Narbonne watched André’s youthful back vanish into the stairwell, and felt a keen envy. He told himself that even when he had served as a cabinet minister, he had never been truly glorious like this—never once enjoyed the heartfelt affection and support of officers and men.

  Outside the window, deafening cheers echoed again and again: tens of thousands of soldiers had come of their own accord to the church square to offer the commissioner the warmest welcome. For André had ordered the gendarmerie to publicize his solemn promises: bread would be 70% of every soldier’s staple ration; every day there would be the scent of meat drifting from the soup; and, as amends for past wrongs, the corrupt quartermaster had already been shot in public, while all accomplices would be brought to justice.

  So above the square, the impassioned cries rose countless times—“Long live André!” “Long live the Commissioner!”—a thrilling chorus. Of course, almost none of the officers and men knew that among the “over one hundred accomplices,” more than half were anti-war propagandists acting under Marat’s faction. Under André’s arrangement with Marat, those men would be expelled from the camp after a first arrest and a whipping; if caught a second time, they would be shot on the spot for treason.

  At this moment, Narbonne could be certain: the number of “long lives” André received from the rank and file already exceeded the total Lafayette had been granted in two months as commander. Under ordinary conditions, Lafayette communicated with common soldiers only at parades, or from a high outdoor platform at headquarters—aloof, proud, and distant.

  But André was different. When he heard the shouting from within headquarters, he merely lifted a hand on the terrace and called out, “Wait for me!” Then he left Lafayette behind and strode straight down among the men without hesitation.

  He accepted every handshake and embrace with an easy warmth, never caring whether an officer wore a proper parade uniform or whether a soldier’s clothes were filthy. Smiling, patient, he answered every question—pay, food, promotions, war, and all the army group’s countless affairs.

  With gendarmes helping him, André climbed onto the carriage of a 12-pounder set on the church square and shouted to the soldiers around him:

  “Soldiers, on behalf of 25,000,000 Frenchmen, I thank you! It is your existence and your devotion that have forced those foolish, cowardly German princes to abandon their support for the rebel aristocrats and kept the northern frontier of France quiet. And our homeland—one that rewards merit—will repay you with its prosperity and strength…

  “Some have complained to the National Assembly that you eat poorly and sleep poorly, here in camp. So André has come from Paris. Because your demands and your claims are precisely the commissioner’s duty. And now I can tell you, plainly, with absolute certainty:

  “Bread will come!

  “Meat soup will come!

  “Army blankets will come!

  “Believe me—everything will come!”

  The moment he finished, the square erupted again in cries that seemed to split the sky—“Long live André!” “Long live the Commissioner!” Very soon, two tall grenadiers approached, hoisted the commissioner onto their shoulders, and carried him through the camp roads as he accepted the roar of devotion from the entire Army of the Moselle.

  Hearing the tumult from the church square, General Kellermann and General Custine abandoned their paperwork and hurried over. When they saw the massed soldiers were unarmed, they relaxed—only slightly. Then they spotted André, swallowed by the black sea of bodies.

  “Though I still don’t much like him, I must admit André has a gift for stirring and controlling men’s hearts,” Custine lowered his voice to Kellermann’s ear. “If he ordered the soldiers to point their muskets at headquarters right now, I believe more than half would carry it out without hesitation.”

  Kellermann nodded without speaking, but worry showed on his face. André’s domineering style already made the senior officers deeply uneasy; once he seized the loyalty of the rank and file as well, the entire army group might refuse to obey any order from Marshal Lafayette. Suddenly, Kellermann felt he ought to accept Marshal Luckner’s invitation and transfer to the left-wing Army of the Rhine. For he knew that when the army group moved from Metz to Sedan, the whole Army of the Moselle might fall into André’s grasp.

  At the Breton 1st Volunteer Battalion’s camp, soldiers also poured out on news of the spectacle, lining both sides of the road and shouting in unison—“Long live André!” “Long live the Commissioner!”

