Passion (3 page)

We were not training on the day he came. He caught us out, probably on purpose, and when the first exhausted messenger galloped into the camp warning us that Bonaparte was travelling non-stop and would arrive before noon we were sprawled in our shirt-sleeves drinking coffee and playing dice. The officers were wild with fear and began organising their men as though the English themselves had landed. There was no reception prepared for him, his specially designed bivouac housed a pair of cannon and the cook was blind drunk.

'You.' I was seized by a Captain I did not recognise. 'Do something about the birds. Never mind your uniform, you'll be busy while we're on parade.'

So this was it, no gloiy for me, just a pile of dead birds.

In my rage I filled up the largest fish-ketde I could and poured cold water all over the cook. He didn't stir.

An hour later, when the birds were staggered on the spits to cook in their turn, the Captain came back very agitated and told me that Bonaparte wanted to inspect the kitchens. It was always a feature of his to interest himself in every detail of his army, but this was inconvenient.

'Get that man out of here,' ordered the Captain as he left The cook weighed around 200 lbs, I was scarcely 120.1 tried raising his upper body and dragging him, but I could only manage a helpless shuffle.

If I had been a prophet and this cook the heathen agent of a false god I could have prayed to the Lord and had a host of angels move him. As it was, Domino came to my aid with some talk about Egypt.

I knew about Egypt because Bonaparte had been there. His Egyptian campaign, doomed but brave, where he had remained immune from the plague and the fever and ridden miles in the dust without a drop of water.

'How could he,' the priest had said, 'if he isn't protected by God?'

It was Domino's plan to raise the cook the way the Egyptians raised their obelisks, with a fulcrum, in our case an oar. We levered the oar under his back, then dug a pit at his feet.

'Now,' said Domino. 'All our weight on the end of the oar and he'll go up.'

It was Lazarus being raised from the dead.

We got him standing and I wedged the oar beneath his belt to stop him falling over.

'What do we do now, Domino?'

While we stood on either side of this mound of flesh, the tent flap parted and the Captain strode in, very proper. Colour drained from his face as though someone had pulled a plug in his throat. He opened his mouth and his moustache moved but that was all.

Pushing past him was Bonaparte.

He walked twice round our exhibit and asked who he was.

'The cook, Sir. A little bit drunk, Sir. These men were removing him.'

I was desperate to get to the spit where one of the chickens was already burning, but Domino stepped in front of me and, speaking in a rough language he later told me was Bonaparte's Corsican dialect, he somehow explained what had happened and how we had done our best on the lines of his Egyptian campaign. When Domino had done, Bonaparte came towards me and pinched my ear so that it was swollen for days.

'You see, Captain,' he said, 'this is what makes my army invincible, the ingenuity and determination of even the humblest soldier.' The Captain smiled weakly, then Bonaparte turned to me. 'You'll see great things and you'll eat your dinner off an

Englishman's plate before long. Captain, see to it that this boy waits on me personally. There will be no weak links in my army, I want my attendants to be as reliable as my Generals. Domino, we are riding this afternoon.'

I wrote to my friend the priest straight away. This was more perfect than any ordinary miracle. I had been chosen. I didn't foresee that the cook would become my sworn enemy. By nightfall most of the camp had heard the story and had embroidered it, so that we had buried the cook in a trench, beaten him unconscious, or most bizarre of all, that Domino had worked a spell on him.

Tf only I knew how,' he said. 'We could have saved ourselves the digging.'

The cook, who sobered up with a thumping head and in a worse temper than usual, couldn't step outside without some soldier winking and poking at him. Finally he came to where I sat with my litde Bible and grabbed me close by the collar.

'You think you're safe because Bonaparte wants you. You're safe now, but there are years ahead.'

He pushed me back against the onion sacks and spat in my face. It was a long time before we met again because the Captain had him transferred to the stores outside Boulogne.

'Forget him,' said Domino when we watched him leave on the back of a cart.

