Susan Johnson (33 page)

Korsakov saw that the front of Duras’s shirt was soaked with blood and smiled. “If you were another second slower, I would have taken your arm off,” he crowed, standing legs spread wide, confident in his victory.

“If you were smarter,” Duras calmly said, failure inconsistent with his principles, “you wouldn’t have stopped until you reached Russia.”

“I could just wait and watch you bleed to death. Gentlemen like you,” the Russian sarcastically intoned, “believe in fighting their own battles.”

“Did I mention your wife is pregnant with my child?” Duras softly murmured.

Korsakov’s mouth twitched in a monstrous grimace. Then his teeth clenched shut and with a roar of fury he attacked, his saber raised high. Two hurtling, maniac leaps and his blade swept downward, aimed at Duras’s skull.

Duras spun away to the left to protect his useless arm, and drawing on all his remaining strength, he moved to the attack. Ignoring the white flashes of light exploding in his eyes, he focused on his target, ducking under Korsakov’s blade in a lightning crouch, aiming directly at his belly, putting the entire weight of his body behind his sword arm as he swung.

The sword sliced through to Korsakov’s spine, dropping the huge body like a rock. Eyes wide with shock, Korsakov would have died in agony. But, a man of honor, Duras dropped his saber, shifted his kinjal to his right hand, and administered a swift
coup de grâce
to Korsakov’s heart.

And the spirit died in his enemy’s eyes.

The women openly screamed for Korsakov’s body, wanting to slice him into pieces and feed him to the dogs. But Duras, swaying on his feet, wearily said, “Keep them away. Get everyone dressed. We move out in ten minutes.” And then he sank to his knees and, falling in a languid motion, crumpled to the ground.

“Someone sew up this shoulder,” he rasped, gazing up at the crowd of troopers who’d rushed to his side, “while I rest for five minutes.”

He was awake while his shirt was cut away and Vigée’s most adept trooper rinsed his wounds with brandy, then took even stitches in Duras’s brown flesh. He felt better after two hearty measures of brandy dulled the prick of the needle, and when the wound was bandaged he came to his feet unsteadily but without help.

Vigée personally eased a new shirt up Duras’s arms and over his head and said with a smile as he buttoned the collar
like a doting mama, “I would have killed him, sir, no offense, if you were in danger.”

“I know, Vigée,” Duras said, a faint smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “That’s why I brought you along.”

They left Korsakov and his Cossacks lying dead in their hellish amphitheater, allowing the abducted women first plunder of the booty for their vicious ravishment.

An unseemly pleasure warmed Duras’s spirits as they began their return journey, a shameful joy he realized even as he relished it. In an earlier time, he could have coldbloodedly killed his rival, but civilization required more subtle reasons now. If he had a conscience—not a surety after twenty years of making war—it was a balm perhaps to know that Korsakov deserved to die for a thousand reasons more than his.

He smiled at his rationalization, having considered himself immune to such niceties. Perhaps love had changed him. It had, of course—he knew that as well as he knew the number of weeks it would take to mop up the last Austrians and Russians from Switzerland. And on his swift journey back to Zurich, his pleasure tended to focus on the fact that there was now a finite limit to his separation from Teo.

Lecourbe held on at the Devil’s Bridge for four days, but Suvorov kept flinging his grenadiers straight into the murderous cannonfire. The path was soon choked with the bodies of the dead and dying. The rocks below were also strewn with corpses, but the Russian soldiers continued to clamber over their comrades’ bodies and advance.
²¹

Finally running low on ammunition, the French cannoneers pulled back across the bridge. Again Suvorov threw his men forward and again hundreds perished in a vain attempt to force the French position. Suvorov then sent a picked force of grenadiers and Cossacks down the slopes into the Reuss Valley. This attack group managed to make its
way through the snow and threaten the French flank. Lecourbe realized that he could no longer delay the Russians. Satisfied that he had inflicted severe punishment on Suvorov, he withdrew north to await reinforcements from Duras.

Two days later leading elements of Soult’s division after several days of forced marches joined Lecourbe’s force near the southern end of the Lake of the Four Cantons. Arriving just in time, Soult’s men helped Lecourbe’s tired and battered units beat back Suvorov’s advance guard and scotched all further Russian efforts to march toward Zurich.

