The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER SIX

The whole world knows what happened next. It dawned bright, the air scrubbed by recent rain, and by afternoon we had a high, hot Italian sun, the kind of weather that allows cavalry to actually charge, cannons to actually deploy, and dry muskets to actually fire. If you want to kill each other, there’s nothing like a sunny day.

As Renato had predicted, the Austrians attacked in force at Marengo, long lines of white pushing through fields and cow pens in irresistible numbers. They took terrible casualties as they plunged across the moat-like Fantanone River, but they were drilled to obedience and didn’t falter. There were a hundred heroic charges on each side, men dying for a vineyard or goat paddock, the battlefield a fog, and by the time Napoleon realised he’d stumbled into the full Austrian army and was desperately outnumbered, his troops were in reluctant, bloody retreat. Bonaparte had twenty-two thousand men and forty guns against thirty thousand men and one hundred cannons, and the Austrians sprayed grapeshot at every French rally. Hannibal had allowed himself to be outwitted, and Napoleon’s career as leader of France was about to end before it had properly began.

I arrived by midday with the bad news that Renato had been a double agent, and the better news that Desaix was coming. Then I watched the battle, its discipline filling me with appalled wonder. I’d seen war in Egypt and the Holy Land, but nothing like this drilled European slugging. Regimental formations marched shoulder to shoulder like automatons, stopped, and blasted each other in ferocious, unflinching determination. How gloriously gaudy they looked, infantry shakos topped with plumes, flags a beacon in gun smoke! The front rank knelt, the second fired over their head, and the third passed up freshly loaded muskets, soldiers leaning into opposing volleys as if weathering sleet. Men coughed, yelped, went down, and new ones stepped smartly up like puppets. Dead and wounded sprawled everywhere, the green grass stained with red, but the living gave ground only grudgingly. Entire companies disintegrated rather than yield. Why did they endure? The individual soldier had little idea how his sacrifice was affecting the whole, but was acutely aware how his courage helped the small universe of friends and comrades. Men fought for their standing among men. The ranks would actually ripple as the bullets tore into them, sagging, and then stiffen until a charge with bayonet would push them back another fifty yards. Back and back the French fell, Napoleon finally committing his Consular Guard in hopes of a final, decisive blow. His elite folded under withering musket and cannon fire like paper curled by heat, pride and power ground down in a few hot minutes. An Austrian cavalry charge scooped up four hundred prisoners.

The battle was lost.

And then I saved the day.

I got no official credit in the campaign histories, of course; I was an agent of no official standing. I was simply one of the ‘couriers’ sent to fetch Desaix. But I got to the little general a full eight hours before any messengers Napoleon sent, and Desaix finally came in time. He reined up near Napoleon late afternoon, his division filing into line, and listened patiently to his commander’s glum recitation of the day’s reverses.

‘The battle is certainly lost,’ the divisional commander agreed. ‘But there is still time to win another.’ And then Desaix counterattacked.

After eight hours of brutal fighting, the Austrians thought victory was theirs. The aged Melas, badly bruised after being thrown from his horse two times, had left the mopping-up to his subordinates and retired from the field. Napoleon’s columns were wrecked, and his exhausted opponents assumed they’d sleep in San Guiliano.

But Desaix’s fresh division hit them like a shock, an Austrian ammunition wagon blew up, and then General François Etienne de Kellermann saw an opening and led four hundred French dragoons into the side of the enemy. It was a brilliant charge of the kind they put into paintings, a rumble like an earthquake, green clods flying from the pounding hooves, sabres bright, plumes waving above the dragoons’ towering bearskin hats – an equine avalanche that took the Austrians when they were weariest. The enemy, victorious one minute, were in headlong retreat the next, hundreds captured by the hurtling horsemen. I hadn’t seen anything so astounding since Napoleon’s own timely arrival at Mount Tabor in the Holy Land, converting a certain Turkish victory into a Turkish rout with a cannon shot.

Bonaparte was less surprised. ‘The fate of a battle is a single moment,’ he remarked.

Brave little Desaix was shot dead at Marengo at the moment of his greatest triumph, and there has been as much romantic nonsense over this tragedy as Napoleon’s crossing of the Alps. ‘Why am I not allowed to weep?’ the conqueror was later recorded as saying, suggesting a tenderness I never saw him display towards any man, or any woman, either. Napoleon weep? To him, life was war and people were soldiers to be used. He was sad, yes – Desaix was as valuable as a good horse – but hardly morose about one more corpse in a square mile of carnage. The truth is that the bullet entered through Desaix’s back, either from Austrian fire as he swung around to exhort his men or, just as likely, from an errant bullet from his own side. The number of men accidentally killed or wounded by their excited, confused, and frightened comrades is one of the dirty secrets of war.

We’d learn later that General Kleber, whom I’d soldiered with on the beaches of Alexandria and the battlefield of Mount Tabor – and who Napoleon had left in command in Egypt – was assassinated by a Muslim fanatic at almost the same moment Desaix fell. So go the people who have been chapters in our lives. Generals are spent like coins.

By day’s end there were twelve thousand Austrian and French dead or wounded, dead and dying horses, shattered caissons, and dismounted artillery. The Austrians had lost another six thousand prisoners and forty cannon.

‘I have just put the crown on your head,’ Kellermann remarked, an impolitic truth he wouldn’t be forgiven for. Let honour be bestowed; don’t grasp for it.

I made no such boast, but could have. At 4 p.m. at Marengo, Napoleon’s rule was finished; by 7 p.m. it had been confirmed. Instead, wisely keeping my mouth shut for once, I wangled my way onto Bonaparte’s swift carriage back to Paris after the Austrians agreed to armistice.

On our journey Napoleon confided that his ambition had merely been whetted. ‘Yes, I have done enough, it’s true,’ he told me. ‘In less than two years I have won Cairo, Paris, and Milan, but for all that, were I to die tomorrow I should not at the end of ten centuries occupy half a page of general history!’

Who else counted their history pages a thousand years hence?

Back in Paris, I was put to work helping negotiations with the newly arrived American commissioners. The confidence I’d won from Bonaparte eased the way for the Franco-American treaty. And so I concluded my tale of derring-do at Mortefontaine where we’d gathered to celebrate peace. We toasted, Pauline Bonaparte’s eyes sparkling at my tale, and even grim Magnus Bloodhammer looking at me with grudging respect.

I downed another glass and smiled modestly. It’s good to be the hero.

‘Monsieur Gage,’ Pauline invited, ‘would you like to see my brother’s cellar?’