Читать книгу Wolf Hunt - Armand Cabasson - Страница 12

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.’