“Major Georg—who is not even seventeen?” André looked up in open puzzlement at his gendarmerie commander. The latter had just submitted the third list of envoys from the Prusso-Austrian Coalition.

  Under the Prussian officer-training tradition of Frederick the Great, youths with royal blood could be groomed into junior and middle-ranking officers before they reached seventeen or eighteen. Yet this Georg clearly did not feel like a member of the Hohenzollern house. More than that, Georg sounded like a given name rather than a surname—much as André Franck himself had always preferred to be called André rather than by his family name, Franck.

  General Chassé explained, “My intelligence is absolutely correct. Apart from the chief envoy, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the most exalted figure in the delegation is Major Georg, who serves as the military deputy envoy.”

  André asked, “Where are the Prussian negotiators now?”

  “By order of the Command Headquarters, until the coalition hands over the Hessian mercenaries, no envoy is permitted to cross our lines. So the Prussian carriage is still two kilometers outside Sainte-Menehould.”

  After the coalition seized the Islettes Pass on the twenty-first, it took another two full days to push the front forward to the outskirts of Sainte-Menehould, ten kilometers away, on the far bank of the Aisne. Before crossing the Aisne, Duc de Brunswick also sent small probing detachments north toward Vienne-le-Chateau and south toward Verrières; both were easily beaten off by the French forces in those villages.

  Reports from forward reconnaissance added that on the twenty-third—today—a new batch of bread, wine, medicines, and ammunition had arrived with the coalition’s supply train. Duc de Brunswick and his Prusso-Austrian Coalition likely did not realize that this would be the last resupply they would ever receive from Verdun.

  André waved a hand and smiled. “Lift the blockade for now. Let them through. Have your gendarmes escort the two envoys in full strength to the Somme Manor in the eastern outskirts of Suippes; the rest of the delegation’s attendants are to turn back the way they came. Until I enter the manor, no one is to have contact with the Prussians except your gendarmes. Also, notify the Military Intelligence Office: I want Major Georg’s true identity clarified as soon as possible. My instincts tell me that fellow will be a nuisance—though perhaps a useful one.”

  The gendarmerie commander saluted and turned to leave, but André stopped him.

  “One more thing. Those five National Convention deputies detained by the gendarmerie in Reims a week ago—Paris has sent a signal by semaphore. The new Convention voted this morning to adopt my proposal and formally revoke the five men’s status as national representatives. They no longer enjoy judicial immunity. So have your military tribunal begin proceedings at once. Their term of hard labour is not to be less than three months.”

  Under the standing regulations of the Northern Command Headquarters, the Marne had been classified as the foremost front line against the enemy since late August. To guard against sabotage in the rear by noble insurgents who might defect to the Prusso-Austrian Coalition, André had long since issued a strict order: without permission from the gendarmerie command, no one was to enter the war zone. Violators were to be detained in a holding facility converted from an abandoned monastery, kept there until their identity could be verified and suspicion of espionage ruled out, and only then released. Many would also be fined. As for those who resisted, the gendarmerie had authority to shoot them on the spot.

  Beyond mere security, this measure was also designed for strategic deception—above all, to conceal the existence of a 40,000-man strategic reserve. For a long time, André had instructed the Military Intelligence Office and the gendarmerie intelligence apparatus to feed the coalition command a stream of pleasing falsehoods through every available channel, including the émigré detachment. Among these claims were that the Army of the Meuse was severely understrength, short of officers and reserves, poorly trained, poorly armed, and low in morale.

  Yet there were always men who did not fear death and insisted on leaping straight onto André’s bayonet point.

  Those five newly seated deputies had originally been charged by the Convention to travel to Soissons and inspect the condition of the new-recruit camps. For reasons unknown, they abruptly diverted to Reims, forty kilometers away. Reims was André’s own stronghold; its defenses were naturally tight, and the gendarmes stopped the deputies’ carriage at the city gate.

  At first, once their identities were confirmed, the gendarmes treated them with outward courtesy and urged them to return at once, explaining that the entire Marne was already a front-line war zone. The deputies refused. They proclaimed that everything was an underhanded dictatorship engineered by André and swore to expose it.