  Captain Decon noticed that his commander Moreau wore a strange expression. Especially when he looked at the commissioner, there was a trace of unease in his eyes. Decon meant to step forward and ask what was wrong—but the situation abruptly changed.

  Perched on the grenadiers’ shoulders, André had clearly noticed Lieutenant Colonel Moreau by the roadside. He waved to the crowd, signalling the men to fall silent at once. Then he patted the grenadiers’ shoulders, telling them to set him down. Through a corridor that opened of itself, André walked straight up to the commander of the Breton battalion.

  Very suddenly, André slapped the broad chest of the burly Lieutenant Colonel Moreau, tapping the spot above his heart, and laughed loudly:

  “Ha! You’ve had your punishment—at least you’ve spent 4 hours trembling with anxiety. So be careful in the future. If you collide with a superior again and fail to apologize at once, I’ll throw you in the cells for 4 hours!”

  Moreau was plainly at a loss before this joking “threat,” but instinct drove him to salute the higher authority. He shouted, “Long live the Commissioner!” and “Long live André!”

  André planted his hands on his hips, swept his gaze around with satisfied vanity, and accepted the soldiers’ greetings. Then he barked at Moreau in a coarse, familiar tone:

  “You damned bastard! I hear you’re the boss here—so why haven’t you introduced to me the warriors of the Breton First?”

  When André first entered the Army of the Moselle’s meeting room, he had given himself a task: plant one man inside the army group, and take one man away. The planted man was naturally Ouvrard. He would serve as André’s liaison to the Army of the Moselle, resident at headquarters, carrying out André’s instructions—and to ensure Ouvrard could work smoothly, André even handed him Captain Suchet’s gendarmerie company.

  As for the man he intended to take away, it was Lieutenant Colonel Moreau. André’s pretext was that he needed a guard detachment for his return to Paris; and the Breton 1st Volunteer Battalion—famous for never having produced a deserter—became the commissioner’s obvious choice. Marshal Lafayette had no objections. A mere infantry battalion that could hasten André’s departure back to Paris was, to Lafayette, an unalloyed delight.

  In the old clerical courtyard, when Moreau received the commissioner’s invitation, he had not even opened his mouth before the officers and soldiers crowding around burst into cheers. Everyone understood: once they became the commissioner’s guard battalion, their status, identity, andtreatment would be transformed.

  “Commissioner, this is a great honor—for me, and for the Breton 1st Volunteer Battalion,” Moreau said, choosing his words with the caution of a lawyer’s son, not letting joy carry away his judgment.

  To be frank, “the Breton 1st Volunteer Battalion” sounded splendid. In reality it was a militia raised in haste. The men had spent less than a week in a recruit depot; most still did not fully grasp the firing drill of a flintlock musket, to say nothing of live-fire practice or complex evolutions of formation. Yet one thing was worth boasting: their discipline was excellent. In the military police records, the battalion had not only produced no deserters—it had never harassed nearby farmers or sunk into petty theft.

  The next day, using his privileges as commissioner, André issued brand-new blue-and-white uniforms and weapons manufactured at the Metz arsenal to every man of the Breton 1st Volunteer Battalion. Food became ample; Spam-style tins replaced fresh meat; even wine—normally unobtainable—was supplied every other day.

  A small squad of veteran gendarmes also arrived as training instructors. Over the next three weeks—including during the march back to Paris—every man would be drilled strictly in basic training: marching and formation, recognizing friend and foe by drums, music, and flags; weapon maintenance and flintlock firing procedure; barracks order and hygiene, and so on. As for live-fire training, to conserve scarce funds, the entire army group had conducted none. The commander ordered ammunition distributed only on the day before the army marched.

  …

  In early April, during André’s fourth week at the Army of the Moselle’s base, an urgent dispatch from the Legislative Assembly was placed in his hands. He tore it open at once. It was written by the rotating chairman, Brissot, informing him that negotiations between France and Austria were proceeding extremely badly.

