Evil in a Mask (6 page)

Hans Hoffman was a nonentity. He was one of the many thousands of teenagers from the Rhineland whom Napoleon had forced the minor sovereigns, who had perforce become his allies, to conscript and send to aid him in his campaign. Secretly Hoffman loathed the French and, given the opportunity, would have deserted; but lacked the courage.

Corporal Vitu was a very different type. The son of a lawyer who had been prominent in the early days of the Revolution, he was a well-educated man in his late twenties; married and with one son. Even so, he had not been able to escape the call-up by which, now ahead of schedule, the Emperor was compelled to recruit fresh levies to make good the losses of
his armies. Vitu had a thin, bitter mouth and a long nose. He was fluent, knowledgeable and aggressive; and Roger soon sized him up as a born trouble-maker.

When they talked over their situation, Vitu said, ‘I'll take a chance and attempt to escape when the time is ripe. But I'll not return to the Army.'

‘You will,' Fournier declared hotly. ‘It's your duty, and I'll see to it that you do it.'

‘Duty be damned,' the Corporal declared. ‘If it were to defend France, I'd fight again, as you did at Jemappes and Wattignies. But here, in this outlandish place, why the hell should I?'

‘Them Prussians would be across the Rhine again if we hadn't given them a licking at Jena; and the Russians with them. Only a fool would rather wait till he had to fight battles in his own country, instead of in the enemy's.'

‘Nonsense! Neither of them would have attacked us. What had they to gain by going to war? Nothing! Not since '99 has France been in the least danger. We have been the victims of Bonaparte's crazy ambitions ever since. He's dragged us from our homes to march, starve and fight all over Europe, solely for his own glory, and I've had enough of it.'

Roger knew that the Corporal was expressing the views of a great part of the rank and file of the Army; but, as a senior officer, he could not let such remarks pass, so he said, ‘That's quite enough, Corporal. Prussia and Russia are both monarchies. They would impose a King on us again if they could. If we are to retain our liberties, they have got to be defeated.'

‘Liberties!' sneered Vitu. ‘You must have been asleep for the past ten years, Colonel. The days of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” are as far behind us as the Dark Ages. Every law the Convention made has been annulled or altered, and the new Constitution of the Year XII, that Bonaparte gave us soon after he crowned himself in Notre Dame, has turned us into a race of slaves. As for Equality, if the men who won it for us in '93 could see things as they are now, they'd turn in their graves. The people's representative has made himself an Emperor and his brothers Kings. His hangers-on are
grand dignitaries, Princes, Dukes and the like. They doll themselves up in gold braid, jewels and feathers, eat off the fat of the land, and get themselves fortunes by looting every country they invade; while we poor devils are paid only a few francs a day and driven to risk our lives so that they can further enrich themselves.'

‘You've got something there,' the Sergeant acknowledged. ‘Nevertheless, I'm for the Emperor body and soul. He knows what's best for France, and never lets his men down.'

‘All the same,' young Hoffman put in, ‘I don't think it's fair that he should force men from other countries to fight his battles. Where I come from we had no quarrel with anyone; neither had the Dutch, the Italians and the Bavarians, yet there are thousands of us here who have been marching and fighting for years, when we might have been working happily in our farms or vineyards, with a good wife and bringing up a family.'

‘Yes, that's hard luck,' Roger agreed. ‘But remember, France has liberated you from the old feudal system by which all but your nobility were virtually chattels of your hereditary Princes. France has paid dearly for that in the loss, for over fifteen years, of a great part of her young manpower. To make good these losses, the Emperor has no alternative but to draw upon his allies.'

‘That was fair enough in the old days,' Vitu argued. ‘Then we needed every man we could get to fight in Italy and on the Moselle. But that is so no longer. What has the Rhineland or the Netherlands to gain by helping to conquer Poland? And what a campaign it's been! Staggering about in the mud, our uniforms worn to tatters, losing our way in blizzards. It's all very well for you, Colonel, and the rest of the gilded staff. You billet yourselves in the best houses in the towns, keep for yourselves the pick of every convoy of food and wine that comes up from the rear, attend splendid balls, then play chase me round the bed-posts with all the prettiest women. But meantime we have to act like fiends to the wretched peasants to get enough food to stop our bellies from rumbling and
sleep in barns so cold that it is not unusual to find that by morning some of our comrades have frozen to death.'

