The Army of the Night Read online



  The Army Of The Night

  Paul Collis

  Copyright: Paul Collis 2012

  This book is a work of fiction.

  All references to actual events and locales, and descriptions of persons living or dead, are purely fictitious and fanciful.

  Otherwise, all names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

  THE ARMY OF THE NIGHT Copyright © 2012 by Paul Collis.

  Registered with the Writers Guild of America, West: 2012.

  All rights reserved.

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  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This short story is mentioned in my novel The Scottish Movie, where it is referred to as a story written by Harry Greenville. Harry and his friend, Alan Decastro, use it as the basis of a movie treatment, which they candidly describe as unfilmable. Even so, they retain the faintest hope that, one day, it might be picked up by Ridley Scott, or Steven Spielberg, or…

  Hey. You never know.

  With thanks to historians, and mapmakers, and keepers of notes.

  The Army of The Night

  1

  Near Toulouse, France. February 1813.

  When he heard the insistent tap—tap—tap on the thick glass of his bedroom window it was a surprise, but not unexpected. More rhythmic than rain and sharper than a knuckle, the sound’s metallic source had cut through his slumber but not, he hoped, his wife’s. He looked over to her and saw that she was still asleep. Thankful, he turned towards the shielded candle sitting on a finely carved chest of drawers. It showed him that the clock read five minutes after three; too late for socialites, too early for farmers. The time of thieves and miscreants.

  He slipped out from underneath the warm layers of fine linen and soft furs, covered his muscled body with a robe, then reached behind the nearest of the window’s thick velvet curtains. Behind it was a hook, from which he removed a loaded pistol. After parting the drapes he pushed the window open with the muzzle of the gun and aimed it directly at the head of the man sitting on a horse below. The cloaked rider responded by raising his sword; pinned to its deadly tip was a small, soft leather case.

  Without a word, the householder took the case and closed the window. The horseman immediately spurred his mount across the courtyard and back towards the road, and the chill darkness of the night enveloped him once more.

  2

  In 1804, when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France, the kings of other nations flinched. The fearless general and visionary statesman was now their equal, and he had made it known that his ambitions involved their borders.

  Yet, for all the coronation’s pageantry and ceremony, and despite his belief that he personified the ideals of a re-born France, the new Emperor’s feet were firmly on the ground. He understood that he was merely mortal; a thirty-five-year-old Corsican career soldier, descended from the exiled remnants of an obscure strand of Italian nobility. Born with little money and slender influence, he had prepared himself for political office as he prepared himself for battle — with information. And now he would prepare himself for rule in the same way. His ministers were charged with informing him of every facet of the state’s endeavors, every word of news from home and abroad. He surrounded himself with the nation’s most intelligent and knowledgeable men. Many of them knew some of the state’s deepest and darkest secrets. But he — and he alone — had access to them all.

  Sequestered deep within the royal vaults and saved from the revolution’s book-burners were chronicles containing all there was to know about the shadowy side of La France. Generations of loyal archivists had hidden manuscripts that dated from the reign of Charlemagne the Great. Some, deceptively bound to resemble tedious tax reckonings or court reports, depicted the true accounts of its royal families, their illicit affairs, their bastard offspring, their treasons, frauds and conspiracies. A pile of dusty volumes described the depravity of cardinals and the ineptitude of statesmen. Several reams of papers catalogued the bribery of bankers and the duplicity of diplomats. Other volumes registered the discoveries of honest men that had been suppressed or stolen by their betters. In short, all of France’s national confidences, good or ill, were there for the reading.

  Bonaparte immersed himself in these records at every opportunity, finding them an invaluable source of education and amusement. But his main focus was not the past; it was the future. His ambition was to unify Europe’s nations under his rule — or, as other people saw it, to conquer them. When he had assembled France’s military forces into a machine strong enough for the task he reminded his General Staff that information, not mere numerical supremacy, was the key to their success. They all assured him that there was no better-informed nation on the globe, but he had his doubts; his diplomats and clerks seldom strayed from their regular sources, and his generals in the field relied solely on the use of scouts and the hearsay of the lower ranks. He decided to reinforce their intelligence with his own, and expanded his private offices to include a secret branch, answerable only to him. Their combined results were positive for the first few years of combat, but, in 1812, things changed. That was the year the Emperor decided to teach Czar Alexander a lesson.

