Free Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess

the Turks. Hornpipes and dervishes. Beer and sherbet. Ashkurak , mates. Fackyou , effendi. The French guns sent by sea and, inevitably, the English had captured them. They had twelve guns, twelve, mark that. It was mad, but Croisier was glad of the madness. I don’t want that sort of cowardice again . Cannot too much emphasize gentlemen the importance of taking Acre vital British naval base take it way clear to Damascus and Constantinople: words filtered down from army to brigade to division to company to platoon. And so they pounded, the guns loosing their twenty-four-pounders, pounding, while the infantry waited. Out of the smoke, incredibly, a wound gaped in the wall. They charged and met scimitars. Croisier saw one of his men converted to a prodigy: a bayoneting pair of hands beneath a rich arterial fountain. Another cursed as he slithered in the blood of his fellows, dancing, groping, running-on-the-spot his way out. Turks went down with shocked beard-framed open mouths, ringed fingers holding in spilling guts. Croisier saw with surprise his own legs splashing out don’t want that sort of to safety, scrambling over corpseless heads, headless corpses, cowardice again , in coughing gun-fog and thunder. But, on the last hopeless plunge into that wound, he found atonement. He watched with a sort of interest as the Turk, one eye bleeding, his mouth full of words he had a passionate and hopeless desire to understand, swung with a grunt with the scimitar. Sorry for his body, not for himself, he saw for an endless second that body spurt out its crimson gallons, himself in his head that flew and spun, the body only just about to buckle at the knees as his light went out, still in the air.
    At Mount Tabor thirty-five thousand Turks roared and slashed at the right flank under Kléber, and Bonaparte rushed in and slashed back with his four-and-a-half thousand and sent them off screaming. But Acre would not yield and disease crept through a frustrated army. Monge moaned with the dysenteries, Caffarelli died of gangrene, Bonaparte wept. “Max, Max, my dear friend Max, his heart shall go back to France with me, never leave me, cut it out tenderly, Larrey, we shall have it embalmed and kept in a fine box, there is no friendship like the friendship between men, comrades-in-arms, comrades in ideas and hopes and aspirations, women are nothing, women are treacherous toys, that wooden leg of poor dead Max Caffarelli is worth more to me than all the perfumed flesh in the Grand Turk’s seraglio, all the proffered bosoms of the stinking Paris salons, when I think what that bitch bitch did to me and she lives, lives, fornicates, grins, glories in her infidelity, and as for those fucking idiots in the so-called Fighting 69th, the number is right, 69, they suck cocks, no, they have no cocks, they’re a load of simpering treacherous pansies, they won’t take Acre, oh no, I’ll have their breeches off and dress them in skirts, cunts they have not cocks, poor poor dead Max, a scholar, a fighter, a man.” A time-bomb fired from Acre fell at his feet and he was dragged back by two grenadiers. A shell struck the gun-fascines where he peered through his telescope and knocked him back so as nearly to knock Berthier over. He cursed women, the cruel fates that had taken Caffarelli, cursed Berthier, the 69th, the bubonic plague, the foul water, the weeviled biscuit. He saw thirty ships sailing in proudly from Rhodes, an Anglo-Turkish fleet full of fresh and ready marines. Now or never, he ordered a blistering attack and the jollies and tars were ready for him, yare me hearties so much for the Frenchies, and drove him out. He danced before the 69th, tore off his buttons, out his hair, had an untimely accession of micturition after dysuria and stained his breeches, raged and dithered so that it was a great and memorable wonder.
    “That’s what I’ll do,” he screamed, “I’ll have your fucking trousers off and parade you as prickless creampuffs,