HS02 - Days of Atonement Read online

  If the doctor’s report and the memorandum of the duty officer had been read out to me in court, I would have had little doubt in declaring that the man had been murdered. Could so much physical damage be caused by a fall alone? Had he been beaten up first, then thrown off the cliff to simulate an accident? But I could see no sense in it. Those soldiers would be taking an enormous risk, killing their officer in the wood while out on an exercise. If they wanted him dead, the dreary fortress was a better hunting ground. Would any murderer, no matter how bold or stupid, wish his name to appear in an official document relating to the death of his victim?

  Could it really have been an accident, then?

  Given the snow and the treacherously slippery ground, it was, perhaps, a wonder that only one man had been killed.

  The corpse has been interred in the cemetery of Kamenetz, I read.

  I sat up stiffly.

  Sybille Gottewald must have known that her husband had been killed a week or so before death darkened her own door in Lotingen. I felt a welling-up of compassion mixed with horror. What had caused such tragedies to fall on that family? A father and three children dead. In such different ways, and at such a great distance. All within a matter of days.

  My thoughts flew to Lotingen. Had Lavedrine managed to find the mother in my absence, or was her corpse rotting somewhere in the woods, deprived of Christian burial, prey to the ravages of the winter and the ferocity of animals? Was it a matter of blind, cruel Fate, or had some darker design decreed the annihilation of the entire Gottewald family?

  It seemed impossible that there was not a connection. It was beyond the range of statistical reckoning to imagine that violence had struck the whole family indiscriminately. But the opposite was also true. Numerical computation, as Voltaire has demonstrated, is an incomplete science. Nothing under the sun is wholly impossible; it may simply not have happened yet. It would take only a short conversation with that other cynical French Encyclopaedist in Lotingen to remind me. Lavedrine would chuckle if I insisted that they had all been victims of a plot, unless I could present him with convincing evidence to support the suggestion.

  But then, another oddity struck me.

  Why had the wife made no attempt to have the body sent to Lotingen for burial, as she had every right to request?

  ‘Have you finished?’ Rochus asked gruffly. The boy was standing over me in a defiant mood once more, one hand held out boldly in front of him, the other dangling his bayonet. ‘I’m to take them papers back where they came from. Orders of General Katowice. He told me to leave you at the officers’ mess. If you want to eat, that is?’

  I handed over the report without a word, drew my cloak more tightly around me, and followed the boy. A zigzag course through the highways and byways of the fortress led at last to a very large open space, in the centre of which stood a tall narrow building.

  Rochus pointed his finger. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  So Rochus, or some other trusted minion of Katowice, was to keep me under strict surveillance until the time for my departure. It was not the thought of being watched like a criminal that irritated me, but the implications of what I had just read. Gottewald had died in Kamenetz, his children had been murdered in Lotingen. Was the killer at large in the fortress? Would I find myself sitting down at the same table as a man whose hands were stained with their blood, unable to investigate as I would have wished, simply because General Katowice had set a veto on my doing so?

  I walked away across the courtyard, mounting the stone steps that led to the dining hall. As the door swung closed behind me, I paused, openmouthed, at the size of the room. The mess was in the central core of the fortress. It was impressive and depressing at the same time. The room was octagonal in shape, as high as a church, but no more than sixty feet at its widest point. A log fire roared and sparked colourfully in a fireplace large enough to stable ten horses, but the atmosphere was as cold as a tomb in February. Three large tables had been laid out in the centre. Two officers sat at one table, two more sat at another, while three of them had taken their places at the table nearest to the fire.

  I made my way towards the latter.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ I asked.

  The men looked up, but no one said a word.

  I sat myself down on the wooden bench. ‘My name is Hanno Stiffeniis,’ I said, increasingly uncomfortable in the strained silence. ‘I am a magistrate, here to . . .’

  ‘We know,’ one of the officers interjected. He did not look in my direction as he spoke. His eyes remained fixed on his plate. He was a solid bulllike man with mottled red skin, and hair that had been shorn to the scalp, except for a black skullcap which had escaped the barber’s blade. The heads of the other men had been tonsured in a similarly brutal fashion. They might have been monks of a holy order sworn to silence. Only their uniforms betrayed their profession.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll not try to worm anything from you that General Katowice would disapprove of. Carry on as you would normally do.’

  They needed no encouragement. The heavy silence endured for the fifteen minutes that it took for a bowl of thin spelt soup and a plate of pale boiled beef to appear before me, carried wordlessly in the hands of a serving-boy. While I spooned down my lukewarm broth, and carved away at my half-cooked meat, the soldiers stood up one by one, pushing their plates away, and left the mess hall. No one said a word to me. There was nothing strange in that, of course. They had been told to have nothing to do with me, and they were following orders. But I had not been prohibited from watching them, and I did so eagerly. They were all most meticulous in their observances. If one man alone had done such a thing, I would probably have dismissed it as an idiosyncrasy. But all seven officers went through the self-same ritual. They made for the central wall on the left-hand side of the hall, stood to attention in stiff silence for thirty seconds or so, then clicked their heels, and strode swiftly to the exit. As I cleared my plate, wiping up the gravy with black bread, I sat alone, wondering what it was all about.

