After the first shocking, phenomenal, impossible occasion, the young Prussian beauty visited him every night she could, which was most nights (the von Hoffmann house was full of old people who slept and dreamed like the dead, never stirring until the morning) and in the golden candlelight and beneath the warmth of goose-down quilts, in the thrall of her sweet-scented skin and smooth heat and willing youth, the sound of her pleasure, her naked breath in his ear, he was a lion. Insatiable and born again in love, a creature fully possessed of itself. He was beyond the intoxications of wine, it had no power over him: Fourés could consume oceans now and balance a sword on the tip of his tongue. He was cured and immune to common men, their misdirections and illusions, to common ailments, to fear, to frost, the beating sun; his joints were supple, his muscles lean and strong, his stomach an iron drum no food could defeat. Kings’ sons did not have what he had, not his own sons. He had everything, the world, distilled through loops of copper and a thousand years contained in each drop, just one under the tongue enough for a lifetime, and the général with a cellar full of barrels.

DRUMMER BOYS ARE LOVED

The drum was battered and scratched, fringed in black-and-gold bands and a few thin tassels still hanging by a thread. The calfskin was brittle, yellow, the white leather straps worn and stained. There was a bullet hole in the brass shell too, entry and opposite exit, both now stopped with cork and patched with gum and leather. The drum had been captured from an Austrian regiment during the Battle of Austerlitz, and it was how the Austrian drummer boy had died, shot through the brass and then bled to death, an artery severed in his groin. Some of his dried blood was still in the tassels.

The corporal said, ‘Christ, try it again.’

There was much to learn: the March, the Quickstep, the Charge. There were coded beats encompassing orders to move formations across the battlefield (played from drummer to drummer, down the hill from where the maréchals watched, mounted, beside the Emperor), and tunes that made the men laugh, whether to ease the prelude to battle or lighten the epilogues of blood and loss. Everything had to be snapped out crisp and clear, resounding. Ears, hands, heart, mind, legs simultaneously stepping across the cannoned terrain, the body in perfect, cold balance. It was vital not to cock it up.

The corporal said, ‘Stop cocking it up!’

The 4e Régiment Étrangers was marching out soon and Johannes Meyer didn’t have a lot of time left in which to learn.

Behind him, in a huddle, the grimy fifer boys watched.

‘Who gave him the drum?’

‘Some fool.’

‘He’s too old!’

‘Too tall!’

‘The snipers will pick him out easy.’

‘He’ll get his head blown off for sure.’