  Emperor Francis II had adopted a strikingly hard line: he refused to expel the French émigré nobles gathered at Coblenz, and would not dissolve the counterrevolutionary army those forced exiles had organized. In response, King Louis XVI had decided to accept the Legislative Assembly’s and the cabinet ministers’ demand for war. He would come to the Assembly’s debating hall within two weeks and publicly declare war on Austria. Brissot therefore hoped André would return to Paris as soon as possible, to help push the declaration-of-war bill through the National Assembly.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  At the same time, Marshal Lafayette received orders from the Minister of War, General Grav. The minister demanded that the Army of the Moselle intensify preparations, and before April 20—while completing the move to Sedan—submit its operational plan to the War Ministry.

  “What do you think?” Lafayette summoned Commissioner André to discuss it.

  “War breaks out around late April,” André said with unusual certainty.

  Lafayette nodded. Behind him, the desk was covered with the Army of the Moselle’s various offensive plans. He felt troubled: these plans had been drawn up by the staff in accordance with the War Minister’s intended strategy, and much of it did not fit reality at all. Even now, Lafayette did not have faith in the coming war. So he hoped to gain help from André—or at least have someone share the burden.

  André did not refuse. He spoke with disarming bluntness:

  “In certain circumstances, a general in the field may not need to obey a king’s order, if reality requires otherwise. That is why you are the highest commander of this army group. As for me, I have also received a summons from the Assembly, and I will leave Metz tomorrow for Paris. So…”

  He hugged Lafayette hard, slapped his back, and continued, “Good luck, my friend!”

  But the moment André returned to the commissioner’s office, he repeatedly warned Ouvrard and Suchet:

  “Watch Lafayette and the senior generals closely. Redouble your efforts to win over the middle and junior officers. Ensure the ordinary soldiers’ supplies. Once the Army of the Moselle’s headquarters moves to Sedan, someone will come to take over your work.”

  André’s efforts to encourage Lafayette to disregard Paris’s orders—and to have the Army of the Moselle waste time in the Ardennes Forest, then fall back to Sedan or the departmental capital Charleville-Mézières—sprang from a particular concern: André strongly suspected that the entire offensive plan, including that of the Army of the Moselle, had been leaked to the Austrians word for word.

  As diplomatic envoy Talleyrand reported from Brussels and Rotterdam, the Governor-General of the Austrian Netherlands, Duc de Teschen Albert Casimir (a man who could be ignored—except that he was the famous Archduke Charles of Austria’s uncle by marriage and adoptive father), was actively adjusting deployments: concentrating defence against the Army of the North’s line of attack; for Lafayette’s Army of the Moselle, the Austrians would use terrain to conduct scorched-earth measures and delay its march; and against the French left-wing army group, they would hold the Rhine’s natural barrier and remain in stalemate.

  As for who had leaked it, André’s answer was clear. The source was the Tuileries. From court informants bought by the Military Intelligence Office, it was known that Queen Marie communicated once a week with Vienna’s Sch?nbrunn. The letters used the standard cipher of Vienna’s diplomatic service, and the system of encryption was changed every two months.

  A week ago, the Military Intelligence Office successfully broke two copies of Queen Marie’s letters to Emperor Francis II. The letters stated that the French had not altered their planned offensive scheme, and expressed the hope that the allied armies would come to Paris soon to help Louis XVI restore absolute royal authority, hang the radical Jacobins, and exile the Feuillants led by Lafayette—the Constitutionalists—and so on.

  On this basis, André secretly instructed that all figures reported to Paris from Marne, Ardennes, and the Champagne Composite Brigade be padded with heavy falsification—overstated, understated, fabricated, concealed—so that truth and falsehood were impossible to separate.