  Hearing men publicly smear the supreme commander, the Reims gendarmes ceased to be polite. They seized the five deputies and escorted them by force to the gendarmerie command. Hours later, Suippes headquarters relayed André’s reply: on the pretext of identity verification, detain them in the gendarmerie holding cells; until further instructions, do not interrogate them. After all, as representatives of the National Assembly, they still possessed judicial immunity.

  Although information passed along by Javert confirmed that the deputies’ intrusion into Reims had been a rash impulse rather than a deliberate plot, no evidence could be found—by Javert or by the Military Intelligence Office—of anyone directing them from behind the scenes. André’s political instincts, however, told him it was highly likely to be a new probe arranged by Brissot.

  Accordingly, André had Prieur—a deputy elected from the Marne to the National Convention, formerly a Constituent Assembly representative and the head of the Reims Polytechnic Institute—introduce a motion accusing the five deputies of using illegal means to force their way into the war zone as spies serving the émigré rebel detachment, intent on passing intelligence to the Prusso-Austrian Coalition and undermining stability and unity in the rear.

  If such charges stood, they would send the five men straight toward the guillotine. Brissot, Guadet, and Vergniaud fought back fiercely. In the end, Marquis de Condorcet intervened and wrote a letter that only just persuaded André to relent. Before long, the Northern Command Headquarters agreed to withdraw the espionage charge; but as punishment, the Convention had to vote to strip the five men of their seats, reduce them to ordinary civil status, and place them under review by the gendarmerie command. André, for his part, had already declared that he would still teach the troublemakers a lesson: three months of hard labour.

  André himself had risen to control the Army of the North and the former Army of Moselle, now the Army of the Meuse, precisely through the elevated authority of a Convention Plenipotentiary. After his own success, he had grown deeply hostile to the idea of other deputies following his path and arriving to share in his towering power. Thus, from the beginning, he struck like lightning to intimidate the ambitious newcomers who had taken their seats in the new Convention.

  The message from the supreme commander was unmistakable: no one was to lay a hand on the three great armies under the Northern Command Headquarters, nor on the northern provinces. Yes—these were André’s sphere. Any deputy who craved agitation and intrigue could go and stir up the central and southern provinces, or the Army of the Pyrenees, or the Army of the Alps, or the Northern Italy army that was now being assembled.

  At times, André grew tired of this tedious political game. As a commander at war, he not only had to manage the fighting at the front but also, without pause, keep a wary eye on the National Convention’s attempts to pull him back by the heels. There had even been a period when he daydreamed that, once the great Army of the Meuse had successfully encircled and destroyed the Prusso-Austrian Coalition’s main force and then occupied the Austrian Netherlands and Holland, he would merge those lands with France’s northern provinces into a new country and break away from France entirely. It had been the dream, in another world, of General Dumouriez.

  But such madness could never become reality. Even if more than 6,000,000 Netherlanders, north and south, and nearly 5,000,000 citizens of the northern fifteen provinces were willing to become André’s loyal subjects, they could not withstand enemies closing in from every direction.

  So it remained necessary to continue the dance with Paris. At the very least, while the foreign intervention armies had not been destroyed or driven off French soil, the Jacobins could not afford a severe internal fracture—even if unity existed only on the surface.

  For that reason, despite the incident of the five deputies forcing their way into the war zone, André did not press the advantage too far. When Danton wrote to ask whether André would support Robespierre’s proposal to expel Brissot and his circle from the Jacobin club, André expressed his opposition. He insisted that, until the foreign armies were annihilated or had withdrawn, the Jacobins could not endure a ruinous internal struggle.

  …

  Wilhelm von Humboldt, aged twenty-six, was a Prussian scholar with a head of blond hair and a powerful build. In 1787, he and his brother Alexandre—who would later become a renowned scientist—entered the University of Frankfurt together; a year later, both transferred to the University of G?ttingen. Not until 1790 did the brothers begin their separate careers.

