Lannes was unquestionably the finest assault leader of the Army. He had been wounded a dozen times, yet, given a fortress to capture, waving his sword he was still the first man up a scaling ladder on to the enemy ramparts.
The red-headed Ney was not only the most capable tactician, but had no ambition other than to win glory and, to achieve it, he led every major attack in person.
Augereau, the tall, unscrupulous gamin raised from the gutter by the Revolution, and a duellist whom no man any longer dared challenge, was a law unto himself, and led a corps that adored him. He and Lannes were still dyed-in-the-wood Revolutionists. Their language was foul, they took scant pains to conceal their disapproval of Bonaparte's having made himself as Emperor; yet, as leaders of troops, they were too valuable for him to dispense with.
About the tall Gascon, Bernadotte, who refused to comply with the new fashion and still wore his dark hair long, opinion was divided. He was the only senior General who had refused to support Bonaparte at the time of the coup d'etat. And, from the days of the Italian campaign tbey had heartily disliked each other. In the present campaign he had several times been tardy in bringing his corps into action; but he was unquestionably a very able soldier, and he was greatly beloved by both his officers and men for the care he took of them.
For Davoust neither Fournier nor Vitu had a good word to say. He was a cold, hard man, and the harshest disciplinarian in the Army. His one pleasure, when opportunity offered, was waltzing; for the rest of the time he employed himself hanging suspected spies and dealing out brutal punishments to anyone, particularly senior officers, who had in any way contravened his regulations.
For a short period Roger had suffered at Davoust's hands; so had personal cause to dislike him. Even so, he respected and admired this most unpopular of the Marshals. However competent and fanatically brave the others might be, Roger had come to the conclusion that the only advantage they had over the Austrian and Prussian Generals they had defeated was their youth and vigour. Davoust had proved an exception. Not only was he utterly loyal to the Emperor, but he had made an exhaustive study of Napoleon's new methods of waging war, absorbed and applied them.
The Emperor, ever jealous of his subordinates' triumphs, had, in his despatch to Paris, written off Auersuldt as merely a flanking operation during the battle of Jena. But Roger knew the facts. Although completely isolated, Davoust, by brilliant handling of his corps, had defeated one half of the Prussian Army. And he had since further demonstrated his great abilities as an administrator and a soldier.
About the flamboyant Murat, Fournier and Vitu agreed. The uniforms that the recently created Grand Duke of Berg designed for himself might be outre in the extreme but, smothered in gold braid and with tall plumes waving from his head, he never hesitated to lead his hordes of horsemen against either massed infantry or concentrated batteries of cannon. He had been wounded on several occasions, but never seriously enough not to press home charges that had led many times to Napoleon's victories.
Roger knew him to be an empty-headed, conceited fool, whose only asset was fearless courage; and that politically he would have been a nobody had he not married Napoleon's clever and intensely ambitious sister, Caroline.
Vitu's idol was Massena. Perhaps the Corporal was a little influenced by the fact that the Marshal also came from the South of France; for Massena was a native of Nice. But there was no contesting the fact that he was one of the greatest soldiers of the Napoleonic age. In '99, while Bonaparte was still absent in Egypt, Massena had held the bastion of Switzerland against great odds, defeated France's enemies and saved her from invasion. Then, in 1800, with Soult and Sourier as his lieutenants, besieged in Genoa, with a half-starved garrison, a hostile population, and harassed by a British fleet, he had hung on for many weeks; thus detaining outside the city a strong Austrian army and enabling Napoleon to win the decisive victory of Marengo.
Massena was still in Italy. The Emperor had made his own stepson, Eugene dc Beauharnais, Viceroy. But it was the Marshal who dominated the north, demanding of the cities great sums to maintain his troops, a big percentage of which went into his own pockets. Meanwhile, by charm and lavish presents of stolen jewels, he persuaded a constant succession of lovely Italian women to share his bed.
In central Italy, Marshal Macdonald dominated what had previously been the States of the Church. Down in the South, the foolish King Ferdinand and his forever intriguing Queen Caroline had most rashly welcomed to Naples an Anglo-Russian force of twenty thousand men, thereby breaking the convention by which the French had agreed to withdraw their troops.
Napoleon, himself the most perfidious of men, had screamed with rage at, for once, being treated with his own medicine, and had despatched the able Gouvien St. Cyr to drive the Bourbons from their throne; which he had promptly done, forcing them to take refuge in Sicily.
By that time Bonaparte had decided that to wear a crown himself was not enough to impress the ancient dynasties of the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs, or even the more recent dynasties of Hohenzollerns and the Anglo-German Guelphs. So he pushed his elder, clever, kindly, unambitious lawyer brother, Joseph, into becoming King of Naples.
How envious the French troops campaigning in frozen Poland, with its ice-covered lakes, poverty-stricken villages and awful blizzards, felt of their comrades quaffing the wine and enjoying the sunshine of Italy can well be imagined; but, wherever the Emperor's determination to become the Master of Europe caused him to go, they had no option but to accompany him. Roger and his two companions might bemoan their fate, but it had been forced upon them. At least they were lucky not to be dead and, as their wounds gradually healed, their hopes rose that they would find a way to outwit and escape from the flaxen-haired giant, Baron Znamensk, who held them prisoner.
The Baroness Freda knew little about surgery, but had enough knowledge to keep their wounds clean and bind up the Sergeant's shattered knee-cap and Roger's ankle in rough splints.
In consequence, after a fortnight they were able to hobble about. The base of Vitu's big toe had healed over, although it still pained him; and all three of them had an awkward limp. But Znamensk thought them sufficiently recovered to be made use of, so they were set to work sawing logs on the ground floor of the barn.
Kutzie stood by and, whenever their efforts flagged, derived obvious pleasure from using his knout to give one or other of them a swift cut across the shoulders. Fournier and Vitu cursed-and reviled him. Roger accepted his chastisement in silence. He was not vindictive by nature; but, as he sweated over the saw, he promised himself that, sooner or later, he would provide Kutzie with a most unpleasant death.
But how to bring that about, and the death of the Baron and his other henchmen was no small problem. Handicapped as they were by their wounds, to get clear away from the castle would be next to impossible as long as Znamensk and his men were able to set off in pursuit.
Night and day Roger wrestled with the question until he came to the conclusion that there was no hope at all of himself and his two lame companions overcoming the half-dozen Germans; but, that, if the Baron could be trapped, there was a fair chance that the others, being no more than brainless oafs, might be cozened or bullied into submission.
At last, early in March, an idea for setting a trap came to him. The saws they used for cutting the trunks of medium-sized pine and larch trees into logs could, in the hands of a fully able man, have become dangerous weapons; but not when wielded by partially-recovered invalids with dragging feet so, when work was over for the day, the saws were hung up on pegs in the wall on the ground floor of the barn.