At this juncture Suvorov learned of Korsakov’s defeat and he realized Duras would soon turn on him. He decided to lead his command in a desperate march to the northeast in order to reach Germany before the French could trap him in the snow-filled Alpine passes and cut him to ribbons.

It was too late though; he was caught in a trap. Lecourbe’s right flank had closed in on his rear in the Reuss Valley, cutting off his supply column. Duras then brought Mortier’s division south from Zurich through Schwyz to Altdorf and the bulk of Soult’s division to Weesen, blocking both ends of the Linthtal. Leaving Zurich on the evening of the twenty-eighth, Duras hurried by Zug and the Lake of Lucerne to meet Lecourbe near Altdorf late on the twenty-ninth and pushed northeast, hot on Suvorov’s trail.

On September 29, Suvorov posted a rear guard at the mouth of the Klonthal Pass and, mounted on a small sturdy Cossack pony, led the rest of his corps toward Glaris. The French in turn closed in on both ends of the column.

Unable to escape to the northeast, Suvorov decided to march due east into the Grisons. He recalled his rear guard, abandoned his artillery and wounded, and led his tired corps forward. For a week the Russians staggered eastward over incredibly rugged terrain. Plodding knee-deep through snowdrifts, exhausted men dropped out of line never to rise
again. Blizzards obliterated trails, horses and soldiers disappeared into crevices, and the thinning lines, stretching for miles, finally reached Germany.
²²

The Russian corps was almost totally destroyed.

With France’s military and political fortunes at their lowest ebb, Duras had saved the nation.

It was his greatest triumph.

But soon after, fate intervened to change Duras’s hopeful plans and the course of history. On October 9, after having eluded Nelson’s frigates in the Mediterranean, a small ship landed at St. Raphael.

Bonaparte was back in France.

And exactly one month later, the
coup d’état
of 18 Brumaire dissolved the two legislative bodies of the Republic by armed force and concentrated supreme authority in the hands of three Consuls—Bonaparte, Roger-Ducos, and Sieyès. The second and third Consuls didn’t survive long. Within the month, Bonaparte ruled alone.

And Duras was summoned to Paris to be given command of the Army of Italy.

He refused at first; he had personal plans, he needed time to recuperate after ten months of campaigning. But Bonaparte wouldn’t allow him to refuse. All the territory won by the French in Italy had been lost, he said. The army was in a shocking condition, discipline no longer existed, he said. Duras was the only one to whom he could entrust the rehabilitation of the shattered army. “It’s your duty,” he said. “France needs you.”

Conscientious, accountable, Duras knew there was no one else.

With an aching sadness he wrote to Teo, explaining why he couldn’t come to her, why she couldn’t join him yet. He was leaving for Italy in a few days; he’d been given extraordinary disciplinary powers to restore order to the army. Even his old enemy Berthier, now war minister, showed him friendship—an indication of the army’s desperate straits, he
added. He’d write to her soon—although he knew his letters would be months delayed before they reached her. He hadn’t heard yet of their child, he wrote. Please let him know how they were. He spoke of his great love, of missing her a thousand times a day, but even as he penned the words, he wondered if they’d ever meet again.

It was the first time he’d consciously considered their separation as permanent. And he found himself unable to breathe for a moment. He’d always thought soon—next month or certainly the month after, when the armies were quiet in Switzerland. Even when Bonaparte had called him to Paris he’d arranged a dozen excuses for what he’d heard was going to be his new command. He could refuse. He knew that and he’d intended to. But when the full extent of the danger was made known to him, he understood that nothing stood between the Austrians in Italy and the south of France except the army he could pull together by March when the Austrian offensive would begin.

So tomorrow he would leave for his new command. His carriage was packed, his aides en route south, Bonnay already at their temporary headquarters in Nice.

He wished with all his heart he could see her, he went on; he hoped all was well with their child. But beyond those hopeful dreams lay a devastated army that hadn’t been paid in six months, with units that had mutinied and others who were begging for bread from house to house. There were no supply depots, no repair shops, no hospitals, no arms, equipment, or clothing. And to add to his difficulties a typhus epidemic was raging at Nice and fourteen thousand of his men were ill. His predecessor, General Championnet, had died of it.