  Half a year earlier, Humboldt had been declared wanted by King Wilhelm II of Prussia. Earlier that year, influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution, Humboldt had published a long essay in the Berlin Monthly titled On the Limits of State Action. In it he denounced the Prince-Elector of Mainz, Karl Theodor von Dalberg, for advocating what Humboldt called “the most timid and the most aggressive despotism.” In substance, Humboldt was attacking the so-called enlightened absolutism then practiced in Prussia and Austria, and promoting the three principles Kant summarized: freedom for all, equality for all, and autonomy for all.

  Fortunately, Humboldt had once served for a time as a tutor within the Mecklenburg family, in which Princess Louise—the Crown Prince’s fiancée—resided. With Princess Louise’s help, Humboldt escaped his legal troubles in Berlin and entered the Prusso-Austrian Coalition as a staff officer to Wilhelm III, rising overnight.

  Naturally, Humboldt felt gratitude toward Princess Louise. He even persuaded Wilhelm III to disguise her as the Crown Prince’s major and aide-de-camp and bring her along to France on what she considered a tour—yes, a tour; to a girl of seventeen who remained innocent and na?ve, that was what “war” looked like.

  Yet Humboldt, serving as the coalition’s negotiating envoy, very much did not want Princess Louise to follow him under the guise of Major Georg. He could not persuade the Crown Prince to forbid it; Wilhelm III adored his fiancée to excess. As a result, many in the coalition headquarters—seeing the deputy commander constantly closeted with his “major aide” behind closed doors—began whispering that Wilhelm III, like Frederick the Great, might have acquired some “habit that God detests.”

  Almost no one knew that the “Major Georg” with a “finely tanned complexion” and “blue eyes” was, in truth, Princess Louise of Mecklenburg.

  In the end, Humboldt accepted Major Georg’s insistence on accompanying him, but in an almost commanding tone he ordered the princess not to speak out of turn—above all, not to challenge the French commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, everything went against his wishes. When André arrived at the Somme Manor, he and “Major Georg” erupted into a fierce confrontation.

  The beautiful princess, born to an old German princely house, looked down on the “wild boy” from Reims who lacked aristocratic polish. She intended to scold the wicked leader of the French rebels, force him and his rebel army to surrender at once, and restore the poor Louis XVI to the throne of France. Perhaps, she imagined, she might even persuade the French nobility to spare André from hanging and instead exile him to the bleak wilderness of North America.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  From beginning to end, André simply tilted his head, smiling without smiling, watching the farce performed by this “Major Georg” whose frame was slight and whose voice was sweet. The Prussian deputy envoy seemed to feel that, facing a French commander well over 1.8 meters tall, he looked too short and lacked presence.

  So the cross-dressed intruder climbed up onto a stone mill, half a head higher than the ground, planted a hand on his hip, and jabbed a slender finger toward André in outrage.

  “Remember this, leader of the rabble. This is my final warning to you:

  You and your army must surrender to the Prusso-Austrian Coalition at once;

  France must withdraw from the occupied Austrian Netherlands;

  Alsace and Lorraine must be ceded to the Kingdom of Prussia;

  France must return, in full, the Catholic Church properties it has seized;

  The Jacobins must be dissolved, and Louis XVI must be restored to his throne by birthright…”

  André smiled and silently halted the reflexive movement of his aides, who were reaching for their swords.

  Then he turned to the Prussian envoy, who looked stricken and at a loss.

  “Monsieur Humboldt, in France, the last man who dared to mouth off at me to my face spent two weeks in the quarry on hard labour. It seems Major Georg wishes to taste the delights of French hard labour as well.”

  Humboldt panicked and stepped forward to plead. “Commander, we are envoys. We are entitled to diplomatic protection under the Peace of Westphalia.”

  André laughed, pointed at Princess Louise on the millstone, and said, “When he calls me the leader of the rabble, there is no law of nations to speak of. So now you have no status as envoys. You are my prisoners. Captain—send this ill-tempered major to the quarry at Reims. Hard labour for three months.”

