Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
“Considering that it came from a dream,”Mr. Forbes said in a low voice.
Father ignored him. “And Gideon ordered each man to carry in one hand a trumpet and in the other a lamp lit inside a pitcher, and on hearing Gideon’s own trumpet they were to break the pitcher and hold up the lamp and blow upon the trumpet and cry out, ‘The sword of the Lord!’ so as to look and sound like ten times ten thousand. ‘The sword of the Lord!’ And when they did that, Mister Forbes, all the hosts of the Midianites who were not slain at once by the sword of the Lord fled into the wilderness!”
I heard Mr. Forbes utter a loud yawn. “Amazing,” he said.
“Yes. If your General Mazzini had looked more deeply into his Bible,” the Old Man went on, “he might in the end have triumphed over his enemies.” When Mazzini had wanted to know how to cut off his enemy’s supplies, Father explained to Mr. Forbes, he should have read 2 Kings, chapter 19. And for setting ambushes, he might have consulted Judges 9, verse 34, where he would have been told to lie in wait against Sechem in four companies, or else divide into two companies, as did Joshua against Ai, and lead the enemy out of its fortress by having one company pretend to flee, and then the second company could enter the fortress and set it afire, and when the men of Ai saw that their citadel was in flames, they would turn and rush back to save it and would be caught in the open plain between the two companies of Joshua and cut to pieces. And to know how to slay an enemy chieftain who is surrounded always by his guard, Father said to look into Judges 3,19—25, and go to your enemy as Ehud went to Gilgal and say that you have a secret errand to him from the Lord, and when Gilgal has sent away his guard, thrust your dagger with your left hand into his belly to the haft, so that the fat will close upon the blade and he cannot draw it out and only the dirt will come. Then go forth and lock the doors upon him and escape unto Seirath.
“Indeed,” Mr. Forbes said. “With your left hand, eh?”
“Oh, yes! Facing him! Because of the placement of the internal organs, the liver and the bowels and so forth,” he explained. “So he’ll die at once and not cry out.” For some time Father continued showing Mr. Forbes the brilliance of the Bible as a military manual, citing chapter and verse from a dozen different books, and I felt that his listener must surely have fallen asleep, for he no longer spoke. I, of course, had heard the Old Man employ the Bible this way hundreds of times before on any number of topics, from the care of sheep to the management of grief, and had myself fallen asleep in the middle of his citations, to waken in time for the grand peroration at the end and nod agreement. This was how the Old Man talked, how he communicated his thoughts and beliefs, and it could be pretty impressive, because he knew his Bible better than any man and could apply it with intelligence and verve and sometimes, perhaps without intending it, even with humor.
This time, however, I heard him differently. For it was clear, as he laid out one case after another, that he did indeed know more about military tactics and strategy than Mr. Forbes, his presumed expert, and probably knew more than General Mazzini, too. He was drawing on the experience of a people who had conducted wars large and small for thousands of years. Never mind that they claimed to have received their instructions from the Lord, from dreams, or even from the entrails of birds; Father’s great knowledge of the Bible gave him direct access to the experience of a thousand generations of military men and women, providing him with the collective memory of an entire race of people. Father didn’t read the Bible like a man who thought he was like the ancient Israelites, he read it as if he were an Israelite himself, as if he, too, were receiving instructions from the Lord. The man did not simply remember the Bible, as a person remembers the alphabet or even as he remembers old injuries or triumphs. No; for the Old Man, the Bible was his memory.
“Well, Mister Brown, that’s all very interesting,” said Mr. Forbes. “But I’m afraid the modern military mind requires a bit more than the Bible for its instruction. Times change, don’t they?”
“Ah, but human beings don’t!” Father exclaimed. “And, unfortunately, one of those things that do not change is the very belief, the delusion, if I may say so, which you have just now uttered, that human beings change. That, too, is constant, my friend. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Times may change, sir, but the Lord does not, and therefore neither does he who was made in His image, for changelessness is in the nature of Him who hath made us. We are the same man as old Adam was.”
“Indeed. Well, I’m afraid I’m not a religious man,” said Mr. Forbes. He then announced his desire to sleep, promising to resume this most interesting conversation in the morning before reaching London.
Father said fine, fine, he too would like to sleep, and so would we all, Miss Peabody especially, he added, although she had said not a word in several hours and must indeed have been lost in her dark thoughts, quite unconscious of Father’s and Mr. Forbes’s conversation and unlikely to sleep, regardless of her fellow passengers’ consideration or lack of it. She did not acknowledge Father’s remark, nor did I, and so we all fell into silence.
Through the long night we made our bumpy, rain-chilled way, catching short naps as we could, stopping briefly for breakfast at an inn outside the village of Dunstable, a ways north of London, and made the vast capital city proper shortly before midday. Several times, the Old Man tried picking up his discussion with Mr. Forbes where they had left off, but the Englishman seemed reluctant to pursue it further and smiled condescendingly and put him off, as if he thought Father slightly cracked. I had seen that response in people many times before, hundreds of times, in fact, and I had almost always felt sympathy for them, even a little pity, with anger at Father mixed with embarrassment for myself. But this time I felt merely superior to Mr. Forbes and dismissive. He was too closed-minded, too conventionally educated, or perhaps simply too stupid, to appreciate the Old Man’s originality and clarity, I thought.
