Shifting blame had always been a lawyer’s specialized craft, and André—who had lived twice—was a master of it. In the past, everything he did, at least everything he chose to show the public, could be framed as lawful, rule-bound action. Even the nobles who hated him most could not indict André on the state’s legal grounds.

  Crushing the tax farmers was simply the duty of the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court.

  Dictating policy in Reims and hunting down the fugitive King were lawful acts authorized by the National Constituent Assembly.

  By August tenth, André, as the rotating presiding officer, had become the head of state of France, albeit for a term of only ten days. So long as a majority of the Legislative Assembly did not oppose him, every move he made could be presented as the national will.

  As for the “dirty work” that invited scandal, it was usually carried out in secret by the intelligence departments; afterward, traces would be erased. But humiliating the Bourbon royal house and slaughtering suspected agents of the Royalist Party were not tasks he could assign to his own people. In that case, he had to kill by another’s hand. Even if doubts arose afterward, it would not matter.

  Because no ordinary person would believe that Deputy André—who made it his mission to uphold law and order—would collude with radical factions who were his sworn enemies to strangle nobles and priests.

  Therefore, before André left Paris, he struck a covert bargain with Danton, the Minister of Justice. He agreed to grant amnesty to Marat’s radical faction, and to encourage the Parisian sans-culottes, behind the scenes, to take revenge—through massacre—on conservative nobles suspected of leaning toward the enemy, as well as on non-juring priests. In return, the Legislative Assembly would maintain a measured silence.

  André’s aim was to provoke the monarchs of Austria and Prussia, and the émigré French units within the coalition, thereby forcing the Duc de Brunswick into a decision he did not wish to make—and, in the end, delivering André the victory in this anti-invasion war. Danton, for his part, needed to consolidate his position as the cabinet’s revolutionary leader. Many sans-culottes had long complained that the Minister of Justice was too soft on the counter-revolutionary enemies of the nation.

  Long before September, André, Brissot, and Robespierre, together with Danton and others, had already pulled their friends among the nobility and clergy out of several of Paris’s notorious prisons for trial, and instructed the Revolutionary Tribunal to use various fabricated charges to expel these unrepentant relatives and close associates from France, thereafter deporting them to North America and the Caribbean colonies. In reality, many deportees would be quietly permitted to settle in Britain.

  Thus, during the great sweep launched by the Paris Commune on September third, although nearly 3,000 people were imprisoned, 80% were ordinary criminals: debtors who refused to pay, swindlers and thieves, murderers and robbers, and prostitutes. Under the Paris Commune’s latest regulations, streetwalkers fell into the category of mid-level offenders.

  ...

  After the outbreak of the foreign war, according to Chief of Staff Berthier’s assessment, for the Army of the Meuse (after adding soldiers) to secure a final victory over the coalition it needed, on a battlefield chosen to its own advantage, to create an encirclement ratio of 2.2 to 2.5:1. In addition, the heavy artillery corps at brigade scale, commanded by the newly promoted General Senarmont, would play a decisive role.

  At present, the Prusso-Austrian Coalition’s Army of Moselle, the central army group, fielded 80,000 men, chiefly Prussians. However, once the garrison troops left behind to watch the Fortress of Montmédy were excluded, along with prior combat and non-combat losses, the Prussian force marching south should not exceed 65,000. After it linked up with the 10,000-man westward detachment under the Prussian Crown Prince, the future Friedrich Wilhelm III, the attackers’ total strength would be around 75,000.

  From the Duchy of Luxembourg, crossing the border and advancing south along the Fort of Longwy, then passing through étain and Verdun before turning west to reach the Sainte-Menehould area in the Marne, the Prussians’ shortest marching distance was 212 kilometers. Berthier and his staff officers had made a precise survey: along the route lay 3 fortresses—Longwy, étain, and Verdun—7 major bridges, and 25 rural towns and villages, with a population of about 20,000.

  After the great northern famine broke out at the start of this year, André, under the pretext of providing food aid in grain and potatoes to neighboring provinces, methodically relocated most of the population of those 25 towns and villages either to southern Lorraine or to the eastern Marne. Now, along the Prussians’ intended line of march, more than half the settlements had been abandoned; only 9 remained, including the 3 fortresses. The civilian population along the way was under 5,000, excluding professional soldiers.

