him it was a thousand times better to be a hussar – even a dead one – than a bureaucrat in the commissariat.
Margont looked surprised. ‘Relmyer injured an officer? Surely he was arrested at least?’
‘Captain Lidoine wanted to have him shot, but Major Batichut promoted him to lieutenant in place of the lieutenant Relmyer had floored. Now do you understand why we’re not in a hurry to send you to see him? You never know, he might want to become a captain …’
Lefine recoiled instinctively. Better to stay well away from duellists. Duellists handed out death like others might hand out accolades.
The quartermaster shrugged and indicated the nearby willows. ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you … You can’t miss him, he’s practising with his sabre over there.’
Margont went off towards the thicket. Lefine hung back, gazing at the quartermaster’s dolman. He was having a sort of vision. He saw the coagulated blood growing wet, liquefying. The stains glistened in the sun before beginning to run down, tracing wide vertical stripes on the jacket. The quartermaster took a puff of the pipe before frowning as he surveyed Lefine.
‘Well, what are you waiting for? Mid-Lent? You won’t get any tobacco, however long you hang about!’
Lefine moved off, telling himself that it must be the sun, the heat … The vision terrified him. This affair smelt of death. Wasn’t there enough of that already with the war?
It was indeed impossible not to notice Relmyer. In shirtsleeves and covered in sweat, he vigorously fought invisible assailants. He lunged, jabbed, parried, sidestepped in order better to attack, feinted … against a seemingly inexhaustible number of enemies. Or perhaps just one enemy that he was unable to vanquish. Margont was not a great swordsman – he had more or less mastered a few moves. Nevertheless he could tell that Relmyer was extremely gifted.
‘It looks as if Relmyer has a few accounts to settle,’ he murmured to Lefine.
‘In that case, I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of whoever he wants to settle them with.’
‘His adversary must be pretty dreadful to drive him to such rage.’
Relmyer turned in their direction, saluted them with his sabre and joined them, mopping his brow. His physique was impressive. What age was he? Twenty? His manner, assured without being arrogant, was that of an experienced man. On the other hand, his rosebud mouth, naïve expression and slightly infantile features were those of an adolescent. He therefore appeared both older and younger than he actually was.
‘May I ask the reason for your visit, Captain?’ His Austrian accent betrayed his origins.
‘Lieutenant Relmyer? I’m Captain Margont and this is my friend Sergeant Lefine. We have come to inform you that Mademoiselle Luise Mitterburg wishes to see you.’
Relmyer immediately barricaded himself inside his inner fortress, locking up his feelings so that they would not show. ‘Yes, certainly, but later.’
‘Mademoiselle Mitterburg and I met by chance. I helped her search for a certain Wilhelm …’
The name hit Relmyer like a blow impossible to parry. His face hardened, ageing him brutally, as if his age were more a matter of his emotions than his years. Suddenly the trilling of the birds seemed to irritate him and Margont thought that he was going to draw his sabre and slice through the poor robin sitting carolling on too low a branch.
‘He’s dead, I know. And disfigured! The two hussars I dispatched to find him described the state he was found in. I wanted to see to it myself but my captain forbade it. He finds me unruly. Unruly! I’m a cavalryman, not a horse!’
He tidied his brown curls and then managed to smile. ‘You’re a captain yourself: perhaps if you were to talk to him, he would let me go and investigate this business …’
Margont was infuriated. Like Luise Mitterburg, Relmyer had no compunction in soliciting his help. ‘I know nothing about this affair, why would I go—’
Relmyer placed his hands on Margont’s shoulders. ‘Come, Monsieur! I can see you’re a man of compassion! Won’t you help an honest officer in distress?’
His tone might have sounded theatrical had there not been tears in his eyes. At that moment he could have been taken for a thirteen-year-old boy.
‘Well, perhaps, it depends on …’ stammered Margont, embarrassed.
Lefine suppressed the desire to hit his friend. If you always looked after other people, you ended up failing to look after yourself – a dangerous defect that he was at no risk of succumbing to.
‘Mademoiselle Mitterburg is my sister, or as good as, and she’s rich,’ added Relmyer. ‘She can lend you money, or give it to you … She’ll do it without hesitating if I ask her to.’
Now Lefine was interested. If they were to be paid for doing a favour, that put everything in a different light.
‘She’ll get you invited to receptions,’ continued Relmyer.
‘I know, yes …’ Margont cut in before Relmyer could also promise them the moon.
‘But for pity’s sake, for the love of Christ, you have to make my captain loosen my reins!’
‘Tell me the whole story and I’ll see if I can plead your cause with your superiors.’
They settled down in the shade of a large oak tree. While Relmyer finished unbuttoning his dolman, he contemplated his lieutenant’s stripes. The silver chevrons contrasted elegantly with the dark green of the cloth. ‘I’m not used to them yet,’ he declared, smiling. ‘I was only recently promoted, following a happy conjunction of circumstances.’
Relmyer leant back against the trunk but could not keep still, constantly trying to find a more comfortable position. ‘I’m hunting a man. He’s probably close by, perhaps in one of these forests …’
As he said that word, he made a sweeping gesture. There were certainly forests round about. Their dark expanses dotted the countryside.
‘I am Austrian by birth. I was abandoned at the age of one. I don’t know why. Perhaps because my family could not afford to keep me. Or maybe my parents were killed in the war, or carried off by illness … or possibly I was the cruel result of the adulterous affair of one of my parents. I was placed in the Lesdorf Orphanage, north of Vienna. The children were well cared for there. It was the least that could be done, let me tell you, since several of the orphans had lost their parents in wars against the French, the Italians, the Turks or God knows who else. You were taught good manners, the Bible, patriotism …’
He laughed sarcastically – he was wearing a French uniform.
‘Not to mention reading and mathematics, especially mathematics for the boys. You see, you have to be a good mathematician if you are going to become an effective gunner: measurement of angles, calculation of the curve of the shot …’
Lefine and Margont were perplexed.
‘Gunner?’ said Margont, astonished.
Relmyer smiled, a bitter, ironic smile. ‘Of course! All these little boys orphaned by war were to be