  ‘Have you finished, sir?’ a voice sounded at my elbow.

  The boy orderly was waiting, anxious to take away my dish and set the hall in order after lunch. He looked even younger than Rochus.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I said, but I held my pewter plate firmly, determined not to let go of it until I had got to the bottom of the mystery. ‘What flag is that?’ I asked, pointing to the far side of the room.

  ‘Sir?’ the child asked, his eyes wide with fright.

  He was just a kitchen-boy. Perhaps no one had bothered to tell him that I was not to be spoken to.

  ‘That one,’ I said again. ‘That banner over there on the wall. What is it?’

  ‘That’s Grunfelde, sir. Teutonic order, 1410.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, letting go of my plate and leaving it on the table.

  I walked across and examined the Grunfelde Standard, which had been hanging on the wall, gathering dust for three hundred and ninety-seven years. A once-black Gothic eagle spread its wings over a field of oxidised ochre that had once been blood-red. In 1410 the Teutonic Knights had fought their last battle. Every boy who had ever been to school knew the story. The Grand Master, most of the commanders, and about three hundred knights had been slaughtered by a united force of Poles and Lithuanians. Only Heinrich Reuss von Plauen had survived, and he had taken refuge in a remote fortress: Kamenetz, though it was not called by that name then. Did General Katowice see himself as a modern-day Reuss von Plauen? Did he think of his men, and the boys that he was training, as a new Teutonic Order that would drive the atheistic French invader out of Prussia? On the evidence that I had seen, no doubt remained in my mind. But what would happen if the French decided to pounce before the general’s preparations were complete?

  Rochus fell into step beside me when I emerged from the dining hall.

  I no longer smiled at the notion of this boy playing at soldiers. In Kamenetz they were openly fomenting a
rmed rebellion. At that moment I fully understood the danger that I represented for that outpost. And, as a consequence, the threat hanging over me in that place.

  ‘Before I leave,’ I said to Rochus, ‘I wish to pay my respects as a loyal Prussian to the brave men who died here four hundred years ago to defend our glorious nation.’

  In truth, I was curious to see what they had done with the corpse of a man who had died much more recently.

  14

  IF A MAN is noble, his name may grace a church wall. The names of my own ancestors, stretching back to the eleventh century, adorn the Stiffeniis family chapel in Ruisling.

  For all the others, oblivion awaits.

  The style of burial used in France was closer to my own ideal. The bones were sealed beneath the stone floor of a church, the spot marked with a cross, and the names were listed in the parish records. One memorial tablet in particular had fixed itself firmly in my mind: a simple slate stone set in the north wall of what is now the Temple of Reason in Paris. When I saw the cathedral in 1793, it was still called Notre Dame. That marker recorded the name of Emilie Daguerre and the dates that spanned the six short years of her existence. Beneath, ornately carved, was a single word. Loved. There was nothing more. No hint of who she was, who her family might have been, or what had caused her death. Emilie Daguerre was dead, she had been loved, and that was enough.

  Napoleon changed all that in the name of ‘public hygiene.’ Décret numero 278, Sur les sépulcres. No more Emilie Daguerres would be buried in any church. No angel carved in stone would weep over a grave. No oak coffin would be made, except for repeated use, employing a swing-gate to release the body into the void. A plain, cheap, cotton shroud would suffice to cover the corpse before it went naked into the cold ground. No poetic plaque, or fond final word would ever again be chiselled or incised in memory of any man, woman or child who was not the Emperor of France. Henceforth, we would all be nameless bones mixed up haphazardly in a pit, waiting to be sprinkled with quicklime.

  But Bruno Gottewald had been buried in the cemetery of Kamenetz.

  To my way of thinking, this was conclusive evidence that the French had no power in the fortress. And if they could not command the Prussian dead, how could they ever hope to subdue the Prussian living?

  Rochus led me through an endless network of grim tunnels and fortified ditches with barely a word. The boy would never warm to me, but he did seem curious to know what strange notions chanced to pass through my skull. We had just entered a narrow redoubt, towering stone walls on either side, with steep steps cut into the right-hand wall leading up to a broad parapet, where the defenders of the fort could fire down upon attackers gathering in siege outside the walls. To my surprise, Rochus skipped onto these steps and began to climb quickly towards the raised walkway.

  ‘This is it,’ he announced, turning back, waiting for me to catch up.

  I reached the parapet, resting my hand on the wall for fear of being blown away.

  ‘It’s not much of a cemetery,’ I said dismissively, catching sight of a row of primitive, rough-hewn gryphons—more like crows than eagles—which had been set between the castellations.

  ‘You’re looking in the wrong place,’ he replied, glancing at my feet.

  I was standing on a flagstone which had been roughly etched with the number 79. A blank stone followed that one, while the next stone along was marked with the number 80.

