Ethan Gage Collection # 1 (80 page)

S
O OFF
I
WENT, ON A CONFISCATED
I
TALIAN HORSE (THAT'S A
fancy word for “stolen” that invaders use) and nervous as a virgin that I might stumble into the Austrian army. When you read about campaigns it's all arrows and rectangles on a map, as choreographed as a ballet. In reality, war is a half-blind, sprawling affair, great masses of men halfheartedly groping for each other across yawning countryside while looting anything that can be carried. It's all too easy for the observer to become disoriented. Gunshots echo alarmingly: fired accidentally, or from boredom, or sudden quarrel. Frightened, homesick eighteen-year-olds poke about with thirteen-pound muskets topped by wicked, two-foot bayonets. Passed-over colonels dream of suicidal charges that might restore their reputation. Sergeants stiffen a line in hopes for a sleeve of braid. It's no place for a sensible man.

Within an hour after setting out on June 9, I heard the ominous thunder of combat. Lieutenant General Jean Lannes had crashed into the Austrian advance force at the villages of Casteggio and Montebello, and by day's end I was riding past long columns of Austrian
prisoners, white uniforms spattered with blood and powder, expressions weary and sour. French wounded called insults to the prisoners plodding by. Wrecked wagons, dead horses and cows, and burning barns added to my disquiet. Gangs of pressed peasants were commandeered to tip heaps of battlefield dead into mass graves, while survivors matter-of-factly cleaned the muskets they called “clarinets” with beef marrow and whitened crossbelts with pipe clay. Some soldiers hoped filth might make them less tempting a target, but others thought fastidiousness brought luck. They used a slit piece of wood called a patience to hold their buttons out from their uniform cloth, shining them with mutton fat until they gleamed.

“Bones were cracking in my division like a shower of hail falling on a skylight,” Lannes reported to Napoleon. The battle had produced four thousand casualties between the two sides—a mere dress rehearsal—and it was through this carnage that I reluctantly passed to skulk in the wake of the retreating Austrians into that netherworld between two armies.

What Napoleon didn't realize is that, look as I might, I couldn't really see. The Po Valley is flat, its fields bordered by tall poplar and cypress, and rain that June came down in buckets. Every rivulet was swollen, the landscape as different from Egypt and Syria as sponge from sandpaper. I could have plodded by the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan and not spotted it, should they happen to take this muddy lane instead of that one, down a cut and behind a hedge. So I wandered, asking directions of Italian refugees in sign language, sleeping in hayricks, and squinting for the missing sun. If Renato was lying, I was unlikely to catch him at it.

Instead, he told me himself.

At an abandoned farmhouse near Tortona I spied a red sash draped on a loose shutter, the agreed signal that our spy was waiting with information. Families had scurried out of the path of the armies like mice darting between the hooves of cattle, and rummaging soldiers
had torn off the home's door, eaten the barn's animals, and burned the furniture. What was left, walls and a tile roof, offered shelter from another spring downpour. I was nervous, but the Austrians seemed to be falling back. The enemy had reportedly destroyed the bridge leading to lightly defended Alessandria, and more Austrians were running southwest toward Acqui. Accordingly, Bonaparte had split his forces, with Lapoype's division racing north and Desaix's division south. In the confusion, we spies were surely safe. I tied my horse, checked the load on my longrifle, and warily entered the dark home.

“Renato?” I almost tripped. He was seated on the stone floor, muddy boots outstretched and bottles at his side. I heard the click of his pistol hammer. “It's Gage, from Napoleon.”

“You'll forgive my caution.” A softer tap as the hammer was eased back to rest near the pan. As my eyes adjusted I saw the muzzle lower, but he didn't put his pistol away. He was watchful as a cat.

“My orders are to meet you.”

“How convenient for us both. And your reward, American?”

Why not the truth? “I go back to Paris.”

He saluted me with his pistol muzzle and laughed. “Better than this cold farmhouse, no? You have the loyalty of a mosquito. Some blood, and you're off.”

I seated myself across from him, rifle by my side, only slightly reassured by our candor. “I'm no warrior. I've been riding around in the rain for four days, no good to anyone.”

