By My Sword Alone David Black (best story books to read txt) 📖

*

The winter dragged on. Several times more James led his dragoons out on forays against the Russians’ lines of communication. Some of these actions were more successful than others when it came to plunder, and on only two did he lose any troopers killed. The dragoons themselves, he felt, had become more confident, although it was hard to tell from their flat, dull, Slav faces, drilled down the generations to never betray an emotion or inner thought – or so it sometimes seemed to him.

Christmas came and went; a drab affair by Polish standards, he was assured. It was the siege’s fault, people said. Except this wasn’t a siege, at least not yet, General von Bittinghofen had kept telling him. It was just a lot of Russians hanging about outside their front door. He’d know when the siege started, proper. Nobody would be in any doubt.

James continued to call on Dorothea, and they conversed on matters ranging from the state of the city’s defences and the progress of the Russian works, to the performances of the king’s chamber orchestra, with only the odd upbraiding from her at his failure to communicate with their mutual acquaintance, de Valençay. He had the impression her heart was no longer in that particular hobby-horse. She seldom flirted with him now. It was all too apparent that her manner had become far more serious, although the precise forces at work behind this new gravity, she studiously never discussed. And James was wise enough not to pry.

His fellow officers among the king’s small army in the city continued to keep their distance, apart from Poinatowski, who continued to shoulder a substantial role in the running of the regiment. In Beart, his second in command, James began to see an officer who was there not because of his abilities, but because he had probably failed at home. A plodding, unimaginative man who, however, did not seem to harbour any malice and who could at least be relied upon to get on with all the administrative business of soldiering.

Then the tempo of the skirmishing around the Russian siege works stepped up, and James and his dragoons found themselves drawn in.

*

The fruits of this despotism are like a poisoned windfall, writes James, seated at a desk in his own lodgings, his quill scratching to the light of a candle constantly guttering in the many cold draughts. It blankets the land and rots everything it touches …

He is writing to David Hume, in Edinburgh.

In an age when the chances of a letter finding you on a foreign shore were slim, the busy shipping lanes between the ports of the Baltic Sea and the Port of Leith have rendered their correspondence routine. A state of affairs that James is becoming increasingly grateful for. Quite simply, he needs someone to talk to, to help him come to terms with this new world in which he now lives. And in this letter, he is fulminating on the injustices of man in his current state; a topic on which he and David have long debated.

The countryside here is nothing like the land that bred us both. It is flat; an endless flatness from horizon to horizon with no mountains for 100 leagues and only ripples in the ground for hills. This soulless view is broken only by scant patches of birch and impoverished settlements of peasant hovels that do not deserve the name village. All the ones we pass on our patrols have been stripped by the occupying Russian army. The livestock stolen and slaughtered to feed their horde, the food stores emptied of grain and hay, the food lifted even from their plates, and the fit male peasantry carried off to be used as beasts of burden digging trenches and battery revetments for the Russian besiegers. Those that are left, are left to starve in the cold that grips this winter landscape. While I have not seen or heard of any deliberate atrocity or ill-usage of women folk as in the great religious war of the last century, I fear that is only because the Russian officers make their men so busy that they have not the leisure for such daemonic diversions.

And then you come inside the walls of Danzig, and commerce and industry proceed as if all around were normal. With its outlet to the sea, trade continues and great profits are made, buying and selling. Trade even continues in its own convoluted fashion with the Russian enemy, especially in goods that suit their officers, such as wine and other fine provender.

He is particularly upset this evening because of the events of the previous one.

He and his Dzików had been placed under the command of one of von Bittinghofen’s subordinates, a particularly stupid man convinced that he is the new Achilles. For several weeks it has been this senior officer’s mission to harass the enemy’s trench building to the south of the city. Last night, his plan for disruption envisioned trapping a significant number of the enemy engineers in one of their own covered trenches, and burying them alive. Or at least, that was his stated intention.

James’ revulsion on hearing the plan almost drove him from the room, and indeed his service as Dzików colonel. But he kept his own counsel, and listened, incredulous, as to what this officer, one General of Brigade Karol Vytautas, a Lithuanian apparently, had in mind.

He stood over a huge map of the city and its surrounding terrain, and with great sweeps of his hand outlined his plan. ‘The Russian engineers have pushed saps through the village of Schidlitz to here,’ – saps being covered trenches that allowed the engineers to get closer to the city’s walls without the city’s guns being able to fire down on them – ‘and this is where they are digging gun batteries from where