  The War Ministry still believed that the forces André controlled amounted to no more than the 5,000-man Champagne Composite Brigade and fewer than 10,000 National Guards with little fighting power. The truth, however, was that the Champagne Composite Brigade had expanded into a formation effectively consisting of two brigade-sized infantry regiments, one mountain rifle regiment, the newly “acquired” Breton 1st Volunteer Battalion, a light cavalry brigade, a massive artillery arm with twelve companies, and a gendarmerie brigade as strategic reserve. Add the non-combat arms—engineers, train, field hospital—and total strength had already reached 20,000.

  In addition, the combined National Guard strength of Ardennes and Marne was 16,000; with full mobilization, it could surge to 30,000 within two days. All these men had undergone four to six weeks of standardized recruit training at the Bacourt camp. Local guards and reserves also drilled regularly in combined exercises with the Champagne Composite Brigade’s units, training to coordinate with regular troops and fight beside them.

  The two departments even recruited from the tens of thousands of refugees flowing in from neighbouring regions. After depot training, the best were selected into the Champagne Composite Brigade; the next tier became local National Guards; the rest were placed as militia reserve candidates. These three categories received departmental citizentreatment in their first, second, and third years, respectively.

  Manpower was not difficult. With potatoes widely cultivated, supplies would not face major shortages, and the rising Reims arsenal could meet the needs of weapons and equipment.

  There was only one problem now: money. War funds.

  From April 1792 onward, the regular troops under the Champagne Composite Brigade banner already numbered 20,000. Add 40,000 National Guards and other reserve-style forces, and the monthly military expenditure averaged 1,500,000 livres. The two departments’ finances could cover only a little over 600,000 livres—already the maximum compatible with keeping the economy healthy and growing.

  The remaining nearly 900,000 livres a month could only be kept alive by transfusions from André’s private purse: dividends from the United conglomerate, sugar and coffee income from Saint-Domingue, the gold from the Madonna statue, and a small amount of property liquidation.

  Ouvrard had warned his former employer: by the end of the first half of the year, these 60,000 men would have accumulated 4,000,000 livres of unpaid costs drawn from André’s personal treasury; by year’s end, it would break 10,000,000. André remained unmoved. A loyal army was his greatest support. Without it, he would snatch every coin he could, flee to the English countryside, and live as a rich gentleman.

  So André only asked Ouvrard lightly, “Old friend—don’t forget. Where did we get the first bucket of gold that built our fortune?”

  “Where” was not a place. It was a method: leverage—using financial leverage in Bordeaux to swallow up nationalized church lands. In Bordeaux alone, André had pocketed well over 10,000,000 livres. Such coercive enrichment came fast, and even “stimulated” the local economy to a degree. Only a game of looting and redistribution could be played in any one place exactly once.

  Now André’s eyes had turned to the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium and Luxembourg). Farther still lay the United Provinces (the Netherlands) and the former Hanseatic world—traditional lands of wealth in the Low Countries. Using the stream of intelligence from Talleyrand and other sources, combined with the Military Intelligence Office’s own threads, the gendarmerie had compiled a grand list for plunder: some 2,000 “fat sheep” families.

  When to slaughter, and how to slaughter—that was a question of method, technique, and skill. And for a descendant of a civilization with 5,000 years of experience in such games, the means were, frankly, endless.

  …

  From Metz to Reims was less than 200 kilometres. An infantry march should have taken five to six days; yet, Commissioner André and his new guard battalion took nearly ten. On the road, besides the traditional training syllabus of the Champagne Composite Brigade, the instructors—at André’s request—added new items, such as hill-climbing.

  West of Verdun, in the forested Argonne hills, Lieutenant Colonel Moreau—fully armed—leaned against the massive trunk of a beech tree, gasping in great heaves. Below him on the slope, more than 500 men lay collapsed on the grass, groaning and sighing. They now openly ignored every threat from the gendarme instructors, declaring they would rather be shot on the spot than take another step.

