Baltic Mission (2 page)

The staff-officer edged his horse forward to catch a glimpse of the battlefield before more snow flurries obscured it. To his left a battery of 60 cannon kept up a ruthless fire into the re-forming battalions of Soult. Beyond, the orange flashes of a further 120 guns pounded Eylau; but in the far distance heavy columns of French infantry could be seen advancing to attack. For a while the snow curtained everything, even deadening the concussion of the guns, but when it cleared again the French attack seemed to have failed.

Nearer at hand a greater drama was unfolding. About a mile away from the ridge a huge column of Russian infantry, grey-coated and with feet muffled in sacking, hurled themselves forward against the houses of Eylau. Six thousand peasant soldiers followed their officers with the obedience of small children and fought their way into the town like furies. Unseen by the distant Cossacks, Napoleon was driven from his post in the church belfry and only escaped by the
self-sacrifice of his bodyguard. But the Cossacks observed his angry response to this insolent bravery; they shook up their horses' heads and grasped their lances, in case they were called upon to react to the great counter-attack that burst out of the French position.

The snow cleared completely, torn aside by the biting wind as swiftly as it had come, and this lull was accompanied by a sudden brightening of the sky as Napoleon's brother-in-law, Marshal Murat, led forward more than ten thousand horsemen to burst through the Russian line. Wheeling in its rear and repeatedly breaking the centre, they sabred the indomitable gunners and cut up the devoted Russian infantry that had so recently threatened their Emperor. Behind Murat's cuirassiers and dragoons, Marshal Bessières followed with the Horse Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, big men on huge black horses who trampled the remains of Bennigsen's frontal assault beneath their hooves. But the tide of cavalry had reached its limit. It was unsupported and ebbed inexorably back towards Eylau. The guns of the Russian centre were remanned and began to pour shot into the enemy as they retreated. Then another curtain of snow closed over the mass of dying and mutilated men, so that their cries and groans were unheard.

The staff-officer finished the flask of vodka and tucked it into the breast of his coat. He nodded companionably to a subaltern who rode up from the Cossack flank.

‘Well, young Repin, this is a bloody business, but a sweet revenge for Austerlitz, eh?'

‘Indeed, sir, it is.'

‘Count Kalitkin should rejoin us soon . . . ah, here he comes, if I'm not mistaken . . .' Kalitkin rode up and reined in, his eyes gleaming with triumph, his horse steaming.

‘Well, my friend, I have done it again! I have found your Ney for you.
Voilà!'
Kalitkin pointed behind him where some of Lasalle's hussars were moving out to form a screen behind which the head of a marching column could just be made out through the snow. ‘And also I have found our valiant ally, or, at least, what remains of him . . .'

‘General Lestocq's Prussians?' asked the staff-officer sharply.

‘Exactly, my dear wiseacre. Lestocq and his Prussians, and we must move to the right and cover their march across our rear.' Kalitkin suddenly drew his sabre with a rasp and pointed it across the shallow valley. ‘There! See, those French pigs are ahead of us! They will try and harry the Prussian flank . . .'

‘I told you they were the best light cavalry in the Grand Army.'

‘You go and tell Bennigsen that the squadrons of Piotr Kalitkin have saved Mother Russia again . . . and if he gives me a division I will win the whole damned war . . .' He stood in his stirrups and bawled an order. This time the whole mass of the Cossacks moved forward and the staff-officer wheeled his horse aside to let them pass. For a moment he remained alone on the ridge to watch. The trot changed to a canter and then to a gallop; the lance points were lowered, the pennons flickering like fire as the dark wave of horsemen swept over the frozen marshes bordering the river, and crashed into the ranks of the French hussars. The enemy swung to meet them, their breath steaming below their fierce moustaches and their hair braided into dreadlocks beneath their rakish shakoes. The staff-officer pulled his horse round and spurred it towards the headquarters of the Russian army at Anklappen.