You did not have to be a Christian to see that Father’s insights into the nature of man were brilliant and that his principles were admirable; in fact, it probably helped if you were not a Christian, for many of Father’s views significantly departed from those held by the modern churchmen. You did, however, have to look at things afresh, as if no one had ever asked your question before. How does one conduct an ambush? How does one assassinate an enemy chieftain? How does one oppose a large, well-trained professional army with a small, ragtag force of angry civilians?
In every case, the Old Man simply answered with another question: How is it done in the Bible? Unlike most Christians, Father did not go to the Bible merely to confirm what he wished to be the case, whether about man or God; he went there to inquire what was the case. And where better to look after all? Where else had the nature and doings of man and God been more closely observed over a longer period of time than in the Bible?
In London we did not tarry, and I barely had a glimpse of the city. Which I somewhat regretted, as it was the hugest conglomeration of people and buildings that I had ever seen or imagined, and I would have liked to take its measure, if nothing else. It consumed fully an hour for our coach to make its way from the edges of the city to the center. All those crowded, twisted, narrow streets and maze-like lanes lined with brick warrens and tiny, dark hutches—it was a literally dizzying sight, and I staggered when I stepped down from our coach to the street! The sky was but a thin, gray satin ribbon zig-zagging overhead, and a light mist drifted down from it upon us, making us shine like smooth, wet stone and giving everything a strange, heightened clarity. I wanted to walk off into the city, to leave the others behind and wander aimlessly, utterly anonymous and invisible in such a crowd.
But perhaps it was just as well that Father was so intent on getting to the continent of Europe, for it would have taken me months, even years, to gain sufficient perspective on the city and its thronged enormity to know where in it I stood at a given moment. I could see and wonder only at what was directly in front of me and had no way of k
Father’s was also, but this seemed not to bother him. From the instant that we stepped all stiff and damp from the coach to the cobbled street, he was busily arranging our departure for Belgium. Before bidding goodbye to our fellow passengers, however, he took Mr. Forbes aside and obtained from him both his London address and his address in New York, which he wrote into his pocket notebook. He then said that he would soon be contacting Mr. Forbes personally or would be sending one of his agents to speak with him in strictest confidence concerning a matter of grave importance and utmost secrecy. The agent would likely be one of his sons and would identify himself as such by recalling certain details of our voyage.
“You’re quite serious, aren’t you?” Mr. Forbes said. He stood, carpetbag in hand, his weight carefully balanced on one foot, the other nearly in the air, as if he were ready to run.
“I am, indeed, sir. I believe that I will want you for an ally in some business that I am planning. You have certain experiences and knowledge that I may have need to draw upon.”
“I thought the Bible was all you needed.”
The Old Man smiled slyly. “Perhaps the Bible has told me that I need a man like you at my side. Just as Abraham, to free his brother Lot from Sodom, needed the Canaanite chieftains.”
“Ah, yes. Abraham. Very well, then,” he said. “You are an interesting man, Mister Brown, and I believe you bear watching. And as I am a journalist, I shall do that. Shan’t I?”
“Just so,” Father said, and shook his hand firmly.
When Mr. Forbes had gone on his way, the Old Man turned to Miss Peabody, who stood beside a heap of suitcases, her own and, I assumed, her niece’s. She appeared to be waiting for a carriage. Father said, “Is there any way I can help you, Miss Peabody?”
She politely answered no, that she had hired a porter and would be on her way directly to her hotel.
“My son and I would both once again like to express our sympathy to you.”
She said, “Thank you, Mister Brown” and turned pointedly away from us, leaving Father’s hand hanging in the air and mine just behind it.
“Goodbye, then,” he called to her. “Goodbye! I will pray for your relief from sorrow!”
She did not answer, and we moved off from her. “I believe I offended her earlier,” Father said in a low voice. “With my persistent sermonizing aboard the ship.”
“Never mind. It’s her niece who needs your prayers.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right. Of course. But I do go on sometimes. I forget myself’
I said to Father, “Speak to me about your conversation with Mister Forbes. Really, what do you need him for?”
He smiled, as if relieved not to think about the Peabody women and the sometimes ticklish business of his enthusiasm for prayer and sermonizing. “Wal, my boy;’ he drawled, “as the man himself said, he is a journalist. And though he is atheistic, he is sympathetic to our cause.”
“But he’s not an American. He’s English.”
“All the better. Americans are always readier to believe foreign reports on our affairs than they are the homegrown variety. Don’t you think?” he said, mimicking the Englishman’s accent. He laughed and grabbed up his valise and said, “Come on, m’ boy, we’ve got to catch the very next train to Dover! Enough of these hard English coaches, eh? We can do it, if we hurry. We’ll be on the other side of the English Channel by nightfall!”