Roger knew all this to be true, but he also knew that his best hope of escape lay in having his three companions willingly accept his leadership; so he tactfully agreed that the Army had recently had a terribly hard time, although he maintained that was no fault of the Emperor's, but due to the exceptionally bleak and sparsely-populated country over which they were fighting.

During the days that followed, the unlovely Baroness Freda came regularly to dress their wounds, and Kutzie twice a day with a big bowl of stew, in which there were pieces of meat that, from its sweetish flavour, Roger guessed to be horseflesh. As the intense cold would have prevented the dead animals from putrefying, he had little doubt that the peasants for miles round, and the survivors of whichever army had kept the field, were gorging themselves upon it.

On their third day in the loft, it was found that young Hoffman's thigh wound had become gangrenous. No surgeon being available, nothing could be done about it. For some hours he babbled deliriously in German and, on the fourth day, died.

For most of the time while their wounds were healing, they talked of the campaigns in which they had fought, and the Marshals under whom they had served. All of them admired Lannes, Ney and Augereau, who invariably led their troops into battle in full uniform, their chests blazing with stars and decorations.

Lannes was unquestionably the finest assault leader of the Army. He had been wounded a dozen times, yet, given a fortress to capture, waving his sword he was still the first man up a scaling ladder on to the enemy ramparts.

The red-headed Ney was not only the most capable tactician, but had no ambition other than to win glory and, to achieve it, he led every major attack in person.

Augereau, the tall, unscrupulous
gamin
raised from the gutter by the Revolution, and a duellist whom no man any longer dared challenge, was a law unto himself, and led a corps that
adored him. He and Lannes were still dyed-in-the-wood Revolutionists. Their language was foul, they took scant pains to conceal their disapproval of Bonaparte's having made himself as Emperor; yet, as leaders of troops, they were too valuable for him to dispense with.

About the tall Gascon, Bernadotte, who refused to comply with the new fashion and still wore his dark hair long, opinion was divided. He was the only senior General who had refused to support Bonaparte at the time of the
coup d'état
. And, from the days of the Italian campaign they had heartily disliked each other. In the present campaign he had several times been tardy in bringing his corps into action; but he was unquestionably a very able soldier, and he was greatly beloved by both his officers and men for the care he took of them.

For Davoust neither Fournier nor Vitu had a good word to say. He was a cold, hard man, and the harshest disciplinarian in the Army. His one pleasure, when opportunity offered, was waltzing; for the rest of the time he employed himself hanging suspected spies and dealing out brutal punishments to anyone, particularly senior officers, who had in any way contravened his regulations.

For a short period Roger had suffered at Davoust's hands; so had personal cause to dislike him. Even so, he respected and admired this most unpopular of the Marshals. However competent and fanatically brave the others might be, Roger had come to the conclusion that the only advantage they had over the Austrian and Prussian Generals they had defeated was their youth and vigour. Davoust had proved an exception. Not only was he utterly loyal to the Emperor, but he had made an exhaustive study of Napoleon's new methods of waging war, absorbed and applied them.

The Emperor, ever jealous of his subordinates' triumphs, had, in his despatch to Paris, written off Auerstädt as merely a flanking operation during the battle of Jena. But Roger knew the facts. Although completely isolated, Davoust, by brilliant handling of his corps, had defeated one half of the Prussian Army. And he had since further demonstrated his great abilities as an administrator and a soldier.

About the flamboyant Murat, Fournier and Vitu agreed. The uniforms that the recently created Grand Duke of Berg designed for himself might be
outré
in the extreme but, smothered in gold braid and with tall plumes waving from his head, he never hesitated to lead his hordes of horsemen against either massed infantry or concentrated batteries of cannon. He had been wounded on several occasions, but never seriously enough not to press home charges that had led many times to Napoleon's victories.

