Later, when the child was born, her half-brother’s same knife was used to sever the cord. She named the master’s child Josephine. By then her son had learned to walk again and Captain Willem van der Velde had Mr Hendrik help with raising the girl. His wife knew that he was the father and she regularly beat Mr Hendrik and his mother, and Josephine too, when she was old enough to be beaten, and this was just what life was like. The master had sired many children, but Josephine was beautiful from the beginning and only became more so as she grew, which was too much an affront to the master’s wife (and their unattractive daughters), and as much a temptation to the father as any of the other slave girls on his plantation.

Book III

BOOK III

THE 4E RÉGIMENT ÉTRANGERS

Posen was damp, the wind was keen, the sky was an open window, bright blue with cold. Here, Johannes and Wolfie were officially enlisted into the ranks of the 4e Régiment Étrangers: three battalions or thereabouts, mostly Prussian prisoners of war and deserters, plus a mix of variously criminal Danes, Swedes and Russians. In other words, Grande Armée cannon fodder.

They’d marched from Berlin; their shoes were wrecked. ‘And now we’re a hundred ’n fifty miles closer to being blown up,’ Wolfie said.

The first day was long and confused. The French shouted orders from their mounts, rode fast up and down the columns, their horses kicking divots of turf at the new recruits. From one endless line to the next, Johannes and Wolfie stood and waited, never quite knowing what they were waiting for. In one line, the rumour was food, boiled potatoes and schinken, but when they got to the front of the queue there was no schinken and the potatoes were only half cooked. In another line they were vaccinated for smallpox, the needle jabbed right through their sleeves by an old, unbuttoned orderly smoking a pipe and flanked by two grenadiers. (‘S’il vous plaît,’ he said in a monotone to every man, then, ‘Je vous remercie.’) Later, in the last line of the day, they were given uniforms: a green Prussian fusilier kollet with a red collar and white epaulettes, a white-plumed shako, green pants and red vest, hussar boots, white cross-belts and a brown leather knapsack, cartridge boxes, an infantry sword and scabbard, and a light musket of dubious condition (not that Johannes had any idea about muskets). Weighed down with their new uniforms and equipment, the men were then marched to a soggy green field on the outskirts of the city, where rows and rows of canvas tents marked a vast square alongside a riverbank. There were soldiers everywhere Johannes looked, standing in groups beside smoky braziers, muskets bayonet-racked in perfect spiky clusters around them, stern, empty looks upon their faces.