  He flicked a hand. Captain Grisel, a huge man, seized the delicate “Prussian officer” and yanked him down from the millstone, then shoved and dragged the prisoner toward the gate without the slightest regard for the shrieks and wails.

  “You cannot do this, Commander—have mercy!” Humboldt blocked André’s path, begging bitterly. “This is a misunderstanding. We can redeem ourselves with gold.”

  “I do not like gold, Monsieur Humboldt.” André’s tone shifted at once. “But I do hope your elder brother, Monsieur Alexandre von Humboldt, can come to France to assist me with a small matter. The University of Reims needs an authoritative botanist.

  “As for you, I have a plan for compulsory education, intended to ensure that children of every class in the northern provinces of France have the same opportunity to receive schooling. In my view, if you oversee and implement this plan, it will advance twice as fast with half the effort. If you agree, Major Georg will be spared hard labour and treated as well as you are. Within a month at most, I will release him to return home. Of course, you and your brother will serve me for ten years.”

  …

  As a politician, André believed that conflicts in this world could be resolved by negotiation and exchange. Even the solemn oaths he had delivered in the Assembly hall had been, at least in part, theatre for other people’s ears.

  In truth, if the Prussians offered a price that suited him, André would not object to politely escorting the intervention army back out of France. Aside from a handful of German states swollen with wealth, André had little interest, for the time being, in the lands east of the Rhine. Prussia in particular: more than thirty years after the Seven Years’ War, it still had not repaid the foreign debts it had accumulated, and Berlin’s treasury was so empty it might as well have held dead rats. If not for Frederick’s lingering prestige, Prussia would sooner or later face a revolution of its own, as France had.

  So, in André’s eyes, fighting the Prussians to the death had little practical value even if he won a crushing victory. The Habsburgs, by contrast—the richest royal house in Europe—were the best target for carving. The Austrian Netherlands and Holland were prosperous lands; northern Italy, under Austrian influence, was even better for plunder. The so-called Northern Italy army was being hurriedly assembled in the southern provinces largely because André had pushed for it.

  At the same time, André possessed an instinctive, almost inborn sense of superiority. Many who judged the supreme commander of the north said of him, “When he is gentle, he is a gentleman; when he is arrogant, he is like a king.” When someone spoke to him with insolence and arrogance, André returned it tenfold.

  So Princess Louise struck a mine—and it was the kind that exploded the instant it was touched. Had André not wished to use her to compel the Humboldt brothers into his service, he would not have minded at all letting the Crown Prince’s future wife suffer a great deal more, even to the point of vanishing without trace. From the standpoint of Franco-German political geography, allowing the future “mother of the German Empire” to survive and later shine across Europe did not suit André’s ambition to check and suppress German power.

  Moreover, provoking the Prussian Crown Prince by detaining envoys—driving the coalition to press west in reckless fury—was itself part of the staff’s established strategy. Indeed, when news reached the coalition headquarters that the French gendarmerie had seized two members of the mission on the grounds that they had insulted Commander André, Wilhelm III exploded with rage. Dining with the commander-in-chief and the chief of staff, the Crown Prince was so furious that he overturned the table.

  He immediately demanded that Duc de Brunswick permit him to be the first to lead troops across the Biesme and attack Sainte-Menehould, forcing a pitched battle between the armies until he could rescue his fiancée from the hands of contemptible French scoundrels.

  This request threw Brunswick’s entire schedule into disorder, but neither the commander-in-chief nor the chief of staff, the Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg, voiced any objection. They knew objection was pointless. Now there was nothing to do but commit fully and hope to crush the French army in battle as soon as possible and seize Chalons or Reims.

  On the far side of the Biesme, after receiving orders from General Moncey, commander of the Army of the Meuse, the French commander at Sainte-Menehould—Masséna—fought a delaying retreat. To lure the Prussians and Austrians into crossing smoothly, he even ordered his gunners to fire their few pieces wildly into the river; every shot, naturally, missed the two pontoon bridges the Prusso-Austrian Coalition was building.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, two dense coalition columns descended from the hillside on the far bank and streamed across the pontoon bridges without end. From a distance it resembled a vast religious procession on the Feast of the Ascension: bayonets glittering like candle flames, the shining helmets of dragoons and the bright cloaks of hussars flashing against one another. Seen from afar, the bridges looked as if they were coated with a crawling layer of densely packed, multicoloured ants.

