The Cemetery at Eylau, 1807

THE CEMETERY AT EYLAU, 1807

by Brett Rutherford

The Battle at Eylau, East Prussia (now Bagrationovsky, Kaliningrad, Russia) As told to Victor Hugo by his uncle Louis-Joseph Hugo.Adapted and expanded from the Victor Hugo poem, "The Story of Louis-Joseph."

1.

Eylau, the graveyard in Kaliningrad, Eylau in East Prussia:
Eylau, the battle rather. Louis-Joseph was then
just Captain, and had earned the Cross, not that
it mattered in ’07 when men in war were naught
but shadows and numbers to those who counted.
He would never forget Eylau, a quiet spot
(East Prussian then), mist-clotted fields,
scant woods. The regiment before a ruined wall,
an angry old belfry frowning down Lutherly,
gravestones one could not read, slabs a-crumble
and flat, sunken and swelling in humps of grass.

Beringssen, superstitious, shuddered to stay here,
but the Emperor would not retreat, not now, while
the threat of blizzard hunched in the clouds.
Napoléon himself went by, sunglassing the sky,
calling orders as he ant-scanned the horizon.
The word spread fast in spiderweb gossip, soldier-
to-soldier: “A battle, for certain, tomorrow.”
They saw the shapes of women and children, fleeing,
huddled forms with knapsacks, potato-brown.
He looked along the ditches’ edge, anxious to hear
the rumble of horses and wagons — but silence.

In the wall’s shelter they made a campfire.
They made giant soldier-shadows, coming and going.
The colonel summoned him: “Hugo!” — “Present!” —
“How many men are with you here?” — “A hundred.” —
“A plague! That’s far too few. No matter then —

You take them all.” — “Where, Colonel?” — “Go down there
and get yourselves all killed in the graveyard.”
The captain laughed. “Down there! That is
     the very place to die.”
He had a gourd, a decent wine. He drank.
He passed it to the discerning colonel,

who savored, nodded. Their eyes met. Each understood.

A chill breeze harrowed the empty branches.
“We’re never far from Death,” the Colonel conjectured,
“Much as I love my life.” He raised the gourd again.
“Much as I love the real, we who know wine like this
know very well how to die.” Grimly, he laughed,
then swept his hand over the graveyard slope.
“Yours is the point they will menace the most.
No matter the cost — hold on. The battle’s real crux
is here.” Climbing to the wall-top, he scanned the ground.
“Have you some dry straw, at least, for bedding?” —
          “None, sir.” —
“Then on the ground it is.” Soft graves, headstones,
a sunken spot or two, they’d find a way.
— “My soldiers can sleep no matter where,” he boasted.
— “And how’s your drummer-boy?” —
          “As brave as a rooster!” —

“That’s good. So let him crow, and beat the charge
at odd times, day and night, run to and fro
so it sounds like an army is crowded in here.” —
“Did you hear that, boy?” called Hugo. A tow-head raised
from a snow-bank and cried, “Yes, sir! Fear not!
I can make enough noise for a Roman legion!”

Taking him aside, the Colonel ordered:
“It is imperative you hold this graveyard
till six tomorrow evening. Hold ground,
be you alive or dead. And thus, farewell.”
He gave a swift embrace and firm salute.

2

Leaving behind the merry fire, they scaled
the crumbling wall to down-slope cemetery.
The old gravestones and their death-headed mounds
peaked with snow-clumps, rolled on and on like waves.
The snow was far deeper than they expected.
In tattered cloaks they sank to its chill-bed.
They slept well, as men of war learn slumber
without a thought of waking, or dying.

He woke at dawn. New snow had covered him
and made his lips icy. He sat up like a revenant
from the grave-mound he had chosen, poor Johan H-
who, dead, had no choice in the manner of bunking.
He was head-to-foot in a snowy shroud.
He stood up and shook it off, shivering.
A bullet breezed by his ear. “Ho!” he shouted.
“Lookout, what see you?” — “Nothing, sir! Nothing!”
“That nothing was no housefly. Sound the reveillée!”