  At the beginning of the long march east everything indicated a victory for Le Grand Armée; 600,000 troops led with dash and vigor. Who or what could resist it? Facing such an onslaught the outnumbered Russian generals dithered, and retreated, and dithered again, until their soldiers, tired of walking backwards and keeping their powder dry, rebelled against the lack of action. Their officers finally made a decision to make a stand at Borodino — where they were summarily defeated.

  The Emperor set up camp in Moscow and waited for the Czar to surrender. The days became weeks, the weeks months, but the white flag was never raised. Fearing the Russians planned to trap him in the city, he eventually ordered his army’s march back to France, only to discover it was too late in the year. The Czar’s peasants had burned their crops and farms, so the retreating soldiers found neither food nor shelter. Battered by bitter winter winds, they starved. Breath froze in the throats of skeletal bugle boys. The tears of weeping musketeers soon turned to icy blindfolds, and those that had the strength to march were feeble. Cossacks picked off the stragglers, and many of those were grateful for the bullet. By the time the Grande Armée returned to France 400,000 warriors had perished. The remnants, some of them sustained solely by the flesh of their comrades, were utterly exhausted and barely capable of thought.

  Rumors of the defeat spread through Paris like the plague, and when Napoleon heard that certain senators were considering a coup he raced back to his capital. He played up the victory at Borodino, passionately denied the severity of the losses, and set to rallying support for rebuilding the army and attacking the Germans. The emperor succeeded, but early in 1813 his attention was diverted south, where his commanders were on the brink of defeat by the British and Portuguese armies under the Marquess of Wellington. The French divisions that remained in Spain were about to be pushed back against the Pyrenees, and he knew that there were few choices of escape routes over those mountains. He was concerned that his generals had considered only the obvious possibilities but, when he asked them to explore alternatives, they r
eplied that there were none; if there was a crevice between the peaks wider than a pack mule they could be trusted to have knowledge of it.

  Wary of his generals’ complacency he found it hard to believe that no other pass existed. So he called upon the services of an agent from his Secret Bureau, a family friend of Corsican descent; Alaine Bellanger.

  The agent was three years younger than the Emperor. He had served briefly with Napoleon as a youthful lieutenant and had distinguished himself not only by his exploits on the battlefield but also by his choice of wife. As a captain about to be promoted to commandant, he proposed to an attractive and intelligent woman with a comfortable dowry. She accepted him on one condition; that he hang up his sword for good. He reminded her he was as good with a sword as the man who taught him. She countered by picking up his pistol. Children, she told him, needed fathers, not stepfathers.

  A month later she was signing her letters as Madam Catherine Bellanger. She managed her own investments, and a subsequent speculation in a shipment of furs, sourced from the upper reaches of the Mississippi and sold in Bordeaux, quadrupled their fortunes. This allowed him the luxury of spending his days in their house on the outskirts of Toulouse, near the Garonne, immersing himself in books, dabbling in scientific experiments and attending the theater and concerts. They soon became the parents of a bright son and a joyful daughter, and whenever his children showed signs of curiosity he took great satisfaction in teaching them about the world around them. In most other respects he found his life amusing but not fulfilling. Thus, when Napoleon became Emperor, Bellanger wrote to him and asked to be considered for any service that might serve his country as long as it did not involve a battlefield or a dreary council chamber. Napoleon took him at his word, and added his name to the clandestine resources of his Secret Bureau.

  It was then that the newly selected agent made a point of telling family and friends that he made his living by buying and selling certificates of stock at the recently established exchange — the Bourse — and that this often required making the long journey to the capital. Nine years later, none of his circle was surprised if he suddenly failed to appear at a function or a party. ‘Called away on business’ was an excuse they had become used to hearing.

  And so, if one of them had seen the dew-soaked courier astride a steaming, lathered horse pull up outside Bellanger’s house at three o’clock on a pitch-dark, February morning, tap against the bedroom window with his sword and deliver a mail pouch, they would not have thought it mysterious; when dealing with the Bourse, everyone knew that time was money.