The colonel raised his glass as if he were already celebrating the capture of Bombay. Margont did not like this vision of the campaign; it was too militaristic and political for his taste. There was no mention of freedom for the muzhiks, the peasant serfs; nothing about reforming Tsarist society, the dashing of the hopes of their Polish allies … Still, the two visions were not totally incompatible. He took a swig of cognac and tried to make the pleasant burning sensation last as long as possible.
‘I can see that you’re a great reader, Colonel.’
‘I’m finishing a book about Joan of Arc. What a fascinating destiny! And to think that she was even frailer than me. Colonel Pégot tells me that you also are a great reader.’
Margont pointed at one of the books lying on the desk. ‘Yes, but not The Gallic War. You read Julius Caesar whereas I read Cicero.’
‘What’s wrong with that? Isn’t a general worth as much as a philosopher?’
‘The only problem is that Caesar had Cicero executed.’
‘You have a sharp tongue, Captain. Too sharp. But that’s often the case with serving soldiers.’
The colonel took a chessboard out of one of the chests. The wooden pieces were delicately carved: infantrymen armed with halberds for the pawns; caparisoned chargers for the knights; elaborate mitres for the bishops; and crenellated towers for the castles. As for the kings and queens, they looked truly regal. Delarse was delighted to have an opponent.
How odd, thought Margont, that no sooner has he begun to respect someone, than he’s in a hurry to challenge them.
‘Let’s see if you’d make a good general. The guest has the first move.’
After a courageous last stand, the white king capitulated on an almost deserted chessboard. Margont had been unsettled by Delarse’s game plan. The colonel had played a particularly aggressive game, never hesitating to exchange pawns, knights, etc. Margont had not even had time to bring his defensive game into play.
‘If only the Russians could attack instead of running away from one chessboard to the next,’ Delarse declared pensively.
‘Please allow me a return game, Colonel. I hate losing.’
‘I do understand.’
Delarse was already enthusiastically setting up the board again. He was the type of officer who, in answer to the standard question, ‘Which regiment do you command?’ dreamt of one day being able to reply in all modesty, ‘All of them.’
The sentry came bursting in.
‘Colonel, sir, the head of bread supplies and the head of meat supplies wish to speak to you.’
The colonel stood up. ‘I’d forgotten about their visit. The return game will have to wait for another time.’
Margont saluted him and, just as he was leaving, declared: ‘I’m very sorry I was not a more worthy opponent, Colonel.’
At chess, only at chess, he added to himself.
The man was not worrying about the investigation into Maria’s murder. He felt perfectly safe, hidden among the unending column of soldiers. In any case, crimes were so seldom solved … No, what bothered him was what was happening to him. As he walked on amongst the infantrymen and the dust, one thing became obvious to him: his fascination with death was not something recent.
As a lieutenant he had often gone into hospitals to view the dying. He attempted to capture that fleeting moment between life and death, the moment when the body becomes immobilised, when breathing itself ceases. He tried to commit to memory the change of expression on those faces at that fateful instant. But even a few years before that, death and suffering had attracted him. He attended autopsies, giving as an excuse his intention to study medicine. At the time he had put it down to a morbid curiosity. He had even read up on different types of coma. He wondered if there was one deep enough to present all the outward signs of death. During the dissections he enjoyed imagining that the man whose muscles had been separated and whose gaping abdomen was being prodded by the doctor’s instrument was still alive and that, although his coma prevented him from moving, his conscious mind enabled him to have a clear idea of what was happening.
In fact his fascination with death seemed to go even further back than that. As a child he had loved graveyards. He’d spent whole days in them. He knew where each tomb was, the names and dates of the dead … He was curious to know what corpses looked like after a day, a week, two weeks … He enjoyed watching apples on which he had drawn features rot away. They were his skulls whose skin withered as the flesh became damp and soft. He watched them shrivel and gradually disintegrate.
Even as a child … he had revelled in the death throes of ducks wounded by his father when out hunting: their fruitless attempts to get off the ground and fly again; their long silky necks twisting in a dance of death; the sharp crack of their vertebrae when he broke their necks to put them out of their misery.
The fact was that he had always been attracted by death, pain and blood, and he wondered why it had taken him so long to realise this obvious fact. It was yet one more question demanding an answer. His life seemed to have become a series of riddles.
CHAPTER 12
THE day of 22 July was particularly gruelling. IV Corps had covered fifteen miles and it was the third successive day that they had kept up such a pace. Margont spent the afternoon attempting to get hold of a horse. In vain. Even the mounted chasseurs had been ordered to give up their mounts to the gunners to enable them to make up full teams. So that evening he went to Colonel Barguelot’s on foot.
Twenty or so officers – captains and majors as well as a lieutenant-colonel – were sitting on the grass around a long white tablecloth that had been placed on the ground and laid with extraordinarily luxurious tableware: plates of Dutch china, crystal wine glasses, decanters, silver cutlery … Servants in powdered wigs were bustling about filling glasses and carving a roasted pig coated with a creamy sauce.
Margont put his shako and sword down on a table cluttered with headgear and bladed weapons of all shapes and sizes. He noticed a silver scabbard on which had been engraved in elaborate lettering, ‘Colonel Barguelot. Semper heroicus’. ‘Ever the hero.’
The colonel spotted him and, pointing at a place not far from his right, exclaimed: ‘Here’s Captain Margont! I’m always pleased to welcome a man of merit. Let’s put an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur between a major and a lieutenant-colonel.’
The higher one’s rank, the closer one was placed to the head of the table. As Margont was taking his place, he could sense he was being stared at by all the majors who had had to move down one place. Barguelot introduced his officers to him.
‘Captain Margont received his decoration in Spain,’ he explained. ‘Ah, Spain, what an ill-fated country. Believe it or not, I almost got torn to shreds in Madrid during the revolt of 2 May 1808, their wretched “dos de mayo”. The whole city went mad that day. I was calmly walking the streets with my friend Lieutenant Carré … Carrier … Damn, what was his name? Anyway, in a word, we were meeting up with two Madrid girls in a park when we noticed a sorry-looking dragoon. The poor chap had lost his helmet and his horse, and was breathless from running, sabre in hand. By the time I’d realised it was not a hallucination, a crowd had gathered at the end of the street and had started rushing towards us. Men and women, old people and children, some dressed in rags, others well dressed … One of the ringleaders was brandishing a rope with a noose at the end of it. My friend and I started to run. We fled down one narrow street after another until we emerged in a square, to be confronted by a horrific scene: the naked and emasculated bodies of two Mamelukes who had been hanged upside down on the façade of a house that some lunatics were setting fire to. The rabble was still on our tail. They caught up with the dragoon, who was out of breath, and tore him to pieces. When we reached the park where we had our rendezvous, we hid behind a hedge. But, believe it or not, the two traitors with whom we should have been billing and cooing pointed us out with their fans. ‘Por aquí! Por aquí!’ The bitches! Determined to die fighting, we turned to face our attackers. I ran my sword through three of the insurgents and my friend … Carsier, Carrier … did the same but, alas, he was pitchforked. I held out against this horde of fanatics for a few more minutes. Then, thank God, the cavalry of the Guard suddenly arrived in the park and cleared the area.’