  On the opposite bank, the miserable French defenders, after “holding on” for roughly forty minutes, judged themselves unable to resist the mighty Prusso-Austrian Coalition and collapsed into another full retreat. Sainte-Menehould became an empty town at once. As before, the cowardly French fled with every scrap of food, drink, and livestock, burning whatever roofs could be seen and knocking down the walls, leaving only a deserted ruin.

  Near dusk, amid the thunderous cheers of coalition soldiers, Duc de Brunswick—having just crossed the pontoon bridge—received disastrous news: at midday, fifty kilometers away, Verdun had been struck by a French assault. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, the fortress fell.

  …

  Just as Hubert walked out from the émigré detachment headquarters at Verdun Cathedral, at the entrance to the cathedral square a Prussian colonel with a snow-white moustache—Colonel Manstein—called out to him. Manstein was the garrison commander left in charge of Verdun.

  “Hey, my friend from Reims!” the Prussian colonel asked Hubert in clumsy French. “Can you help me price this thing?”

  Hubert froze—until Colonel Manstein stepped aside and revealed a standing clock nearly as tall as a man’s waist, made of gold, silver, and pure copper. At its top was a chubby little angel beating a gong and drum, seemingly cast in solid gold, rendered with astonishing detail.

  Hubert circled the gilded clock for a long moment, then said, “If you keep this in Verdun, you would get at most 600 livres. If you take it to Reims, it should sell for 2,000 to 3,000 livres. And if you carry it to Paris, it will be worth no less than 10,000 livres—about a 500-louis profit.”

  “Exactly. Paris is our goal!” The Prussian colonel beamed. He called a servant at once and ordered him to pack away the treasure worth 10,000 livres. The servant lifted the clock with great care, panting; its weight was clearly formidable.

  Manstein stopped the Frenchman again. “By the way, Monsieur Hubert, are you free tomorrow at noon? I should like to invite you to the Abbey of Saint-Vanne—our headquarters—to share a midday meal.”

  Hubert accepted with pleasure and waved a hand. “Colonel, I will bring a bottle of genuine Reims Champagne.”

  When he turned away, Hubert quickened his pace. The interruption had delayed him by a quarter of an hour; he was late for his meeting with Colonel Moreau, who had slipped into the city.

  In June of last year, Hubert had followed Comte de Provence into exile in Brussels and then wandered between Vienna and Berlin. Early this year, he received orders relayed by the Military Intelligence Office on André’s behalf, directing him to infiltrate the émigré detachment. Using the cover of serving as Comte de Provence’s private secretary, the former prosecutor of Reims easily gained the trust of Comte d’Artois, the Comte’s younger brother. After war broke out in April, Hubert was appointed the noble insurgents’ logistics officer.

  In a warehouse two blocks from Verdun Cathedral, Colonel Moreau—disguised as a porter—had fallen into trouble. A group of Prussian officers had barged into the émigré supply depot to drink and carouse. At first, it was not a serious problem. Despite supply difficulties imposed by weather and roads, the officers’ liquor ration was not short.

  But by the end, the Prussians stopped observing any camp rule. A drunken captain climbed onto a table and shouted at his companions, “Gentlemen, are we women, or what? We’ve drunk ourselves blind and we still haven’t broken a single thing!”

  He flung a cup into the air. Then cups began to fly everywhere; the clatter of shattering glass and porcelain filled the warehouse. Tables and chairs were overturned. Bowls, plates, and bottles were smashed to fragments. Sacks of flour, potatoes, and spices were hurled through broken windows into the street. When the Prussians found there was nothing left worth throwing, they began throwing the soldiers guarding the depot for sport.

