On His Majesty's Service

XIX

DIE BEIDEN FREUNDE

Later

The heat of the day was at its greatest, and the labourers of the field, if they had not fled towards Constantinople, had sought the shade. Hervey and Fairbrother saw no one in their ride to Iskender except the outlying pickets at the start and at the end. They rode at a walk and leisurely trot to spare the horses, so that what might have been covered at a gallop in half an hour took two.

General Budberg had planted his pennant atop the caravanserai on the old Justinian road, where Muffling and Moltke also lodged. Tents filled every quarter, and there were more in the pasture beyond, the bounty of a happy interception of Turk baggage bound for the capital. Budberg – von Budberg – was from an old Westphalian family; his father, Count Andrei, had been Tsar Alexander’s foreign minister but had resigned when Alexander signed the treaty of Tilsit (for none had mistrusted Bonaparte as much as he), and had died, vindicated but in despair, a week before Borodino. The general spoke German with the accent of Riga, the family’s seat, but clear enough, and he greeted Hervey with the warmth of three months’ shared campaigning.

Hervey explained that he was come to meet Moltke at the request of Princess Lieven (he saw no reason to conceal the fact; indeed, he believed it would speed the meeting), but that he understood General Muffling was also here, ‘And I would wish to pay compliments since I had the honour to attend on him at Waterloo.’

This latter was by no means untrue, but Hervey used the word – bedienen (attend) – at the extreme of its meaning to lay claim to an audience.

Budberg frowned and shrugged: he was entirely sympathetic, he explained, but Muffling was heavily dosed with laudanum, having contracted a fever in Constantinople which had very materially worsened since arriving here; ‘But Moltke you may see at your leisure, Colonel. His quarters are on the other side of the courtyard.’

Hervey thanked him.

And then after a pause, in which his look turned quizzical, the general asked, ‘What is this Moltke’s business? Does he disguise himself in a junior rank?’

Hervey shook his head. ‘I do not know the answer to either question, General, but they are exactly, I think, Princess Lieven’s questions too.’

‘Very well. I hope that you do not think me mistrustful; you have shown your loyalty again and again.’

Hervey smiled uncomfortably, and took his leave.

Outside, Fairbrother waited with his customary air of unconcern, though as ever it masked activity. ‘Why do you suppose Muffling is come so far from Constantinople, and so ill?’

‘How did you know he was ill?’ replied Hervey, sensing the portents of dramatic revelation.

‘His surgeon.’

‘He speaks English?’

‘French. He is French. Muffling engaged him in Paris when he was Tolly’s chief of staff.’

‘You mean Blucher’s chief of staff.’

‘No, Tolly’s. Muffling was at the Russian headquarters after the fall of Paris – the first fall. He got to know Diebitsch well.’

‘Indeed? Upon my word, Muffling coming to see an old colleague. That is ripe intelligence – though it doesn’t necessarily bode anything untoward. Well, I can hardly present my compliments to him when he’s prostrate, so I’ll go to see this Moltke instead. He is, by Budberg’s reckoning, scarcely much older than Agar.’

‘Then while you’re attending on boys, I shall take a tour of the camp, and then I shall find a pleasant tree and sit beneath it to finish my book.’

Hervey’s disappointment at finding Muffling hors de combat was lessened by his realizing that it might serve to his advantage, for why would an English colonel come to see a Prussian lieutenant? That he could say, in all candour, he had come to see the general would surely serve to disarm the object of the Lieven curiosity. Why a lieutenant should be such an object had puzzled him since first she had asked him to make contact, and he could only conclude, and not without sympathy, that it was Moltke’s very lack of seniority that made his mission intriguing. What special expertise did he possess; what connections? It was, indeed, fortunate that Muffling’s presence here provided him with the pretext for his call. Yet within a few moments of their meeting, Hervey concluded that the young Moltke was shrewd enough to take nothing at face value.

Leutnant von Moltke was a man of spare build, not very tall, his face thin but intelligent, almost hawk-like, and – Hervey supposed – a year or so short of thirty. He admitted his visitor to his room with the greatest civility rather than formality, and he did so in English – very fluent English. Indeed, Hervey found him charming. There was coffee and lemon sherbet, and a readiness to talk that was the very opposite of the taciturn Teutonic spy of his imagining. His coming into the King of Prussia’s service was by an unusual route, Moltke explained. He was born in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the year that the young General Buonaparte (he pronounced it in the Italian way) crossed the Alps and won his first great victory at Marengo. His father was in the Danish service, and five years later settled in Holstein, but was soon impoverished by the burning of his country house by the French and the plunder of his town house in Lubeck. He had grown up therefore in straitened circumstances, and at the age of eleven had been sent to the cadet school in Copenhagen. In 1818 he was commissioned into the infantry, and through the influence of his father, who was by then a lieutenant-general, he became a page to the king. Three years later, however, and for reasons he did not disclose, but which Hervey thought he perfectly understood, he resolved to enter the Prussian service.

‘In consequence, Colonel, I lost seniority,’ he was careful to make clear. ‘I became second lieutenant once more and did not proceed to the Kriegsakademie until I was twenty-three, where I followed the three years of instruction, and passed out of there almost four years ago.’

Notwithstanding this loss of seniority, Moltke was evidently held in high regard; Hervey supposed he had been marked out at the Kriegsakademie, a thing that did not occur in England, for there was no academy of that form or distinction, but which he understood to be customary practice in Prussia. ‘It is unusual, I would imagine, for an officer to be sent on detached duty so soon after commissioning,’ he said, in German.

Moltke registered no surprise at Hervey’s fluency (it was inappropriate that a lieutenant should compliment a superior officer), but took it as an invitation to speak in his own language. ‘I think it is so. But I have for three years worked on the military survey in Silesia and Posen.’

Their respective service was so unalike, and in armies whose organization and method was so different, that Hervey could not begin to think what Moltke might achieve in any appraisal of the Turks (and from what he might suppose, the Porte was not in need of expertise in survey). And yet there was in this lieutenant a seriousness of manner – even for a German – that marked him as singular. It seemed to him unthinkable that Moltke could have been sent to Constantinople except for some equally singular purpose. Yet although the late reforms were far from happily settled, no Turk ferik (general), who had come to his rank through long years of the sword, could view with equanimity the advice of a man half his age who had never heard a shot fired in anger. Was his mission therefore one of gathering topographical intelligence under the guise of some other assignment? It would seem apt for one who had spent three years at military survey. But what possible interest could the kingdom of Prussia have in Roumelia?

Even after an hour’s agreeable conversation, Hervey was none the wiser, although he did form a very favourable impression of Moltke as both an officer and a man. He found himself thinking that he would like to know him better, and hoped they would meet again soon – and not merely for the purposes of pleasing Princess Lieven. As soon as General Muffling was restored, and he and Moltke came to Adrianople, said Hervey, he would introduce him to his two fellow officers. ‘You and they would have much to talk about.’

He made then to leave, and as he did so Moltke went to his travelling desk and took from it a book. ‘Herr Oberst, would you honour me by accepting this? It is a work I wrote whilst at the Kriegsakademie.’

Hervey was mystified: the work of a cadet, printed and bound … ‘With the greatest pleasure,