Free Napoleon's Roads by David Brooks Page A

up in the middle of a tree, in the centre of a farmer’s field, in what now, suddenly, unexpectedly, seems like it must, after all, be the centre of the world.
    In the morning it is gone, of course, as all moons are. But then, everybody agrees, it was a small, thin, thumbnail moon, as all moons also are, always, on the night before they disappear.
    Vierge Ouvrante
    A woman gives birth to death while a man stands watching – after all, he is the father, and what else can he do, his own death grown so large inside him, almost ready to be born?
    The Net
    High in the night sky over a country far below the equator the moon is casting great swathes of silver light into the emptiness about it. As they near the earth, transected by the high, thin tessellations of the evening cloud, they appear to turn into the kind of net that fishermen use to pull in sardines or mackerel from the bright night waters of the Mediterranean, or that natives might have employed, some hours earlier, in the broad, flat waters of a moonlit bay off an island in the South Pacific.
    Far below, a man is standing on a balcony, staring upwards, thinking of nothing but the moon’s astonishing brightness – the way, passing through a shoal of cloud that stretches away to the invisible horizon, it is as if the moon’s light were rising towards him from the bottom of a shallow sea. A corner of the net has entered his eyes. As might have been predicted, and without the aid of his actual hands – in fact without his being conscious of this at all – the mind of the man, arm over arm, is hauling in the bright fish of the moon.
    A Turkish Head
    The family of a veteran of the Gallipoli campaign, deceased at last at the age of one hundred and three, visit his house in Bendigo – it has been abandoned for years – and find in the potting shed, amongst his pieces of broken furniture and garden implements and suitcases full of old photograph albums and pianola rolls and 78 rpm records, a wooden box containing the severed head of a Turkish soldier, preserved as if mummified. The head is distorted and a dark unnatural brown, but still recognisable, with its teeth and moustache intact and a bullet-hole just above the right eye. After a great deal of debate and a few discreet and embarrassed phone calls the granddaughter finally persuades the family to give the relic up to the authorities and now the Australian and the Turkish governments are debating over where the head should finally be buried, the Australians wanting to send it back to Turkey and the Turks wanting the Australians to take responsibility and to bury it in Bendigo with a large memorial. After all, it hasn’t exactly come with papers. It could be anybody’s head.
    We Are Standing at the Low Stone Wall …
    We are standing at the low stone wall of a churchyard, in a village high on a ridge overlooking the border. The church is at the edge of the village and the view from the wall is panoramic, although that word does not seem to fit the time of day – near dusk, the darkness approaching – or the chill in the breeze coming in up the valley from the sea. Nor the stories that my friend is telling me, of the partisans who used to hide on the ridges opposite, the German killings, the reprisals, the raids that have lately been happening so much more. Over the border they are probably saying similar things about the people on this side, and on the far side of that country, on each side of another border, there are things being said that are almost the same. In this light the ridges look like great whales surfacing, in an already-mountainous sea.

THE WALL
    It is Moon Sector 17 of what has already come to be called the Great Wall. Seven men to cover a two thousand metre stretch from the Quarter Moon guard house, westward eleven hundred metres to the gorge of the Eel River – down there, a hundred metres or so upstream, is another contingent of men, three or four,