Chapter 2 - Napoleon Is Back
By breakfast, Napoleon had become the only subject in Brussels.
A Frenchman could not sneeze without someone claiming it was part of the Emperor’s strategy.
I took my coffee downstairs and listened.
“He crossed at Charleroi.”
“No, farther east.”
“The Prussians have him.”
“Wellington expected this.”
“Wellington expected nothing.”
“He’ll be back in Paris in a week.”
“Whose week?”
Nobody agreed.
The name Napoleon carried a strange power.
Men who had never seen him lowered their voices when speaking it.
To some he was a monster.
To others a genius.
To others simply the reason Europe had spent so many years burying sons.
I had been eleven when the wars first became part of my childhood.
By twenty-seven, Napoleon seemed less like a man than a season that refused to end.
And now he was back.
I spent the morning walking through military districts.
Everywhere there was preparation.
Muskets inspected.
Flints checked.
Cartridge boxes filled.
Horses shod.
Wagons loaded.
Men rolled blankets and tied packs.
A soldier could carry much of his world on his back, and that world looked painfully heavy.
I watched one young infantryman trying to force bread into his haversack.
His friend said, “Eat it.”
“I’m saving it.”
“For when?”
“When I’m hungry.”
“You’re hungry now.”
The first man considered this argument and began eating.
I wrote that down.
War, from a distance, is strategy.
Up close, it is a man deciding when to eat his bread.
At midday I found Mercer outside a warehouse.
“You’re following me,” he said.
“I’m a writer.”
“Same thing, but less useful.”
He was organizing medical stores.
Lint.
Bandages.
Tourniquets.
Medicines.
Water containers.
Blankets.
A young assistant checked lists beside him.
I looked at the preparations.
“How many casualties are you expecting?”
Mercer did not answer immediately.
“Enough.”
There was that kind of answer again.
I asked whether I could travel with his supply wagons if the army moved.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because battles are dangerous.”
“I had heard.”
“And you are a civilian.”
“That has never stopped civilians from being near battles.”
“Correct. It simply makes their deaths more unnecessary.”
I persisted.
It was not bravery.
I should make that clear.
I wanted to see.
That is a dangerous desire.
Writers spend their lives approaching things sensible people leave alone.
Finally Mercer sighed.
“If we go south, you stay with the medical wagons. You follow instructions. If I say move, you move.”
“Agreed.”
“If I say leave, you leave.”
“Agreed.”
“If I say stop asking questions—”
“I cannot promise miracles.”
He stared at me.
Then he laughed once.
“God help me.”
In the afternoon I went toward the fashionable quarter.
The contrast was remarkable.
While wagons rolled south, shops still sold ribbons.
Women still selected gloves.
Officers visited friends.
Dinner invitations remained important.
People behaved as though normality could be preserved by effort.
Perhaps they were right.
Perhaps civilization is simply the refusal to cancel dinner until cannon fire is audible.
Near one square I met an elderly Belgian bookseller named Van Doren.
He had sold me a map earlier in the week.
“You still here?” he asked.
“So are you.”
“This is my shop.”
“I have a room.”
“That is less permanent.”
He unfolded a map.
His finger moved south.
“Here. Charleroi. Here, roads north. Brussels here.”
“What does Napoleon want?”
Van Doren smiled sadly.
“You ask a bookseller what Napoleon wants?”
“You read more than I do.”
“Everybody reads more than a journalist.”
He tapped the map.
“He wants them apart.”
“Who?”
“Wellington and the Prussians.”
That was the first clear explanation I heard.
Two Allied armies stood in Belgium.
Wellington’s multinational force around Brussels.
Blücher’s Prussians farther east.
If Napoleon could strike between them before they united, he might defeat each separately.
Simple on paper.
Nothing about the men involved would be simple.
That evening, news arrived that fighting had begun near the frontier.
Brussels changed.
People gathered around messengers.
Officers vanished from dining rooms.
Horses were saddled.
Military bands that had sounded festive now sounded like departure.
I stood beside a street as another column marched south.
Boots struck stone.
Hundreds at once.
The sound entered your chest.
I saw no fear at first.
Men joked.
One smoked.
Another adjusted a pack.
Then I saw a soldier walking beside his wife.
She kept pace for as long as she could.
At a crossroads, an officer shouted.
The column continued straight.
Civilians had to turn back.
The wife stopped.
The soldier did not.
He looked over his shoulder once.
She raised her hand.
So did he.
Then other soldiers blocked him from view.
That image stayed with me.
May you like
Armies are often drawn as arrows on maps.
Nobody draws the hands waving goodbye.