“Then you need this.” He tossed me a bottle sitting next to him. “I found the trap to the cellar's sparkling wine, just the thing for a party. To a fellow spy! And of course I
could
believe you really
are
a mosquito, irritating and aimless. On the other hand, I've heard you have a reputation for pluck and persistence as well. No, don't deny it, Ethan Gage! So perhaps you're here to fetch my latest missive. Or perhaps to spy on
me.
”

“Why would I spy on you?”

“Because the French don't trust me! Yes, we men of intrigue see things clearly.” He nodded to himself. “I don't blame you for trying to get back to France. Can you imagine being a soldier in regimental line, shoulder to shoulder with a rank of similar idiots just fifty paces distant, everyone blazing away?” He shuddered. “It's amazing what armies get conscripts to do. If the morons survive, it will be the highlight of their lives.”

I took a drink, thinking. His bottle was two-thirds empty, the champagne loosening his tongue. “People better than me say they believe in something, Renato.”

He drank again too, and wiped his mouth. “Believe in Bonaparte? Or that old ass, Melas? What are they fighting about, really? Ask any of those soldiers to explain a war of a hundred years ago and they'll go blank. Yet they'll march to their death for this one. They're all fools, every one. Fools universal, except for me.”

“You serve the French, too, don't you?”

“Alas.” He winked. “The cabbages pay better than the vain Corsican.”

“Napoleon would find that hard to believe, at your price.”

“I'm a double agent, my naïve friend. If you are really that naïve.” He belched, and drank again. “While I report, I spy, and then cross the lines to report and spy again. Why not keep everyone informed? Now Bonaparte is going to get a surprise.”

“What do you mean?” I took a more vigorous swallow and lightly reinserted the cork, eyeing the pistol he kept in his lap.

“The Austrians are not running. They're concentrating. Napoleon has split his forces to catch an army massing against him.”

“But you told him the opposite!”

He shrugged. “If he wanted the truth, he should have paid more than Melas.”

“Men will die!”

“You think they won't die otherwise? Bonaparte believed what he wanted to believe. He remembers the clumsy Austrians of four years ago and gives Melas no credit. That old man is a fox, let me tell you. Fox enough to outbid Bonaparte for me. So I tell the French what they want, and the Austrians what I've told the French. Now the little despot will get his comeuppance.”

He massaged the butt of his pistol, making me feel safe as a goose at Christmas. Why was he telling me this? I rocked my bottle, considering.

“Yes, American, Napoleon is about to get his nose bloodied. When he loses, I'll sell him still more advice—he'll be desperate enough to pay double—and then I'll go back and sell what I sold him to the Austrians for triple. This is how to make money in our business.”

“Our business?”

“Bringing people together.” He laughed.

“You're very candid.”

He shrugged. “Just half-drunk. And confident of your discretion.”

“Because I'm a spy, too?”

Now he looked at me seriously. “Of course not! You're a man like me, American, able to see the value in what you've been told. You'd betray me in an instant just as I've betrayed Bonaparte, and count your thirty pieces of silver as I swing from a tree. No, no, don't deny it…I'd do the same if our positions were reversed. This is the way of the world.” Lazily he raised his pistol. “So you'll go to your grave with a secret! Ah, don't touch your rifle!” He smiled. “You must realize by now that I was sent to find
you
, not Bonaparte. My true employers remember your crimes.”

“True employers?”

He pulled the hammer back. “Do you think the Rite forgets?” He aimed for my heart.

So I shot him with my cork.

He was a little
too
confiding and
too
confident, see. I'd seen reptiles like him before, so I got up some pressure in my bottle of bubbly and popped the cork just as he pulled to fire. The bottle gushed, cork and spray flying in his face, and it was enough of a surprise that the pistol jerked as I rolled. The ball whined past and thudded into the wall behind, raising a little puff of dust. He heaved up, pulling out a second pistol, but I beat him with a sidearm throw of my tomahawk. There was a crack as it struck between chin and teeth, enamel flying, and then I brought up my rifle. We fired at the same time, but it's even harder to aim with a hatchet in your face. He missed, and I didn't.