  On this basis, General Berthier judged that the Prussians would have to carry most of their food supply with them, unless their soldiers were willing to eat mashed potatoes every day—fare even civilians found hard to stomach, Russians excepted. According to the mathematical models that mathematicians had helped the staff build, to secure 3 fortresses, 7 bridges, and other key routes, the Prussians would have to deploy 35% of their strength across the area. Moreover, the appalling mountain roads, foul weather, and epidemic disease would likewise cut Prussian manpower by 20% to 30%.

  More crucial still, with the battlefield set on the eastern frontier of the Marne, the French army’s rations, ammunition, and matériel were plentiful, while the medical and sanitation system promoted over the past two years kept infectious disease—chiefly dysentery—at a very low incidence among local troops, about one per thousand.

  In other words, throughout the defensive campaign, within the Army of the Meuse’s 110,000 men, fewer than 120 soldiers would be lost to dysentery, whereas the German intervention force would suffer losses many times—dozens of times—greater. And because the war was fought on French soil, the wounded and sick could receive timely and proper care in field hospitals, without the slightest damage to morale.

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  In September, André, as supreme commander, accepted the staff’s enemy estimate: when the Duc de Brunswick’s intervention army reached the battlefield, its total strength would not exceed 40,000. Meanwhile, the Army of the Meuse already had 70,000 men; adding the headquarters’ later strategic general reserve of 40,000, the total came to 110,000—nearly 3 times the enemy.

  In General Berthier’s view of war, when neither side committed obvious command blunders, the balance of victory came down to nothing more than the exchange rate of casualties. As a simple problem in applied mathematics, if you wore down and exhausted the enemy’s strength, you would win in the end. André agreed wholeheartedly.

  ...

  In the mountains of western Lorraine, tens of thousands of Prussian infantry and gunners in blue and black uniforms, and cavalry in green or yellow coats, emerged from the misty forest road in marching columns of regiments, battalions, and squadrons, guided by drums, banners, and the whistle-calls of sergeants.

  With the footfalls of these brave soldiers came a martial song the Prussians had sung for decades: the Ode to Frederick the Great.

  “Frederick the Great—my sovereign, my master—

  mustered the soldiers of the realm;

  two hundred battalions and thousands of squadrons,

  each man issued sixty rounds.

  ‘Hard men!’ the monarch said,

  ‘I expect you to fight at my side.

  They covet the Silesia and Glatz I won,

  and the vast treasury that is mine.

  Come—let them learn we are not to be bullied!’”

  ...

  “Our cannon are the biggest;

  the Prussians are forever loyal.

  The Swedes are the worst—running from the field;

  the Austrians are only a little better.

  The King of France pays his soldiers in scented pomade;

  but we receive our wages on time every week.

  Who gets paid as punctually as Prussia does?”

  ...

  On one side of the road sat the Duc de Brunswick, a professional soldier, mounted on his warhorse. He wore nothing more than a felt cloak like any common soldier’s, to fend off the autumn wind and fine mountain rain.

  As commander of the Prussian army, the Duc de Brunswick would from time to time incline his head slightly—saluting the kingdom’s warriors who streamed past his horse like a rolling flood, and stirring their morale.

  Especially whenever the soldiers, fired with zeal, reached the final stanza of the Ode to Frederick the Great, the coalition’s supreme commander—who had once fought alongside Frederick the Great and his uncle, Ferdinand of Brunswick, the first Duc de Brunswick—would join in loudly for a line or two, indulging his remembrance of the Seven Years’ War and the glittering honors that had gathered around his name.

  “Frederick the Great, crowned with a flashing laurel—

  so long as you let us sweep down our foes,

  Frederick the Great—my sovereign, my hero!

  For you, we would dare to overturn the world.”

  ...

  Not far from the commander, several luxurious four-wheeled carriages stood on the grass beside the gravel road. Their gilded coach-bodies served as the Duc’s staff’s mobile offices: coalition orders were drafted, reviewed, finalized, and copied there, then submitted for the Duc de Brunswick’s signature. After his approval, couriers carried them out to commanders at every level of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition.

