defence. Now we wanted a ruler and we wanted him to rule the world. We are not an unusual people.
In my soldier’s uniform I was treated with kindness, fed and cared for, given the pick of the harvest. In return I told stories about the camp at Boulogne and how we could see the English quaking in their boots on the opposite shore. I embroidered and invented and even lied. Why not? It made them happy. I didn’t talk about the men who have married mermaids. All the farm lads wanted to join up straight away, but I advised them to wait until after the Coronation.
‘When your Emperor needs you, he’ll call. Until then, work for France at home.’
Naturally, this pleased the women.
I had been away six months. When the cart I was riding in dropped me a mile or so from home I felt like turning back. I was afraid. Afraid that things would be different, that I wouldn’t be welcome. The traveller always wants home to be just as it was. The traveller expects to change, to return with a bushy beard or a new baby or tales of a miraculous life where the streams are full of gold and the weather is gentle. I was full of such stories, but I wanted to know in advance that my audience was seated. Skirting the obvious track, I crept up on my village like a bandit. I had already decided what they should be doing. That my mother would be just visible in the potato field, that my father would be in the cow
shed. I was going to run down the hill and then we’d have a party. They didn’t know to expect me. No message could have reached them in a week.
I looked. They were both in the fields. My mother with her hands on her hips, head pushed back, watching the clouds gather. She was expecting rain. She was making her plans in accordance with the rain. Beside her, my father stood still, holding a sack in each hand. When I was small, I’d seen my father with two sacks like that, but they had been full of blind moles, their whiskers still rough with dirt. They were dead. We trapped them because they ruined the fields but I didn’t know that then, I only knew that my father had killed them. It was my mother who pulled me away rigid with cold from my night vigil. In the morning the sacks were gone. I’ve killed them myself since, but only by looking the other way.
Mother. Father. I love you.
We stayed up late so many nights drinking Claude’s rough cognac and sitting till the fire was the colour of fading roses. My mother talked about her past with gaiety, she seemed to believe that with a ruler on the throne much would be restored. She even talked about writing to her parents. She knew they’d be celebrating the return of a monarch. I was surprised, I thought she’d always supported the Bourbons. Becoming an Emperor didn’t make this man she’d hated into a man she could love surely?