The bullet slammed him backward and he jerked as he died. I reloaded as I watched, ready to club him, then yanked my tomahawk out of his face and cleaned its steel on his coat. His split lips were fixed in a snarl. It was a nasty business, but after the events of the past two years the extermination of his kind of vermin didn't bother me overmuch.

The Rite? Now I understood my own apprehension. I dragged him through his own blood to the doorway for better light and ripped open his coat and shirt. Burned into his chest was a small tattoo of a pyramid wrapped with a snake. Apophis, the snake god! I shivered. Was this spy in the same confederacy as my old nemesis Silano, another branch of the perfidious Egyptian Rite that had pursued me in Egypt? And now, thanks to this serpent, Napoleon was dividing his forces as the Austrians were massing. Even if I hurried back to Napoleon this instant, it would be too late to pull in Desaix and Lapoype. The French center would be overwhelmed.

Damn Renato!

No, there'd be no quick exit to Paris. I'm not exactly steadfast, but I'm no traitor either, even if it wasn't my country. The only thing to do was to gallop after Desaix, who I faintly knew from Egypt, and get him hurrying back to the battle about to erupt in his rear. It
would be a near-run thing, but if I rushed there might just be time enough!

I glanced down at the lifeless body. As I said, don't boast. And me? Not only was I occasionally useful, I might be developing integrity as well. By the saints, how had Napoleon guessed I might be worth betting on?

The spy stared upward with the surprised gaze of the dead, his body in a widening pool of gore. I buttoned his bloody shirt to hide his mark and wearily mounted my horse to go off and save the battle. And did I see the flicker of someone else, sinking back into a hedgerow, from the corner of my eye?

T
HE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.
I
T DAWNED
bright, the air scrubbed by recent rain, and by afternoon we had a high, hot Italian sun, the kind of weather that allows cavalry to actually charge, cannons to actually deploy, and dry muskets to actually fire. If you want to kill each other, there's nothing like a sunny day.

As Renato had predicted, the Austrians attacked in force at Marengo, long lines of white pushing through fields and cow pens in irresistible numbers. They took terrible casualties as they plunged across the moatlike Fantanone River, but they were drilled to obedience and didn't falter. There were a hundred heroic charges on each side, men dying for a vineyard or goat paddock, the battlefield a fog, and by the time Napoleon realized he'd stumbled into the full Austrian army and was desperately outnumbered, his troops were in reluctant, bloody retreat. Bonaparte had twenty-two thousand men and forty guns against thirty thousand men and one hundred cannons, and the Austrians sprayed grapeshot at every French rally. Hannibal
had allowed himself to be outwitted, and Napoleon's career as leader of France was about to end before it had properly began.

I arrived by midday with the bad news that Renato had been a double agent, and the better news that Desaix was coming. Then I watched the battle, its discipline filling me with appalled wonder. I'd seen war in Egypt and the Holy Land, but nothing like this drilled European slugging. Regimental formations marched shoulder to shoulder like automatons, stopped, and blasted each other in ferocious, unflinching determination. How gloriously gaudy they looked, infantry shakos topped with plumes, flags a beacon in gun smoke! The front rank kneeled, the second fired over their head, and the third passed up freshly loaded muskets, soldiers leaning into opposing volleys as if weathering sleet. Men coughed, yelped, went down, and new ones stepped smartly up like puppets. Dead and wounded sprawled everywhere, the green grass stained with red, but the living gave ground only grudgingly. Entire companies disintegrated rather than yield. Why did they endure? The individual soldier had little idea how his sacrifice was affecting the whole, but was acutely aware how his courage helped the small universe of friends and comrades. Men fought for their standing among men. The ranks would actually ripple as the bullets tore into them, sagging, and then stiffen until a charge with bayonet would push them back another fifty yards. Back and back the French fell, Napoleon finally committing his Consular Guard in hopes of a final, decisive blow. His elite folded under withering musket and cannon fire like paper curled by heat, pride and power ground down in a few hot minutes. An Austrian cavalry charge scooped up four hundred prisoners.