  The Royalist soldiers screamed and did not dare fight back as the Prussians lifted them one by one and tossed them out of the windows, crashing onto the street below. Some split their heads; some broke bones. Seven or eight were sent to hospital, and one unlucky man was grievously injured and blinded when a shard of glass pierced his eye. When they tired of throwing Royalist soldiers, the Prussian drunkards turned to the French hired labourers, among whom were Moreau and his two companions. At the colonel’s signal, the three men offered no resistance and prepared to endure the humiliation.

  At the last moment, Hubert arrived at the warehouse, accompanied by a detachment of coalition gendarmes. The gendarmes showed no politeness at all: they knocked the drunken Prussians down one by one, hauled them onto a white canvas-covered wagon, and dragged them back to headquarters to await Colonel Manstein’s final disposition.

  After Hubert assigned supply-train labourers to sort out the wrecked warehouse, he used “moving barrels” as a pretext to lead Moreau and his men into a deeply concealed cellar. Two of Moreau’s subordinates remained above to keep watch.

  “How many of you made it in?” Hubert asked.

  “You know how strict the gendarmerie searches are. Only the three of us could slip into the city. But out in the Argonne Forest, one full infantry regiment is lying in wait—2,100 men—under my assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Decon. Don’t worry. They’re solid lads trained out of the Reims camp, not replacement dregs from the Rhine army.” As he spoke, Moreau pulled a bottle of decent-looking Champagne from the rack, intending to pour himself a drink.

  Hubert lunged forward and snatched it away. “My apologies, Colonel. This bottle is a special 1777 vintage. Neither you nor I may drink it. Tomorrow at noon it must be presented to Colonel Manstein.”

  As he spoke, Hubert pushed a different bottle of red wine into the French colonel’s arms. “Colonel, your force is too small. The Prussians have not only stationed 3,000 men in Verdun. Two German brigades are also camped at Vaux and Douaumont, ten kilometers away. They can reinforce the fortress within two hours.”

  Moreau smiled. “You can rest easy. The German troops in those two forts cannot easily approach along the Meuse. I have contacted Colonel Davout of the rifled-musket regiment; he has guaranteed that he will block those damned Germans so they cannot make progress on the mountain roads and will have to crawl forward at a snail’s pace. As for the garrison inside the city, only about half are Prussians. The other 1,500 are likely your émigré detachment soldiers.”

  Hubert understood what the other man wanted, but shook his head. “That is troublesome. Among those I can trust—and who will obey my orders—there are fewer than thirty. They will not be much help.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You only need to prepare several sets of Royalist white uniforms for me. Tomorrow at noon, find a chance to control the fortress commander first, so the coalition loses direction at the crucial moment. I will sow discord in the camp. Over the midday meal, I will incite the Prussians and the Royalist French into a brawl, triggering prolonged chaos inside Verdun. The gendarmerie will be too busy to look elsewhere. Then your men can open the western gate so that Lieutenant Colonel Kant can lead the regiment in and storm the city. After that, we take Verdun back.”

  As he reached the end, Moreau could not help remembering how, years earlier, he and his current assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Kant, had run with street gangs in Rennes, the capital of Brittany. Back then he had successfully set two noble factions at each other’s throats, and the brawl had ended with his own commoners’ faction victorious.

  The same method again.

  At noon the next day, Hubert used his luncheon with Colonel Manstein to get the man drunk and then abduct him from the Abbey of Saint-Vanne. At the same time, in the coalition camp next door, Moreau and his companions exploited the deep hostility between the Prussians and the Royalist French and sparked a riot involving more than a thousand men—so large that even if the gendarmerie across the city rushed to the scene, it could not swiftly suppress it.

  While everyone’s attention was fixed on the camp near Saint-Vanne, Hubert and his men quietly opened the western gate. More than 2,000 French soldiers, already poised, surged into the city according to their prearranged objectives—toward the gun emplacements, the gates, the key intersections, the coalition headquarters, and finally the coalition camp itself.

  The entire operation unfolded as if rehearsed. The French took control of the fortress-city with ease.