Napoleon Symphony by Burgess Anthony

Author:Burgess, Anthony [Anthony, Burgess]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2010-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

In the snow and growing snow they go

So slow in woe the glowing snow their foe

Forego foreshow but oh foreknow the snow

The snow tableau and flow in vertigo

Rousseau and Diderot and frozen toe

Bestow or sow an Eskimo bravo

A tremolo fortissimo of snow

Fifth of December twenty-one below

Eighth of December twenty-six below

And throes of snow below and to and fro

And oh so slow to go and know the snow

To sow and hoe and grow and mow the snow

The groaning scarecrows moaning through the

Snow

Some died puzzled. Sergeant Huppe knew at odd intervals that they were evacuating Russia and had crossed a big river to do it and as soon as they saw the Niemen again they would be really on their way home, but he knew that the main enemy was England and why in God's name had they had to march into Russia in order to fight England? Because Russia was not supporting the Continental System. And what was the Continental System? It was everybody all being forced to band together to stop England exporting the things she manufactured into Europe, that was to say the French Empire. So you marched over half a million men into Russia to make the Czar or Tsar start supporting the Continental System again. But if supporting the Continental System was the most important thing in the world, then why was the Great Army not supporting it? Sergeant Huppe had had undeniable proof until very recently that army boots were coming from England—a tag in the inside of the boot said NOTTINGHAM, now disintegrated along with the boot, N and TT and NGH and M lowing like ghost-cows through the steppe winds. Sergeant Huppe composed himself for death inside the frozen shell of a horse. I am your little shuddering foal, give birth to me, huppe huppe, gee up, whoa. Continental System.

Lieutenant Ratiano saw his left leg, from the knee down, actually break off, no pain, like a rotten tree-limb, and then wept for it, seeing it in the snow: my baby, part of me, I have let you die. He prepared to die puzzled that God had not interfered in the huge agony of a dying army, but then saw the incredibly beautiful subtlety of the whole Universal System, God using the Emperor to bring about undeniable evidence of the immortality of the soul. It was so simple really: the one part of the Human System that could not break off and lie there in the snow was the Human Spirit. Lieutenant Ratiano prepared in ecstasy to break everything off, including his brain, and then what would be left was the essential Lieutenant Ratiano, counting his broken-off parts invisibly, seeing that everything was there. Hallelujah hallelujah. And then he died puzzled that anybody had to be born in the first place.

Major Cordaillet was puzzled about too many things—the delay in leaving Moscow, the failure to use the warmer southern route home, the burning of the pontoon train (somebody had said that the rivers would be

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