Night fell early, the short winter afternoon expiring under heavy clouds and the smoke of battle. The French attack failed, largely due to the timely arrival of General Lestocq's Prussians and the late appearance of Ney: Napoleon had received the worst drubbing of his career, but Lasalle's hussars had had their revenge, and Kalitkin's Cossacks had been pushed back beyond the village of Schlöditten, to bivouac and lick their wounds. It was past midnight when Kalitkin had posted his vedettes, rolled himself in his cloak and lain down in the snow. A few moments later he was roused as one of his men brought in a strange officer, wearing an unfamiliar uniform and raging furiously in a barbarous French at the Cossack trooper whose sabre point gleamed just below the prisoner's chin.

Kalitkin sprang to his feet. ‘Mother of God! What have you there, Khudoznik? A Frenchman?' Kalitkin addressed the prisoner in French: ‘Are you a French officer?'

‘God damn it, no, sir!' the man exclaimed. ‘Tell this ruffian to let me go! I am Colonel Wilson, a British Commissioner attached to General Bennigsen's headquarters. I was reconnoitring when this stinking louse picked me up. Who the devil are you?'

Kalitkin ordered the Cossack Khudoznik to return to his post and introduced himself. ‘I am Count Piotr Kalitkin commanding two squadrons of the Hetman's Don Cossacks. So, you are a spy of the British are you?' Kalitkin grinned and made room round the fire.

‘You Russians are a damnably suspicious lot,' said the mollified Wilson, rubbing his hands and extending them to the warmth of the fire.

‘But you have come to see we don't waste your precious English gold, eh?'

‘To liaise with the headquarters of the army, Count, not to spy.'

‘It is the same thing. Where are your English soldiers, Colonel, eh? Your gold is useful but it would have been better if some English soldiers could have helped us today, would it not? There would be fewer widows in Russia tomorrow.'

‘My dear Count,' replied Wilson with a note of tired exasperation creeping into his voice, ‘I am plagued night and day with pleas for which I can offer no satisfaction until the ice in the Baltic thaws and His Majesty's ships can enter that sea. Until then we shall have to rely upon Russian valour.'

‘So, Colonel,' said Kalitkin, still grinning in the firelight, ‘you are a courtier
and
a spy. I congratulate you!'

‘I hope', said Wilson with a heavy sarcasm, ‘that I am merely a diplomat.'

A stir on the outskirts of the firelit circle among the half-sleeping, half-freezing men caused both Kalitkin and the Englishman to turn.

‘And', exclaimed Kalitkin triumphantly, ‘here is another spy. Welcome back, my friend. I expected you to spend the night in a whore's bed at headquarters. Are there no women with General Bennigsen?'

‘Only pretty boys dressed as aides,' said the staff-officer emerging from the night, ‘in accordance with the German fashion. Besides, I came back to bring you . . . 
this
!' The staff-officer produced a bottle from the breast of his cloak with a magician's flourish.

‘Ah! Vodka! Next to a woman, the best consolation.'

‘One can share it with more facility, certainly . . . I see you have company.'

As Kalitkin laughed, snatching the bottle and wrenching the cork from its neck, the staff-officer's expression of cynical levity vanished at the sight of the British uniform.

‘Yes, my friend,' explained Kalitkin after wiping his mouth, ‘a spy like you. He is an English officer; a
commissioner
no less.'

In the firelight the staff-officer's mouth set rigid, his eyes suddenly watchful. ‘I am Colonel Wilson,' said the Englishman again, waving aside the vodka that Kalitkin companionably offered him after liberally helping himself, ‘His Britannic Majesty's representative at the headquarters of His Imperial Majesty's army.'

‘Colonel Wilson . . .' the staff-officer muttered under his breath, his eyes probing the face of the English officer.

‘Count Kalitkin has introduced himself,' said Wilson, referring obliquely to Kalitkin's failure to introduce the staff-officer. ‘Whom have I the honour of addressing?'

The staff-officer hesitated, looked down and with a muddy boot kicked back a piece of wood that had been ejected from the heart of the fire by a small explosion of resin deep in its core.

