Four days later, as dusk fell, Colonel-en-second Freuler said, ‘Forward!’, and this time Johannes Meyer wasn’t up on a hill but inside the turmoil on the ground. He hit the drum and began to walk (his legs shaking uncontrollably) and a battalion of the 4e Régiment Étrangers followed him into the Battle of Friedland.

Within seconds of starting the Quickstep, the battle had swallowed them whole, like a huge, grinding, red-bloody mouth.

There were soldiers everywhere, dead, crawling, running, limbless, gutted, thousands of soldiers. The cannons thundered.

‘Keep moving! Forward!’

He wasn’t a coward, but the world was being torn apart, its heart ripped out. It was just like Goethe’s story of the island with its magnetic mountain and the ships that sailed too close, all the iron torn from their timbers, nails and bolts and braces, and the ships collapsed and broke apart, the sailors killed by falling spars and yards. The battle was a force all its own and drew everything into its centre, grinding relentlessly through the thirty thousand men who eventually lay dead and injured.

The impossible noise, the soldiers everywhere, the drum at Johannes’s hip, smacking his leg as he marched and drummed, onwards, or was it in circles, who could tell?

And then he was running.

It was as though his body had willed it and not his mind, running, and the drum like a man at his leg, trying to pull him down, and Johannes panicked and ran as hard as he could, he’d never run so fast.

Maybe he was a coward.

The air burned his lungs and ahead of him were more soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, French or Russian he couldn’t tell, and they cried out and died and were torn by explosions, and then up ahead he saw the shadowed darkness of trees and they were very still and quiet and nobody called out and nobody shot him and the trees were there, a miracle. Johannes Meyer almost wept at the sight of the trees, they were so close, and he was running towards them and he couldn’t believe the trees, and then suddenly he was there, inside the trees, he was there, and he believed them.

Book IV

BOOK IV

THE NEGER VRIJCORPS

In Surinam, Captain Willem van der Velde was something of a hero.

Back in 1772 he’d successfully led his free Negroes (the Black Rangers) against the rebel runaway slaves known as the Bonis, who, emboldened by greater numbers, hunger and revenge, had attacked the white plantations, murdered the masters and their families, and plundered the bursting storehouses. In time, they’d reached the very outskirts of the capital Paramaribo, forcing the gouty lords of sugar to take action. Unfit to fight the Bonis themselves (the thought of it amused their wives), they decided to buy an army.

‘But the cheapest going,’ they all agreed. ‘We have expenses!’