  Indeed, to climb and descend three ridges without rest over a distance of 20 kilometres was not work for ordinary men. The ridges rose only 500 to 600 metres and were not steep—yet the slopes ran long. Even the strongest men in the battalion, Moreau and Decon included, had been forced to stop halfway up the final hill. Yet someone had still reached the summit of the third peak.

  That man was their highest commander: General André Franck.

  Captain Decon slumped beside Moreau, seized a passing gendarme sergeant by the sleeve, and panted, “Sergeant—why can he run up there? Is he… is he truly The God-Favoured?”

  The sergeant saluted, raised his head, and answered with pride, “Of course. The general is not only the God-Favoured—he trains every day. Forget a few small hills: he can swim for hours in the Meuse.”

  Hearing this, Moreau’s temper finally drained away. At first, he had been unwilling to accept it, thinking André was just pampered—more educated, luckier, nothing more. But now he saw that the mere fact of daily high-intensity training—four hours a day (two in the morning and two at night)—was already beyond him.

  Perhaps Moreau would never know that André once felt an inexplicable terror of this revolutionary age. Beyond building his own sphere of power and pulling together an army loyal to himself, he also practiced the arts of escape relentlessly—another vital lesson André forced himself to repeat every day.

  Twenty minutes later, Moreau and Decon finally crawled and stumbled up to the ridge. André stood there, staring toward the side facing the fortress of Verdun.

  In 1552, King Henri II of France recovered Verdun from the Holy Roman Empire and formed the “Three Bishoprics” from the dioceses of Verdun, Toul, and Metz. After thirty years of brutal war, in 1648, the Duc de Richelieu—then First Cardinal Minister of France—signed the Peace of Westphalia with the Holy Roman Empire, and Verdun became, in international law, part of the Kingdom of France. Over the next century, France built a series of batteries and forts around Verdun’s strategic heights, making it a key northeastern stronghold.

  André had ordered a two-day halt near Verdun in order to study the fortress firsthand. Over the previous half-year, by André’s command, the Military Intelligence Office, the staff, and the engineers had dispatched survey parties in batches under the pretext of disaster relief. They had examined, in stages, the terrain, relief, and conditions of weather along two routes—Viron–Verdun–Valmy and Thionville–Metz–Nancy—testing maximum transport loads on roads and bridges, recording the populations of towns and villages, and the state of grain reserves, and so on.

  Behind André, the two officers who had made it up struggled to straighten their chests and prepare to salute. The superior waved them off and smiled. “At ease. You may sit—listen to me.”

  André pointed toward Verdun and asked, “If I gave you 50,000 men and sufficient artillery and ammunition—could you take this fortress, held by 3,000 defenders, within 4 days?”

  “Absolutely impossible!” Moreau and Decon answered in unison.

  Even setting aside the batteries and forts built on Verdun’s surrounding heights, the fortress-city itself was hard to assault. The broad, winding Meuse and the surrounding marshes and lakes wrapped the place like chains; only a single bridge linked the city to the western hills. Verdun looked small, but it was in truth a fortress complex expanded over more than a century—until the Kingdom of Lorraine was annexed by France, and only then did Verdun’s long era of enlargement end.

  Even so, to Moreau and Decon, a Verdun held by only 3,000 men would still be a symbol of the unbreakable. If 50,000 enemies attacked, without a year or more of time and a casualty price of one-third, no one would ever set foot upon its walls.

  André only smiled, saying nothing.

  Yesterday at dusk, André had visited Verdun’s commander, General Beaurepaire, a Constitutionalist noble, in his capacity as commissioner attached to the Army of the Moselle. Over dinner, the meddlesome deputy of the National Assembly could not resist hinting that émigré spies were active in Verdun, and that the fortress commander should be vigilant and guard against disaster.

  In reality, General Beaurepaire treated the warning as nothing at all. André did not press the point further. He waited quietly for history to repeat itself—eager to see how an “impregnable” fortress could be conquered from within.