  ‘Are they firing positions?’ I asked.

  ‘Dead soldiers,’ he replied with a smirk. ‘On guard beneath our feet. It’s always been the way in Kamenetz. When a good man dies, they bury him standing up, facing east, so his spirit can defend the place from foreign invaders.’

  The past commanders of Kamenetz had stolen a march on the Emperor of France. No names, only numbers for the dead.

  ‘A good man?’ I queried.

  ‘A brave man, a soldier who dies in the line of duty.’

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked out over the battlements.

  ‘What about the bad men?’ I asked him. ‘Do they exist in Kamenetz? Does every man under General Katowice’s command die nobly, that is, doing exactly what he has been ordered to do?’

  The boy spat straight over the wall, leaning out to watch the progress of his projectile in the wind. There was still something of the child left in him, I was relieved to note. As he turned back to me, he spat on flagstone number 79 as well.

  ‘Good or bad, they have to put ’em somewhere,’ he sneered.

  ‘In that case, number 79 could well be Major Gottewald. Would you dare to desecrate his memorial stone?’

  Rochus looked at me as if I were deranged.

  ‘Why not?’ he said with a heartless laugh. ‘He can’t do nothing, can he? And anyhow, he’s standing on his head.’

  ‘On his head?’ I echoed. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘That’s how we bury a coward,’ the boy replied, harking back to our discussion before I ate my lunch.

  ‘But Gottewald chose to run that race,’ I insisted. ‘He wasn’t fleeing from the enemy. He challenged his men to catch him if they could, and he accidentally fell to his death. Surely that was courageous?’

  The soldier-boy’s face screwed up like a withered apple.

  ‘You’ve taken part in the deer hunt, have you not?’ I asked.

  He lowered his eyes and looked away into the distance.

  ‘Come, Rochus. You know what it’s like. Only a man who is brave and strong can hope to win.’

  The boy would not be drawn.

  ‘It’s cold up here,’ he said after a moment’s silence. ‘And anyway, you’ve seen what you wanted to see.’

  But I had not yet finished with him. ‘They’ll have to dig up Gottewald before they can send him home. His coffin . . .’

  ‘He ain’t inside no coffin!’ the boy retorted. ‘Just a hole beneath the stone. I bet he’s scared down there. Still a coward, though dead,’ he snapped, his face a mask of fierce disgust. ‘You wouldn’t catch me being scared,’ he added, lifting his chin in a gesture suggesting courage and determination.

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘D’you know why the general has such a hard time finding boys to train? When the peasants know that the doctor’s coming, they dig holes in the snow to hide their sons. Sometimes, they’re in such a hurry, they forget to leave a marker. If the snow keeps falling, and the doctor takes his time, they never find them boys again! You can die, murdered by your own parents, just because they don’t want you to fight for your country. I’ve been in holes . . .’

  He stared at me and he was quivering with rage.

  In villages all around the fortress, I thought, there might be skeletons hidden under the snow, children who had been left to die like so many rats in traps. The notion took away my breath.

  ‘My father wanted me to tend his pigs,’ he went on angrily. ‘Going for a soldier? He’d rather have me dead! But he don’t know what it’s like to be buried. You can’t breathe. The cold gets worse. It takes away your will to live. But someone heard me shout. Do you know who?’

  I could guess, but I wanted him to tell me.

  ‘Who, Rochus?’

  The boy’s face lit up like a lamp. ‘General Katowice. That’s who!’

  And you will do whatever he asks, I thought, even if it means heaping insults on a man when he is dead and buried.

  ‘Did the general always hate Gottewald?’ I asked in an offhanded way.

  Rochus shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ask him, if you want to know,’ he said, but the urge to defend his saviour was too strong. ‘General Katowice don’t hate no one,’ he added hotly. ‘Do your duty, you’ll be all right. Step out of line, you’re looking for it. Either you’re in his good books, or you’re out of them. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Gottewald was out of them, I take it?’

  ‘Wrong again, magistrate!’ the boy replied. ‘The others had to sleep in the officers’ dormitory, but he had a room to him
self.’

  ‘Was that why the other officers were jealous?’

  ‘Who said they were jealous?’ he countered. ‘The only time Gottewald ever opened his mouth was when they brought in a new harvest. Always complaining about “quality”, that was him. Wanted to send half the boys home again. Said they weren’t fit for active service.’

  ‘Did he argue with the other officers, then?’

  Rochus shook his head slowly. ‘He didn’t speak with no one. He didn’t have a single friend in the place, except for General Katowice . . .’

  He looked away, as if he might have said more than was good for him.

  The general spoke to Gottewald. He seemed to favour him, giving him a room which he was obliged to share with no one else. And Katowice had known him in the field when the war with France was in full flow. I was perplexed by the news. Would the general invite a coward to follow him? Would he reveal his plans to build a new Prussian army to a traitor?

  I walked the battlements ’til dusk came on, and the cold grew more intense. The wind howled as if it meant to tear the fortress up by the roots.