‘Tell him, my friend,' said Kalitkin, swigging again at the vodka. ‘Tell him who you are.'

The staff-officer's obvious reticence combined with the scrutiny to which he had been subject to awaken suspicions in Wilson's mind. Kalitkin's flippant allusions to espionage had been initially attributed to the subconscious reaction to excessive centralisation that Wilson had encountered in his dealings with the Russians. Watching the staff-officer's face he was aware of a quickening interest in this man.

‘Come, sir,' he prompted, ‘you have the advantage of me.'

‘I am Captain Ostroff, Colonel Wilson, aide-de-camp to Prince Vorontzoff and presently attached to Count Kalitkin's squadrons of the Hetman's Don Cossacks.'

But Wilson paid little attention to the details of the staff-officer's status. What interested him far more was the way in which this Ostroffhad pronounced Wilson's own name. For the first time since his secondment to the Russian army Wilson had heard his surname without the heavy, misplaced accent upon its second syllable. In a flash of intuition he realised he was talking to a fellow Englishman.

‘Your servant, Captain Ostroff,' he said, bowing a little from the waist and holding the other's eyes in a steady gaze. But Ostroff's expression did not alter, not even when a sharp crack at their feet ejected another sliver of wood from the bivouac fire.

‘How interesting,' went on Wilson with the smooth urbanity of the perfect diplomat, ‘I have not had much opportunity to study the Russian tongue of your
muzhiks
, but if I am not mistaken, your name is the Russian word for . . .'

‘
Island
,' snapped Ostroff suddenly and it was not the abruptness of the interruption that surprised Wilson but the fact that where he had been about to employ the French noun, Ostroff had chosen to head him off with a sideways glance at Kalitkin and the use of a definition in plain English.

As the two men strolled with an affected nonchalance away from the recumbent Kalitkin and his bivouac, the Count lounged back on
his sheepskin. ‘Spies,' he muttered to himself, ‘spies, the pair of them . . .' and he stared up at the stars shining through the rents in the clouds, aware that their motion had become suddenly irregular.

His Britannic Majesty's 36-gun, 18-pounder frigate
Antigone
, commanded by Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater, lay at anchor off the Swedish fortress of Varberg wrapped in a dense and clammy fog. Her decks were dark with the moisture of it; damp had condensed on the dull black barrels of her cannon, giving them an unnatural sheen, and her rigging was festooned with millions upon millions of tiny droplets like the autumn dew upon spiders' webs. Wraiths of fog streamed slowly across her deck, robbing the scarlet coats of her marine sentries of their brilliance and dulling all sounds.

The duty midshipman leant against the quarterdeck rail with one foot upon the slide of a carronade and contemplated the dark oily water and the ice-floes that bumped and scraped alongside. Fifty yards out from the ship's side he could see nothing and the view from the deck was too familiar to engage his slightest interest.

Not that the slowly swirling ice-floes were worthy of study in themselves, for they were fast melting and puny by comparison with those he had seen in the Greenland Sea, but they were hypnotic and drew all active thought from the brain of the idle young man. They set him to dreaming aimlessly and endeavouring to pass the time as pleasantly as possible without the tiresome need to exert himself. For the past forty minutes Midshipman Lord Walmsley had been the senior officer upon the upper deck and in that capacity he saw no reason to exert himself. The sentries were at their posts, the duty watch fussing about routine tasks, and he was perfectly content to leave them to the supervision of the petty officers and their mates. Besides, Walmsley had been cheated of the prospect of an early repast and the trivial sense of grievance only reinforced his inertia. In the absence of the captain ashore, the first lieutenant, Mr Samuel Rogers, had repaired to the gunroom for a meal he felt he was more entitled to than the midshipman.

Lord Walmsley did not seriously dispute the justice of the
contention, for to do so would have involved far more effort than he was capable of. So he let the silly sense of grievance paralyse him and dreamed of a distant milkmaid whose willing concupiscence had long since initiated him to the irresponsible joys of a privileged manhood.