‘It’s too late for that,’ Napoleon replied coldly. ‘You had your chance, and you proved that you are no soldier. Take him away.’
Linois made a light keening noise and bit his lip as two soldiers pulled him to his feet and half led, half dragged him across the piazza to join the other prisoners. Napoleon turned away, sickened by the sight, and caught Bourrienne’s eye. His secretary stared at him, then shook his head faintly.
‘Are you questioning my judgement?’ Napoleon asked softly.
‘I would not presume to do that, sir,’ Bourrienne replied.
‘Good. Perhaps if you were a general you would understand.’
‘Then I thank God I am not a general, sir.’
Napoleon stared at him briefly before he responded. ‘Yes. Thank God. For the sake of France if no other reason.’
The men of the firing squad stood to attention facing the town hall. Opposite them Captain Linois leaned against the wall, his head covered with a piece of sacking and his hands bound behind his back. His body trembled and Napoleon hoped that he would spare himself the indignity of falling over before the sentence was carried out. He turned away from the man to address the three companies of grenadiers assembled to bear witness to the execution.
‘Through his cowardice this man has endangered the lives of every one of his comrades in the Army of Italy. His death will act as a signal to every French soldier that betrayal of one’s comrades is beyond contempt and will never go unpunished! Tell every soldier you meet what you witness here today so there will be no doubt about the fate reserved for those who fail France, fail their comrades and fail in their own duty as a soldier! Colonel Lannes, carry out the sentence.’
He moved to one side as Lannes drew his sword, raised it overhead, and barked out the commands.
‘Firing party . . . present arms! Take aim!’
There was a final sob from Linois, a horrible animal noise from deep in his chest, and then Lannes swept his sword down.
‘Fire!’
The volley thundered out, echoing off the tall walls of the town hall as the musket balls ripped into Captain Linois, flattening him against the wall before he tumbled to the side, twitched once, and was still. Colonel Lannes marched stiffly across to his commander.
‘Sentence has been carried out.What are your orders, sir?’
Napoleon drew a breath to help strengthen his resolve. His work in Pavia was not yet complete. One final task remained to be carried out. He gestured across the Piazza to the prisoners. ‘Hang them. All of them.’
There was only the faintest look of surprise in Lannes’s face before he nodded solemnly and turned away to carry out his orders.
The grenadiers were in a subdued mood as they marched out of Pavia late in the afternoon. Napoleon did not want to linger in the devastated town overnight and resolved to let his men rest for the night only when they were some distance from the scene. Several wagons had been seized to carry the wounded back to the army, as well as the bodies of their fallen comrades. Napoleon did not wish to have them buried where the townspeople could desecrate their graves. They would be given full honours by the army once the column reached Brescia.
Behind them Pavia lay under its shroud of smoke, still and quiet as a ghost town. Napoleon drew rein and stared at the scene, feeling cold and tired. For a moment he yearned for a different life, or at least a period of respite away from the monstrous deeds that he had been compelled to carry out. Then he turned his horse away from the town and trotted forward to take up his place at the head of the column.
Chapter 19
As soon as he reached the army headquarters in the bishop’s mansion in Brescia Napoleon dictated a letter for circulation to every town and city lying between his army and the border with France. There were to be no more uprisings. If any French soldiers were killed then the nearest town or village would be burned to the ground and any men caught under arms would be shot. Bourrienne took down his words in silence, and once his commander had finished he rose from his seat and left the room with a curt bow. Napoleon propped his head on his hands and stared at the far wall as the punitive attack on Pavia came back to him.The execution of civilians was not a new refinement, merely an inevitable feature of war. Bourrienne’s distaste for the measures that Napoleon had felt forced to carry out in Pavia was misplaced, Napoleon reassured himself.
He raised his head and pulled over a fresh sheet of paper. He opened an inkwell, dipped his pen and wrote the opening words of a new letter, words that he had written a hundred times before, but which still gave him a small thrill when he saw them in his own hand on the page.
He still marvelled that she had consented to be his wife, and the familiar longing to lie in her arms once again fired the passion in his veins. He readied his pen, wanting to burst into the flow of impassioned words that poured from him in a torrent whenever he wrote to Josephine. But tonight the words did not come. His mind was too weary and too occupied with the demands made upon him as commander of the Army of Italy. Napoleon sat for a moment, pen poised, wanting to unburden himself of all the concerns that weighed down on him. The Directory’s criminal neglect of his soldiers; uniforms in tatters, boots worn to shreds and bellies frequently empty, and the men were still owed several months’ pay. Then there was the need to close with the Austrian army and destroy them, but Napoleon was constantly frustrated by the enemy’s refusal to stand and fight. And Napoleon still had to deal with the prospect of dividing his army with Kellermann. If Barras and the other Directors stood by their decision then Napoleon would be removed from the public’s gaze. The Army of Italy would certainly lose the initiative in the war against Austria as the two generals struggled to co-ordinate their separate, weaker forces against an enemy who already outnumbered them even before a wave of fresh troops was added to its strength. He desperately wanted to confide all this to Josephine, and yet he dared not. All of his soldier’s troubles would surely seem arcane and dull to someone who moved in the most exclusive circles in Paris. He feared she would find him boring.The only words which he felt confident of pleasing her with were words of love.
Josephine.
She was truly the first woman he had loved. To be sure, there had been women before her.Those who had satisfied his physical yearnings, or had been objects for his youthful veneration when, like all young men, he had desperately needed to practise his love, and be loved in turn by someone whose affection was not bound to him by family ties.With Josephine he had learned to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh without shame or embarrassment. So it had been easy to surrender to the flood of feelings: passion, loneliness, hope, anticipation and sometimes even jealousy when he received a rare letter from her in which she expressed even the slightest affection for another man. And from such feelings the words formed readily, written down as fast as his pen could manage, raw and intense.
But tonight he felt too tired, too drained, and the usual phrases of an ardent lover seemed stale and insufficient. It was no longer enough to commit his emotions to paper. He needed Josephine here and now. Dipping his pen in the inkwell, Napoleon wrote a terse note, asking why he had not heard from her for several days. If she truly loved him, he wrote, then she would do all in her power to be at his side without delay, and he expected that of her. He signed it with a formal expression of affection and then folded the paper and sealed it, tossing it on to the other correspondence to be sent to Paris in the morning.
Napoleon rose early the next day to read the latest intelligence reports. The Austrians had established a new line of defence stretching southwards from Lake Garda to the fortress town of Mantua. As ever, the key to driving the Austrians from Italy was taking Mantua, but to do that the fortress had to be cut off from the rest of the Austrian army. At the morning conference Napoleon outlined his plan.
‘We must take Mantua before the end of the year. Once we have Mantua, Austria is finished this side of the Alps,’ he began. ‘Accordingly, we will have to force a crossing of the Mincio river and drive Beaulieu north, away from Mantua, which will be besieged by Serurier.’
Berthier raised his eyebrows.
‘Do you object to my plan, Berthier?’ Napoleon asked curtly.
