Constantinople

You can learn to live with hunger, but you never get used to the damp.

By the winter of 1799, the Republic had been dying for ten years, and it was taking the Franche-Comté down with it. In Besançon, we didn’t talk about liberty anymore. We talked about the price of lard. We talked about the salt tax. We talked about how many cords of green pine it took to keep the rot from setting into the floorboards before the spring thaws.

My father had died three years earlier in a hospital at Mainz, wearing a blue uniform that had turned grey from grease and rain. He left my mother with four hectares of rocky hillside, five hundred livres of paper assignats that weren't worth the twine used to bind them, and two sons who had grown too large for their coats.

I was twenty-one. My brother, Henri, was sixteen. We spent that December hauling cured ash timber down from the ridge on a sledge that had no grease for the runners.

The town was a limestone trap. Every morning, the fog came off the Doubs river like cold wool, coating the stone walls, the church roofs, and the barrels of the National Guard muskets in a fine, grey slime. There was no money. If you wanted bread, you traded iron. If you wanted iron, you traded wood. The politicians in Paris had changed the names of the months and told us we were living in the Year Eight of Freedom, but the flour in the bins still smelled of weevils.

I remember the day the world changed because my boots gave out completely. The left welt split while we were dragging the final load of ash to the military commissary. The frozen mud came straight through the wool rags I’d wrapped around my toes. It was a sharp, clean pain that went straight to the bone.

The commissary, a man named Tessier who wore a tricolor cockade pinned to a greasy velvet coat, didn't even look at our timber.

"The Directory is finished," he told us, tossing a handful of walnut shells into his brazier. "There is a new First Consul in Paris. General Bonaparte. He has canceled all provincial supply contracts. Take the wood back to the ridge, Delacroix."

"We have no flour," I said. I didn't shout. You don't waste breath when you're cold. "My brother hasn't eaten anything but boiled turnips since Tuesday."

Tessier looked at me then. His eyes were small, watery, and completely indifferent. "Then teach him to like turnips, Matthieu. The Republic has plenty of them."

We dragged the sledge out into the square. Henri sat on the timber, his hands buried in his armpits, his breath rising in small, erratic plumes. He didn't cry. We had forgotten how to do that by '96.

Across the cobblestones, near the fountain of Saint-Pierre, a crowd had gathered around a fresh broadsheet. It was the first time I saw his name in print. Bonaparte. The ink was black, thick, and heavy on the white paper. The words didn't promise equality or virtue. They promised twenty francs in silver coin upon enlistment, three hundred grams of white bread a day, and a pair of leather shoes with brass buckles.

I looked at Henri’s pinched face. I looked at my own split boot, where the red skin was already turning black from the frost.

The old world was a dead mule carcass frozen into the ditch. The new world had leather shoes.

The enlistment table was set up inside the nave of Saint-Pierre, right where the altar used to be before the revolution cleared out the saints.

The air inside smelled of damp stone, old incense, and the wet wool of forty men who had all come to the same conclusion I had. A single tallow candle sat on the pine table, its flame guttering every time the heavy oak doors creaked open to let in another draft from the square.

Behind the table sat a sergeant of the 6th Line Infantry. He had a scar that ran from the corner of his left eye down into his moustache, turning the hair white where the blade had cut. He didn't look like a man who cared about the Republic. He looked like a man who knew exactly how many paces it took to clear a ditch.

"Name," he muttered, not looking up from his ledger.

"Matthieu Delacroix."

The quill scratched. It was a dry, rhythmic sound that felt incredibly loud under the high vaulted ceiling.

"Age?"

"Twenty-one. Twenty-two come the spring."

"Trade?"

"Timber," I said. "My father was a cooper before the war."

The sergeant paused, his quill hovering a fraction of an inch above the paper. He looked up, his one good eye fixing on my shoulder, measuring the width of the bone beneath my patched smock. "Can you read the grease-notes on a shipment?"

"I can read a manifest. I can write my name."

A slight nod. He dipped the quill again, then looked past my shoulder at the boy standing half-hidden in my shadow. Henri was trying to hold his chin high, but his knuckles were white where he gripped the edge of his threadbare coat.

"And the shadow behind you?" the sergeant asked.

"My brother," I said, stepping slightly to the left to block the sergeant's view of Henri’s narrow chest. "Henri Delacroix. He’s eighteen. Born in the winter of '82."

The lie tasted like cold iron. Henri was sixteen, and his ribs still showed through his shirt from the lean months of October.

The sergeant lowered his quill. He leaned back in his creaking chair, his one eye drifting from my face to Henri’s. A man who spends his life pulling men out of villages can spot a sixteen-year-old by the way his coat hangs off his shoulders. For a second, the nave was completely silent, save for the wind rattling the high stained-glass windows.

"Eighteen," the sergeant repeated, his voice flat. He looked at Henri. "You look like you've been living on cabbage soup and prayers, boy. Can you carry a twenty-pound pack for twelve leagues a day?"

"I can carry forty pounds of green ash from the high ridge to the river," Henri said. His voice cracked slightly on the word ridge, but he didn't blink.

The sergeant let out a dry, short breath that might have been a laugh. He didn't challenge the lie. He didn't care about birth registries; the parish records had been burned in '93 anyway. He just cared about teeth, legs, and a man's willingness to stand still while grapeshot tore through the air.

"The 6th needs men, and it needs drummers," the sergeant said, turning his ledger. "You sign for three years, both of you. You get twenty francs each when the muster is full, and you march south to Dijon by the end of the week. If either of you runs, we hunt you down and shoot you against the nearest barn wall. Do you understand the terms?"

"We understand," I said.

I picked up the feather first. My fingers were stiff from the morning haul, the skin rough and stained with ash sap. I signed my name quickly, the ink black and wet against the coarse paper.

Then I passed the quill to Henri. His hand shook slightly as he took it. I put my palm flat on his shoulder, gripping the bone through his coat, holding him steady.

"Write it clear, Henri," I whispered. "Eighteen."

He dipped the point, looked at me once, and then traced his name onto the line below mine.

The ink was the same color as the mud in our boots. With a few strokes of a feather, I had bought my brother a pair of shoes, three hundred grams of bread, and a ticket to a battlefield in Italy.