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment. During the days that Bonaparte stayed in Boulogne there was a feeling of urgency and privilege. He woke before us and slept long after us, going through every detail of our training and rallying us personally. He stretched his hand towards the Channel and made England sound as though she already belonged to us. To each of us. That was his gift. He became the focus of our lives. The thought of fighting excited us. No one wants to be killed but the hardship, the long hours, the cold, the orders were things we would have endured anyway on the farms or in the towns. We were not free men. He made sense out of dullness.

The ridiculous flat-bottomed barges built in their hundreds took on the certainty ofgalleons. When we putoutto sea, practising for that treacherous twenty-mile crossing, we no longer made jokes about shrimping nets or how these tubs would better serve washerwomen. While he stood on the shore shouting orders we put our faces to the wind and let our hearts go out to him.

The barges were designed to carry sixty men and it was reckoned that 20,000 of us would be lost on the way over or picked off by the English before we landed. Bonaparte thought them good odds, he was used to losing that number in battle. None of us worried about being one of the 20,000. We hadn't joined up to worry.

According to his plan, if the French navy could hold the Channel for just six hours, he could land his army and England would be his. It seemed absurdly easy. Nelson himself couldn't outwit us in six hours. We laughed at the English and most of us had plans for our visit there. I particularly wanted to visit the Tower of London because the priest had told me it was full of orphans; bastards of aristocratic descent whose parents were too ashamed to keep them at home. We're not like that in France, we welcome our children.

Domino told me that we were rumoured to be digging a tunnel ready to pop up like moles in the Kentish fields. 'It took us an hour to dig a foot pit for your friend.'

Other stories concerned a balloon landing, a man-firing cannon and a plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament just as Guy Fawkes had nearly done. The balloon landing was the one the English were taking the most seriously and, to prevent us, they built tall towers along the Cinque Ports, to spot us and to shoot us down.

All folly, but I think if Bonaparte had asked us to strap on wings and fly to St James's Palace we would have set off as confidendy as a child lets loose a kite.

Without him, during nights and days when affairs of state took him back to Paris, our nights and days were different only in the amount of light they let in. For myself, with no one to love, a hedgehog spirit seemed best and I hid my heart in the leaves.

I have a way with priests, so it came as no surprise that along with Domino, my friend should be Patrick, the de-frocked priest with the eagle eye, imported from Ireland.

In 1799, when Napoleon was still vying for power, General Hoche, a schoolboys' hero and onetime lover of Madame Bonaparte, had landed in Ireland and almost succeeded in defeating John Bull outright. During his stay he heard a story about a certain disgraced priest whose right eye was just like yours or mine, but whose left eye could put the best telescope to shame. Indeed he had been forced out of the church for squinting atyoung girls from the bell tower. What priest doesn't? But in Patrick's case, thanks to the miraculous properties of his eye, no bosom was safe. A girl might be undressing two villages away, but if the evening was clear and her shutters were back she might just as well have gone to the priest and lain her underclothes at his feet.

Hoche, a man of the world, was sceptical of old wives' tales, but soon found that the women were wiser than he. Though Patrick at first denied the charge and the men laughed and said women and their fantasies, the women looked at the earth and said they knew when they were being watched. The Bishop had taken them seriously, not because he believed the talk about Patrick's eye, but preferring the smooth shapes of his choirboys he found the affair exceedingly repulsive.

A priest should have better things to do than look at women.

Hoche, caught in this web of hearsay, took Patrick drinking till the man could hardly stand, then half-walked, half-carried him to a hillock that afforded a clear view across the valley for some miles. They sat together and, while Patrick dozed, Hoche pulled out a red flag and waved it for a couple of minutes. Then nudging Patrick awake he commented, as one would, on the splendid evening and the beautiful scenery. Out of courtesy to his host Patrick forced himself to follow the sweep of Hoche's arm, muttering something about the Irish having been blessed with their portion of paradise on earth. Then he propped himself forward, screwed up one eye, and in a voice as hushed and holy as the Bishop's at communion said, 'Would you look at that now?'

'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.

Tf 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 resdessness 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?