Up popped the nine-and-ninety heads of men
from the Lutheran ground that had never seen
such an Easter rising. The sergeant called, “To arms!”
Red dawn was split in two by inky clouds,
a bloody-mouth leer at humanity,
sun-rise, Death-rise, the lamp of War. “To arms!”

For all the horn-call and drumming, the pots-
and-pans clamor of readiness, they in their turn
got only silence from the unseen enemy.
The shot he heard was but a random thing,
much like a ballroom orchestra player
who by chance picked up a horn and blew it.

Though blood was iced, they were warm for battle.
On the plains, the silent armies waited.
The graveyard-men were set as bait and lure ,
on which the enemy might spend and waste.
They gathered along the protecting wall,
each one prepared to bleed for every foot deterred.

3.

And then it came on: six hundred field guns
roared their iron mouths, booming and thundering.
Lightning and fire-burst flashed from hill to hill.
Then Hugo’s drummer beat the charge, in answer.
A colossus of trumpets answered back.
Down came the leaden shots upon the graves,
as if the very tombs were their targets.
Starlings and crows exploded in black clouds
from the shaken church’s crumbling steeple.

One corpse but lately dead popped up half-height
as a mortar exploded his fine monument,
a preacher from the look of him, black-raimented
with a bony hand stretched out in admonition.
Skulls rolled through the snow like aimless billiards.

Then a day-defying darkness seized them.
Dawn would not give to day, the sun was shamed,
smoke rolled onto and up the slope, to wall,
o’er-reaching it, up to the church itself.
And then, in clot of gun-cloud came more snow,
a steady, head-pounding downfall of heaviness.
Soldiers against the wall were whitened ghosts,
others upon the ground a rose-burst of bleeding.
Down on the plain, fires rose from the smoke-sea —
villages now plundered were set a-light.
’til the whole horizon seemed one vast torch.

They stood against the wall, and they waited.
Till six o’clock tomorrow! the Colonel had said:
How could they make their shivering presence matter?
Not crouching this way like hares before a hunter!
“Morbleau!” said the lieutenant next to him,
“Our chance may come, and may come but once.
Let us advance now —” and then a bullet
ripped through his throat and he fell trembling, dead.

Napoléon, the Emperor, had set them here,
they knew not why, except to be a puppet show
of easy things to shoot at, a hundred armed men
pretending to be a thousand, by dint of din.
What would he tell the men? Their only goal
was to survive until a gold watch clicked on six.

He raised his sword, swinging it this way-that way.
“Courage!” he bellowed, choke-full of rage and manhood.
Out and apart from the others he stood.
He felt it not – not the thing that ripped him,
his hand limp, sword on the ground before him.
“No matter, for I have another hand,” he laughed.
He used his good hand shake the numb one,

counting fingers, all there, thanks be to God!
He took up the sword again. Soldiers’ faces blurred;
some seemed to sink and falter. “Ah, my friends,
we have left hands for the Emperor, too!”

Too soon, the boy’s drum-beating stopped. He found
the staggering drummer. “No time for fear!” —
“Six hours I’ve drummed. Six! I’m not afraid.
I’m hungry,” the drummer boy protested.
The ground rose up — like an earthquake, it seemed —
the drummer was gone — Hugo’s sword was gone.
A cry went up to heaven, coarse like crows:
Victoire, it cawed. Victoire! Victoire! Victoire!

“Let anyone who lives, stand up! Report!” —
The drummer stood. “I’m here. I didn’t die!”
The sergeant from behind a tree: “I’m here!”

The Colonel rushed in on horseback, red sword
edged with the blood of retreating Russians.
He approached, saluted. “Who won the battle, sir?” —
“You did, you, Captain Hugo. How many still live?”
And Hugo answered, “Three!”

[Revised May 2019].

Oct 25, 2018

Subjects: Eylau, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, translations