The battle was lost.

And then I saved the day.

I got no official credit in the campaign histories, of course; I was an agent of no official standing. I was simply one of the “couriers”
sent to fetch Desaix. But I got to the little general a full eight hours before any messengers Napoleon sent, and Desaix finally came in time. He reined up near Napoleon late afternoon, his division filing into line, and listened patiently to his commander's glum recitation of the day's reverses.

“The battle is certainly lost,” the divisional commander agreed. “But there is still time to win another.” And then Desaix counterattacked.

After eight hours of brutal fighting, the Austrians thought victory was theirs. The aged Melas, badly bruised after being thrown from his horse two times, had left the mopping-up to his subordinates and retired from the field. Napoleon's columns were wrecked, and his exhausted opponents assumed they'd sleep in San Guiliano.

But Desaix's fresh division hit them like a shock, an Austrian ammunition wagon blew up, and then General François Etienne de Kellermann saw an opening and led four hundred French dragoons into the side of the enemy. It was a brilliant charge of the kind they put into paintings, a rumble like an earthquake, green clods flying from the pounding hooves, sabers bright, plumes waving above the dragoons' towering bearskin hats—an equine avalanche that took the Austrians when they were weariest. The enemy, victorious one minute, were in headlong retreat the next, hundreds captured by the hurtling horsemen. I hadn't seen anything so astounding since Napoleon's own timely arrival at Mount Tabor in the Holy Land, converting a certain Turkish victory into a Turkish rout with a cannon shot.

Bonaparte was less surprised. “The fate of a battle is a single moment,” he remarked.

Brave little Desaix was shot dead at Marengo at the moment of his greatest triumph, and there has been as much romantic nonsense over this tragedy as Napoleon's crossing of the Alps. “Why am I not allowed to weep?” the conqueror was later recorded as saying, suggesting a tenderness I never saw him display toward any man, or any
woman, either. Napoleon weep? To him, life was war and people were soldiers to be used. He was sad, yes—Desaix was as valuable as a good horse—but hardly morose about one more corpse in a square mile of carnage. The truth is that the bullet entered through Desaix's back, either from Austrian fire as he swung around to exhort his men or, just as likely, from an errant bullet from his own side. The number of men accidentally killed or wounded by their excited, confused, and frightened comrades is one of the dirty secrets of war.

We'd learn later that General Kleber, whom I'd soldiered with on the beaches of Alexandria and the battlefield of Mount Tabor—and who Napoleon had left in command in Egypt—was assassinated by a Muslim fanatic at almost the same moment Desaix fell. So go the people who have been chapters in our lives. Generals are spent like coins.

By day's end there were twelve thousand Austrian and French dead or wounded, dead and dying horses, shattered caissons, and dismounted artillery. The Austrians had lost another six thousand prisoners and forty cannon.

“I have just put the crown on your head,” Kellermann remarked, an impolitic truth he wouldn't be forgiven for. Let honor be bestowed; don't grasp for it.

I made no such boast, but could have. At 4:00 p.m. at Marengo, Napoleon's rule was finished; by 7:00 p.m. it had been confirmed. Instead, wisely keeping my mouth shut for once, I wangled my way onto Bonaparte's swift carriage back to Paris after the Austrians agreed to armistice.

On our journey Napoleon confided that his ambition had merely been whetted. “Yes, I have done enough, it's true,” he told me. “In less than two years I have won Cairo, Paris, and Milan, but for all that, were I to die tomorrow I should not at the end of ten centuries occupy half a page of general history!”

Who else counted their history pages a thousand years hence?

Back in Paris, I was put to work helping negotiations with the newly arrived American commissioners. The confidence I'd won from Bonaparte eased the way for the Franco-American treaty. And so I concluded my tale of derring-do at Mortefontaine where we'd gathered to celebrate peace. We toasted, Pauline Bonaparte's eyes sparkling at my tale, and even grim Magnus Bloodhammer looking at me with grudging respect.

I downed another glass and smiled modestly. It's good to be the hero.

“Monsieur Gage,” Pauline invited, “would you like to see my brother's cellar?”