We had disembarked at King Street near the Covent Garden Market Hall, and it was only a short walk to the station at Charing Cross, which was located on a wide boulevard called the Strand. Father strode along in his usual straight-legged fashion, led by his chin, and I scrambled to keep up, distracted by the passing crowd, by the elegantly coiffed and bustled women in their long dresses, the gentlemen with their canes and silk hats, the fine, high-wheeled carriages and tall chaises with liveried drivers and footmen and the handsome matched teams that drew them through the jammed streets.
The over-abundance of visible wealth, power, and suave self-assurance amazed me. This, I thought, is the other side of those smoking factories and the hovels we saw in Manchester and the other towns, where children collapse and die daily at their machines. And this is the visible profit produced by the terrible sugarcane plantations in Jamaica and Barbados, where slavery has been replaced by serfdom. The whole country seemed like a single, huge factory, whose raw materials and labor were fed into it from the barren hills of Ireland and Scotland and from distant tropical plantations. Liverpool was its shipping dock and London its counting house. I could not imagine myself as a member of the ruling class, one of these grand men and women passing me on the street; consequently, I thought that if I were an Englishman living in England, I would surely be one of those old Luddites, smashing machinery with hammers. And if I lived in one of the colonies, I would be like those old Maroons under Cudjo, escaped slaves living up in the mountains and slipping down to the plantations at night to set the cane fields on fire. In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.
So on we went to Europe itself, hurrying east by train to Dover and by ferry boat to Flanders, and then by train again, click-clacking our way across green, marshy Walloon country to Brussels, and thence by foot, as the early morning mists rose from the meandering streams of Brabant, out the Charleroi road to the farm village of Waterloo, where a generation earlier the greatest armies and generals of Europe had hurled themselves against one another, settling in smoke and blood, once and for all, or so we believed back then, the fates of half the nations of the world. We knew nothing of what was coming after, of course; little enough of what had gone before. I was there that day merely because Father had led me there—Hurry, hurry, hurry!—and he had come to Waterloo because he wanted to see how, just when Napoleon was about to win it all, he had lost everything.
I was beginning to understand the Old Man’s obsession with Napoleon and Waterloo. For a long while, it had seemed little more than another of his passing, erratic distractions, his characteristic way of not thinking about a thing that pained him, a practice that he was periodically inclined to indulge in, especially in times of stress, usually financial. Sometimes familial, of course. Sometimes political. But these wayward interests of his rarely lasted longer than the particular period of stressfulness, and as soon as the pressures on him eased a little, as they always did, he would return to his two great, permanent, ongoing obsessions—religion and the war against slavery.
This interest in Napoleon and Waterloo, however, had lasted longer than it should have. His expectations of financial success in the English wool market were now realistic, it seemed, and the pressures ought to have lifted. For the first time in years, he could think about wool and money without wincing in pain, which should have brought him straight back to slavery and religion. He did not have to think any longer about Napoleon—the greatest man of the century to most people, even to most Americans, but to John Brown, one would have thought, an evil genius, a small Corsican puffed up with delusions of imperial grandeur, a man whose vanity and shocking ambition had been responsible for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of men at arms and the permanent impoverishment of millions of civilians. Father had no love for Caesar, and even less for those who, like Napoleon, wished to emulate him, no matter how brilliantly they waged war or how much adored they were by their followers.
That very morning, before leaving for the battlefield, I had asked him directly what was so wonderfully attractive about Napoleon. We were eating our breakfast, smoked fish and bread and cheese and rich, creamy milk—how clearly I remember that rough, fresh Flemish food! We were seated at a bench-like table in a roadside tavern a short ways outside the bustling, large market-town of Brussels, where, on our arrival late the night before, we had taken lodgings. We spoke no French, of course, nor any other European language, so Father had compensated by much pointing and by shouti
“I know that Napoleon’s an important man,” I said to him, “especially here, to the Europeans. But really, Father, what’s he to us Americans, except a sort of cynical, power-hungry humbugger? In a democracy, a man like that would be successful only on the stage, or he’d be put in prison early.”
Father laughed. “Or hed run for senator from New York. And probably win it, too.”
“I’m serious. Why do you admire him so?”
“Admire him, Owen? I loathe him! However brilliant a military man he was, he was nevertheless an atheistic monster, an egotistical dictator of the first rank. When he was finally declared dead on his little island of Saint Helena, while all over the world people wept, I cheered.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Well, to put it simply, I want to understand why he lost. And this one battle made all the difference.” It was Bonaparte’s hundred days’ march, Father explained, his final, mad plunge back into Europe from Elba, that intrigued him. Not that he was so successful, storming back from exile the way he did. Father said he would have expected that. It was a supremely intelligent move, with predictable results, once he made it. Except for his loss at Waterloo—that was not predictable. No, what intrigued and puzzled Father was that after such a success, which shocked and terrified all of Europe, in the end Napoleon failed. For future reference, Father explained, he wanted to know if Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was due to a tactical blunder or to the superiority of Wellington and Blikher, the Prussian. Or did his own generals, the Frenchmen Ney and Grouchy, betray him? No evidence for that. Was it cowardice? Not likely. Too much caution? Highly unlikely. Too little? Perhaps. Regardless, it was important to know.