  In the mountain woods, fine raindrops occasionally slid across the Duc’s face, and the cold wind strengthened as it blew. Perhaps sick of the weather, the commander’s horse snorted repeatedly, its tail flicking off the icy water. Soon the Duc de Brunswick jumped down from the saddle and signaled servants and grooms to lead the mount to shelter. He also emphasized again and again that they were to dry the horse’s back thoroughly, and that the water used to feed the mount must be clean stream water.

  By the gilded carriages, Goethe sprang down from one of the coach-bodies. Anxious and hurried, he held a sheet packed with figures and jogged swiftly to the Duc de Brunswick, speaking in a low voice:

  “Duc, just yesterday, within the Prussian army, five military physicians confirmed another 282 cases of dysentery and other intestinal diseases. Moreover, from August twenty-third to the present, the statistical reports show that the daily losses due to dysentery and related illnesses have been rising sharply.”

  The Duc de Brunswick did not take the document his staff officer offered. He swept a calm glance left and right, then asked heavily, “Now, tell me the worst case.”

  “In one week, daily dysentery infections will exceed 600; in two weeks, daily losses will reach 1,200. As for one month from now...”

  Before Goethe could finish, the Duc de Brunswick cut in: “That is to say, by late September, my Prussian army will have lost at least one third of its strength. To avoid that outcome, we must fight a decisive battle with the French within one week—or retreat along the same road, accomplishing nothing.”

  Goethe nodded. Stepping forward, he said, “Commander-in-Chief, I advise that you immediately order a halt to the advance on Verdun.” Under normal circumstances, the staff addressed him simply as Duc, as a mark of respect to their patron of the arts. Now that Goethe had shifted to calling him Commander-in-Chief, the gravity of his view was plain.

  Later generations would know Goethe as a great poet, novelist, playwright, and remarkable thinker of this age. But in the eighteenth century he was also a scientific investigator with wide interests: he studied plant and animal morphology, anatomy, color theory, optics, mineralogy, and geology, and achieved results in certain fields that drew genuine praise.

  After the Duc de Brunswick recruited him as an accompanying staff officer for the expedition into France, Goethe made a special study of Lorraine’s terrain and weather. Before the war, he had warned the Prussian prince that the autumn rains in the French mountains were ill-suited to large-scale operations, and that every effort must be made to avoid them.

  After the Prussian army captured the Fort of Longwy, while others celebrated victory, Goethe hid in his room and studied alone a newly seized copy of the 1792 Regulations for the Internal Administration of the French Army. André had ordered it printed in early April and distributed to garrisons across the Northern Theater. It was an abridged digest of the former Champagne Composite Brigade’s internal regulations, with the more elaborate hygiene and disinfection provisions removed.

  A year earlier, Goethe had learned from a visiting French scholar the story of Fourier’s cholera map, and he felt the French method might be useful. The next day he advised the Duc de Brunswick to implement French-style hygiene rules within the Prussian army, including the practice of drinking boiled, purified water.

  Plainly, in a season of unending autumn rain, boiling water, even in a stationary camp, was troublesome to carry out—let alone on the march, where it became even less feasible.

  Besides, officers quenched thirst with alcohol, and dysentery was considered an ailment of low-ranking soldiers. So the Duc de Brunswick and his Prussian officer corps, after laughing it off, rejected the proposal. Only when dysentery losses increased day by day did the commander recognize the seriousness of the problem and summon Goethe again for countermeasures.

  Boiling water could never be extended across the whole army; it could only be maintained for the sick and wounded, and for officers. For ordinary soldiers, Goethe recommended drinking clean stream water rather than pond water or stagnant sources.

  At first, the measure worked well. For a time, case numbers even fell to single digits. But the good days did not last. Once they pushed deeper into the interior of the Lorraine mountains, losses from dysentery and other intestinal diseases began to rise day by day in a geometric escalation.

  More than once, Goethe suspected French agents of poisoning the army along the route. But he soon ruled that out. In his investigation he discovered that with the same water quality, Prussians might fall ill after drinking it, while local Lorraine farmers drank it without any trouble.