He sent his love, this man who short months before hadn’t recognized the word. She was in his heart and soul, he wrote; she
was
his heart and soul. Remember me, he said, feeling comfortless and stricken. And at the end, he added,
in case you haven’t heard, Korsakov is dead. He’d done that for her at least, when he’d done so little else.

Desolate and moody, he sat alone in his carriage on the journey south, drinking more than he should, short-tempered and sullen, without conversation for his aides. Even the sight of Nice didn’t cheer him when the carriage rolled over the crest of the hill and the azure bay sparkled in the sunshine.

But Bonnay, aware of the reasons for his ill humor, treated him gently. And by the second day, inundated with work, he had little time to dwell on the past.

It took Duras a month to clear up the worst of the difficulties and on February 10 he moved his headquarters to Genoa.

There was no time in those spring months to think of himself, to look beyond the huge enemy army they faced. They were attacked on three fronts in overwhelming numbers the first of April and by April 24 Genoa was under siege—completely cut off from the world.

Duras’s letter was delivered to Teo four months after it had been written, carried the last stage on foot through the thick forests that surrounded her home.

And when she first held it in her hand, she realized she wasn’t prepared for the impact. To see it on this warm spring day was like going back to that sad, sad night in Basel with his men below waiting for him, with their time so brief.

She felt all the hurt and sadness again.

The wash of memories.

She stared at the letter, at each word on the outside sheet, her name and location, the slant of his letters, the graceful curves and bold slashes, knowing he’d formed each flowing line. She gently ran her fingers over the writing on the smudged, worn paper and the memory of him came
back so strongly, it seemed as though his hand reached out to touch her fingers.

She showed the letter to their young son lying in his cradle beside her chair and he smiled at the happy sound of her voice as she told him of his father and he reached for the scrap of paper with his pudgy pink fingers. “It’s from your papa,” she repeated, remembering Duras standing at the door, turning back to her before he left that night, thanking her for his child. She was deeply grateful he was alive; rumors of Russia’s defeat had never been substantiated by the government. He’d been victorious for France, she’d thought when the first bits of gossip were carried down the trails into her country. And she was pleased for him.

But the smile vanished from her face as she read the letter and her eyes welled with tears. She hadn’t thought it could hurt so horribly, but she was wrong. The pain made her gasp when she thought she’d long ago talked herself into a sensible wisdom about Duras. She’d always told herself he might die and she’d never see him again. She’d prepared herself for that. She’d not prepared herself sufficiently for his desertion.

When she’d read the letter through, she set it on the table and picked up her cooing son and held him so tightly he squirmed and struggled and protested with a loud wail. At the baby’s cry, Tamyr came running in from the kitchen where she’d been giving the messenger tea and bread.

“He made you sad,” she said, irate that Duras had made her darling cry, the letter’s sender common gossip at every post stop from Paris east. And walking across the polished floor strewn with fur carpets, she held her two babies in her arms.

“He’s off fighting again,” Teo whispered, tears streaming down her face.

“He’ll come when he can,” Tamyr soothed.

“I thought he really meant it.” Teo’s voice was filled with hurt.

He did, Tamyr thought, when he said it. But she’d never thought Andre Duras would actually give up his life and travel to the ends of the earth for Teo. “He’ll come, little bird,” she lied. “When the wars are over.”

“They’ll never be over.” He’d left her seven months ago—seven months to forget.

At that moment the baby decided he’d been still too long, and arching his back, he waved his little arms, kicked his legs, and screamed at the top of his lungs.

“Let me take Pasha outside and show him the new calf. He likes the barn,” Tamyr offered. “And you sit down and write to the general. Tumen will take your letter when he leaves.”

Teo reread Duras’s letter, desperately wanting to believe his words of love, but the sad reality of his duty and obligation to France was closer to the truth. His sentiments were probably no more than suave, meaningless phrases, testament that his reputation as a transient lover had been well earned. And she’d been unbearably naïve about him.