Wolf Hunt. Armand Cabasson

tin.

      ‘That bird is singing offkey,’ declared Lefine.

      Margont was not listening to him. ‘If the man we’re after is responsible for this fire, he’s particularly methodical. He’s applied scorched-earth tactics to ensure that he’s left as few clues as possible behind him. The only “evidence” is Franz, Wilhelm, the mutilations he inflicted on them … and you.’

      Lefine froze, listening intently.

      ‘There’s another bird singing off key. Listen, will you?’

      Margont made out a sort of far-off trilling, which seemed to be answered by another much closer one. It sounded like a bird, but which one exactly? Lefine threw himself onto his horse in panic.

      ‘The Austrians!’

      The whistling of a blackbird rang out, coming from yet a third direction. The French bounded into their saddles. A detonation sounded. A hussar’s horse bolted, wheeling round on itself and whinnying. Pagin made to help it, but a bullet hit his own animal in the chest. The horse collapsed, its bit striking the stony ground harshly. Lefine fired his pistol into the thicket where the shot had come from. The leaves shook, perhaps because of the breeze, or possibly because a body had fallen behind them. Other trillings resounded, longer and much louder. Lefine rode his horse over to Pagin, who hopped on behind him. New explosions crackled. They were coming from all sides, mingling with the echoes of previous reports, so that the French felt as though they were being deluged with bullets.

      ‘They’re surrounding us!’ cried Lefine, huddling down with Pagin gripping his waist.

      They made for the forest, hammering their horses’ flanks with their heels, though obstacles in their way slowed them down. Margont thought he saw someone and fired his pistol into a clump of ferns to his left. In response a shot cracked to his right and buried itself in the trunk of a pine tree, spraying his cheeks with fragments of bark. Although the horses were aided by the slight slope, Margont, too impatient, tried to make his mare go faster. The frightened, maddened horse entangled its legs in dead branches and to regain balance placed its shoe on a carpet of dried needles. The shoe slipped and the beast’s head plunged downwards, almost causing Margont to lose his stirrups and tumble forwards. Three more gunshots rang out, but more for form’s sake than to kill. The French were too far away to be hit.

      Relmyer saluted Lefine as he would a colonel.

      ‘If you hadn’t picked up their damned signals, they would have caught us hook, line and sinker; none of us would have escaped. How would you like to join the hussars?’

      ‘I’ve had my fill of that sort of thing today, Lieutenant.’

      The horses continued down the slope at a hurried trot, constantly slowed down by the thickets and trees. Margont could make out the Austrians shouting something.

      ‘Are they calling for reinforcements?’

      Relmyer smiled. ‘No, they’re saying: Welcome to Austria.’

       CHAPTER 7

      LEFINE was furious. He was pacing back and forth under the roof of branches rigged up by Saber and Piquebois, near their tent.

      ‘We were almost killed by the partisans!’ It was the tenth time he had said that, as if he couldn’t get over it. ‘This inquiry – it’s his battle, not ours!’ he exclaimed for the nth time.

      Margont was leaning against a tree trunk. This was the miracle of being an officer: the Isle of Lobau was being transformed at speed into a fortification but here he was enjoying free time! Lefine, meanwhile, was covered in sweat.

      ‘What on earth did you want to get involved for? Is it because of that Austrian woman? That Luise Mitter-something … Why go hankering after a beautiful girl with problems when you could easily find two without? Oh, it’s not only for her, is it? It’s those magnificent revolutionary ideas of yours again, that drive you to take crazy risks!’

      He took off his shirt to change it. His right shoulder bore the scar of a sabre blow, a souvenir of the Spanish campaign courtesy of an English light dragoon, and his stomach was scored with a gash from a bayonet attack badly parried. His collarbone had been shattered by a Prussian musket butt. The bone had knitted together strangely so that a bony ridge bulged under the skin as if trying to break free from his body. A pattern of burns carpeted his back, caused by fiery splinters from the explosion of a munitions box. The whole saga of the Empire could be read on the scarred skin of its soldiers.

      ‘Being a Good Samaritan is not a quality, it’s a defect.’ He tugged on the new shirt so angrily he almost tore it.

      Margont was cooling himself using a book as a fan. Assuredly, literature had many uses.

      ‘It’s not that. It’s not just that.’

      ‘Yes, it is, it’s always that! “We have to take the principles of the Revolution to the peoples of other countries!” “Down with monarchy, long live Liberty!” You’re always going on about it. You’re a product of the Revolution, but it’s not relevant any more. We were all so naïve! Yes, I believed in it all too: liberty and equality for all, peace, progress, a constitution guaranteeing the same rights for everyone … It’s utopia, and you’re still fighting for it! This army is full of soldiers who want to liberate the world. That suits the purposes of the Emperor who—’

      Lefine stopped short mid-sentence, while Margont hastened to assure him that no one had heard. Criticising the Emperor was the quickest way of being taken for a subversive spy, a royalist, an agent of the Vendéens or a Jacobin plotter … For the past few years freedom of expression in France had become more and more restricted.

      Lefine went on more quietly: ‘The Emperor abuses the army! Why is half our army in Spain along with the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English, all butchering each other? We only had to set foot in Spain for us to be mired there up to our necks. When will there finally be peace? When we’re all dead? And now there’s you embarking on this search! All because it arouses your pity and you still believe you have to help those around you! After four or five more years’ war, when everyone else will have been killed or will have abandoned all hope, you will be the last republican humanist.’