Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Read Online Free PDF

command post at Castelnuovo.”
    “He told me to wait for him here. Where’s Castel—?”
    “Inland. On the road to Verona. You must have passed it last night.”
    “This sounds to me as if the Austrians are everywhere.”
    “A brief defensive interlude call it.” Junot smiled, very tired, with his unshaven bristles catching the laky light. “Our first, or very nearly.”
    Her pout was a woman’s unreasonable rebuke for lui : you said I’d like this play and I hate it; you said it would be fine and it’s rained all day.
    It was Louise who pointed at the shining boat on the beautiful lake as big as a sea, so lovely in the Italian summer morning. Then smoke puffed with great cracks and whines, the coach swerved and sidled and tilted and stopped, with Junot shouting, Louise going oh oh oh, and the noise of thuds and mad hooves, then the sight of two horses threshing and foaming as they tried to die between the shafts. A dragoon was dead with one foot in the saddle, being dragged by his frantic horse, a cheek ripped open and the back of his head scraped raw along the road. Junot had them out of the coach and, using it as a shield from the firing, made them crawl into a shallow dry ditch, then he whipped the lead offside horse with his sword and had all four trundling the empty coach off with the patrol boat guns still cracking away at it.
    Louise wept in the ditch. “Quiet, girl, quiet, this is an adventure, this is something to tell them back in Paris, this is war.”
    “Waaaaaaaar.” That started Fortuné barking.
    She had not seen Lieutenant Charles at Verona, there had been some talk of his doing well in battle, he would not now be concerned about the quality of cloth and the sit of a cravat, but she shut him out of her needs, lying there as the sun mounted, hearing the flies around the corpses: she did not want now to be in a Paris drawing room with Charles witty and saying my dear what a delightful foulard. She wanted the protection of her General. Later, of course, she knew, it would be different. One does not move straight from a ditch to a drawing room.
    “There’s a farmer’s cart there,” Junot said later.
    They jolted in flea-leaping straw past more war: buzzing mounds of horse and man flesh, the acrid smoke a solvent of the foul sweetness. She was half-asleep when rough hands pulled her out of the cart. Having missed death in war it seemed that she was now to meet it in love. His love, all howls and tears, tears she joined in, was confused with desire to strike at once at the renegade French swine Field Marshal von Würmser, leader of the attacking Austrians. He shall pay dearly for your tears . “Waaaaaaaar,” howled Louise, joining them. He got her and her dog to bed in a rough room of his headquarters, and she could hear the rustle and thumping of maps as she fell into sleep dug deep as a pit, gun-crumps, shadows in lantern-light, his words: local disorganization disorganization of the entire front . Bbbest make the atttack southeast of Bbbrescia?
    Mark how the Alexander of our age
    Bids soldier’s skill fulfill a lover’s rage.
    His numbers far inferior are found:
    Too many ring resistant Mantua round,
    Too many languish in the fevered swamp,
    Too many through the restive boroughs tramp
    With freedom’s flag unvocal to convince
    Men long enslaved to prelate and to prince.
    Though Würmser’s roll take twice the time to call,
    Yet is he tardy in unrolling all.
    Our general is impetuous to fling
    His total force upon a single wing,
    Then on the other, then he splits the spine
    In center of th’ attenuated line.
    At Castiglione see the guns advance
    And tricolor of liberating France.
    The double-eagled banner dips and droops,
    And Würmser whines, then growls, and then regroups.
    But at Bassano, Rovereto, Trent,
    His front is fractured and his rear is rent.
    He spies th’ encircling trap that soon awaits
    And refuge seeks in Mantua’s battered gates.
    Ah, Mantuan Virgil, could but time