Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [101]
“Will they come to separate us as well?” Alvisetto asked his mother later that evening, at the dinner table.
“No,” she replied. “We shall always be together.”
“I feel much better now; I shall eat with greater appetite.”
After dinner, Alvisetto walked about the house with his big hat on—a peculiar habit he had recently developed and which his grandfather, Andrea, also had. Lucia watched her son come through the room as she sat at her writing desk. “His blood is truly Memmo blood,” she scribbled to her sister. “This thing he has about wearing his hat in the house has become a fixation. No doubt he’d keep it on all day if he weren’t made to take it off.”46
A few days later, Lucia was forced to break the promise she had made to Alvisetto about not leaving him alone: she had to go to Vienna to organise the move to a new apartment, a smaller place but with a nice view of the Danube, which she had let for six months. Alvisetto would not have it. “I am not going to be separated from my mother,” he insisted, tears swelling in his eyes. “I will go with you—don’t even speak of leaving me here if you don’t want to see me cry…”47 With that, he burst into tears.
Lucia stayed in Vienna only the time that was strictly necessary. Exhausted, her muscles aching from moving furniture around, she wrote to Paolina on 7 August: “Our new home is delightful. The river here is at its widest point.”48 She looked forward to moving in with Alvisetto and living there until the end of the following spring, by which time she hoped to return to Italy—provided war did not force her to change plans. While in Vienna, she learnt that she had been awarded the Starred Cross. It occurred to her that she now had a formal tie to the Habsburg Court. But the timing seemed so odd, what with war preparations by now in full swing.
Two days later she was back at Margarethen with Alvisetto. “The Austrian regiments are marching through the fields around us,” she reported. “It is said that General Mack is heading for the Tyrol on his way to Italy with His Majesty at the head of 100,000 men…”49 Alvisetto gave his own bit of strategic advice, drawing from his recently acquired knowledge of geography: “I believe the Russians should join the Imperial Army. I have seen on the map that the Russian Empire is very extended and may provide us with many troops.”50
In fact, the Russian army was already moving west, albeit at a woefully sluggish pace. In mid August, Lucia wrote that “friends who have just come from Russia and have a keen eye for military matters told me they saw 120–130,000 troops marching into Poland.”51 A week later, an Austrian cavalry battalion stopped in Margarethen. Three hundred soldiers camped in the fields around the house. Lucia found Alvisetto playing billiards with a group of officers belonging to General Mack’s regiment. The commanding officer said cheerfully that if the boy were old enough he would recruit him. “I shall only go to war to defend my papa and my mama,”52 Alvisetto snapped back. Everyone laughed, and Lucia let her son bask in the limelight a little longer before taking him up to bed.
General Mack entered Bavaria, France’s ally, on 11 September, then moved north, concentrating his troops between Ulm and Gunzburg, on the Upper Danube, about eighty miles east of the Black Forest, whence he expected Napoleon to appear. There Mack waited for the Russian reinforcements marching west from Poland. He estimated Napoleon headed an army of 70,000 men, and he wanted to crush that force before it reached Italy, the presumed theatre of war. Once the Russians joined him, he should easily have the upper hand. But General Kutuzov and his troops were moving too slowly. As Lucia wrote to her sister in mid September, the Russians were still in Polish Galicia.
Far worse was the fact that General Mack had made a terrible miscalculation: Napoleon had chosen to make Germany, not Italy, the main battleground of the new war, and planned to annihilate