Roger knew him to be an empty-headed, conceited fool, whose only asset was fearless courage; and that politically he would have been a nobody had he not married Napoleon's clever and intensely ambitious sister, Caroline.

Vitu's idol was Masséna. Perhaps the Corporal was a little influenced by the fact that the Marshal also came from the South of France; for Masséna was a native of Nice. But there was no contesting the fact that he was one of the greatest soldiers of the Napoleonic age. In '99, while Bonaparte was still absent in Egypt, Masséna had held the bastion of Switzerland against great odds, defeated France's enemies and saved her from invasion. Then, in 1800, with Soult and Sourier as his lieutenants, besieged in Genoa, with a half-starved garrison, a hostile population, and harassed by a British fleet, he had hung on for many weeks; thus detaining outside the city a strong Austrian army and enabling Napoleon to win the decisive victory of Marengo.

Masséna was still in Italy. The Emperor had made his own stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais, Viceroy. But it was the Marshal who dominated the north, demanding of the cities great sums to maintain his troops, a big percentage of which went into his own pockets. Meanwhile, by charm and lavish presents of stolen jewels, he persuaded a constant succession of lovely Italian women to share his bed.

In central Italy, Marshal Macdonald dominated what had previously been the States of the Church. Down in the South, the foolish King Ferdinand and his forever intriguing Queen Caroline had most rashly welcomed to Naples an Anglo-Russian force of twenty thousand men, thereby breaking the
convention by which the French had agreed to withdraw their troops.

Napoleon, himself the most perfidious of men, had screamed with rage at, for once, being treated with his own medicine, and had despatched the able Gouvien St. Cyr to drive the Bourbons from their throne; which he had promptly done, forcing them to take refuge in Sicily.

By that time Bonaparte had decided that to wear a crown himself was not enough to impress the ancient dynasties of the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs, or even the more recent dynasties of Hohenzollerns and the Anglo-German Guelphs. So he pushed his elder, clever, kindly, unambitious lawyer brother, Joseph, into becoming King of Naples.

How envious the French troops campaigning in frozen Poland, with its ice-covered lakes, poverty-stricken villages and awful blizzards, felt of their comrades quaffing the wine and enjoying the sunshine of Italy can well be imagined; but, wherever the Emperor's determination to become the Master of Europe caused him to go, they had no option but to accompany him. Roger and his two companions might bemoan their fate, but it had been forced upon them. At least they were lucky not to be dead and, as their wounds gradually healed, their hopes rose that they would find a way to outwit and escape from the flaxen-haired giant, Baron Znamensk, who held them prisoner.

The Baroness Freda knew little about surgery, but had enough knowledge to keep their wounds clean and bind up the Sergeant's shattered knee-cap and Roger's ankle in rough splints.

In consequence, after a fortnight they were able to hobble about. The base of Vitu's big toe had healed over, although it still pained him; and all three of them had an awkward limp. But Znamensk thought them sufficiently recovered to be made use of, so they were set to work sawing logs on the ground floor of the barn.

Kutzie stood by and, whenever their efforts flagged, derived obvious pleasure from using his knout to give one or other of them a swift cut across the shoulders. Fournier and
Vitu cursed and reviled him. Roger accepted his chastisement in silence. He was not vindictive by nature; but, as he sweated over the saw, he promised himself that, sooner or later, he would provide Kutzie with a most unpleasant death.

But how to bring that about, and the death of the Baron and his other henchmen was no small problem. Handicapped as they were by their wounds, to get clear away from the castle would be next to impossible as long as Znamensk and his men were able to set off in pursuit.

Night and day Roger wrestled with the question until he came to the conclusion that there was no hope at all of himself and his two lame companions overcoming the half-dozen Germans; but, that, if the Baron could be trapped, there was a fair chance that the others, being no more than brainless oafs, might be cozened or bullied into submission.

At last, early in March, an idea for setting a trap came to him. The saws they used for cutting the trunks of medium-sized pine and larch trees into logs could, in the hands of a fully able man, have become dangerous weapons; but not when wielded by partially-recovered invalids with dragging feet so, when work was over for the day, the saws were hung up on pegs in the wall on the ground floor of the barn.