Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

Jean’s eyes were restless during the march from the bivouac to the tileworks. There was not a gun or a regimental disc that he missed, and he paid particular attention to the haphazard structure of the floating bridge stretching from the bank to the island. It looked to him, an expert layman in bridge-building, far too light a contrivance to provide the only thread between the main battle and the reinforcements. He said as much to Nicholas, the big man at his side.

  Nicholas had been acting corporal since the idiot Raoul had got himself killed at Ratisbon the month before. Jean sucked his moustache in vexation at the thought of their latest casualty. Get killed, yes, in the line of ordinary duty, but why run across open ground holding the end of a scaling-ladder? Carrying scaling-ladders was not the business of a voltigeur. His work was to keep enemy heads down whilst the grenadiers planted the ladders. If Marshal Lannes had not been so stupid as to take hold of the ladder himself Corporal Raoul would never have laid hand on a rung and thereby left his head in the rampart ditch. Jean had seen too many men exchange their lives for a moment’s glory. He was not that type of soldier. He believed in living as long as one could. God alone knew the chances of ultimate survival were sufficiently remote, without sticking one’s head over the redoubt and drawing fire.

  Nicholas laughed at the sergeant’s misgivings.

  “They’ll have another bridge across here in a matter of hours,” he said. “Besides, there’s a dozen boats paddling upstream to gather in anything that’s likely to pile up on the causeway.”

  Jean grunted and looked towards the boats, noting that they were manned by sailors. What in God’s name was the Grand Army coming to that it should need naval men in the field? Was the Emperor losing his grip? Were the old days of infallible victory receding? If so, it was because men like himself were becoming used up. Hardly anyone serving in the company today had fought in Egypt; scarcely more than a dozen had been present at Jena or Eylau, if one discounted the officers. Where were they all, those jolly companions of a dozen years ago? Dead, most of them, buried along the banks of Italian rivers or under the rubble at Genoa and Saragossa. Dead of plague on the Jaffa road, or of cold and hunger in the Spanish mountains; and in their place were mere children like this new recruit, Guillame, boys who had never heard a shot fired save at a brace of pigeons and did not know the difference between the whistle of chain-shot and the whine of grape.

  Yet, as he was bound to admit, most of them learned the trade soon enough. This latest batch, for instance, stood fire like veterans if you found them sufficient cover and prevented them from taking silly risks. This fellow Nicholas was reliable, too, although how it came about that a man of his education, who had taught school at home in Toulouse, was serving as a private at the age of twenty-eight was a mystery which Jean had never been able to solve. Some scrape or other with a woman behind it, he’d wager. Much good education did for a man! He had never learned to read or to write, but had never felt the lack of these accomplishments. He could have become an officer without them in the old, carefree days but had preferred to remain as he was. Half a dozen men to watch over was more than enough; what sort of fool was a man who wanted thirty?

  Jean, by nature a confirmed pessimist, always hoped that things would not turn out quite as badly as he expected. He switched his thoughts again to the campaign.

  Over on the far side of the plain, and already shooting off at them from a village to the south, were a hundred thousand Habsburg mice. No Frenchman troubled himself about Austrian battalions. Still, there were a hundred thousand of them and, at a rough guess, two hundred and fifty guns. Against what? Less than two corps, he would say; not more than thirty thousand men. And all reinforcements and ammunition had to come over that single plank of a bridge!

  He looked up as a group of horsemen cantered past the column. At sight of one of them his brown face brightened, and immediately he found himself taking a less gloomy view of the situation. There went Jean Lannes, once a sergeant in the Volunteers of Gers when he and Jean Ticquet had fought side by side in the eastern Pyrenees. Now the ex-sergeant was a marshal, with God knows how many titles and revenues allotted to him. Wealth and fame had not spoiled him, as most were spoiled. He still knew how to fight with the bayonet and still had wave and greeting for an old comrade. Ticquet carelessly answered the wave of the marshal’s hand, catching, as he did so, a look of mute astonishment on the face of the new recruit, Guillame. What did the young idiot suppose? That a sergeant couldn’t wave at a marshal?

  The marshal reined in and leaned over his saddle-bow.

  “Ha, there, you old scarecrow!” he shouted. “I didn’t see you at Ratisbon.”

  “I was there,” grunted Jean, “and saw you get my corporal killed with your damn fool monkey tricks! Why don’t you leave such japes to the Emperor’s brother-in-law!”

  Lannes threw back his head and roared with laughter, and several of the older men in the staff group shared the joke. Everyone in the army knew the extravagant antics of Marshal Murat, King of Naples and husband of Napoleon’s sister, who pranced about in front of the enemy waving a gold-tipped staff and issuing challenges to single combat. Everyone laughed, somewhat contemptuously perhaps, but they were glad enough when Murat’s squadrons went thundering against enemy cavalry, scattering them like feathers in a gale. Moreover, the rainbow-hued cavalry leader was always a yard or two in front of the foremost trooper, and to the men of the Grand Army that meant more than a dozen Neapolitan crowns and their attendant revenues.

  Jean Ticquet felt much better after the marshal had gone by, and shepherded his file into the yard of the granary at the extreme end of the village. In less than half an hour the place had been loopholed for musketry, not only on the south side, as Nicholas had advised (apart from fighting, he had an intense dislike of all forms of manual labour), but on every side, for Jean prophesied that their infantry would be driven from the main street during the course of the day and if this happened they could easily maintain themselves in the building. The stone granary was being properly garrisoned.

  Jean’s instincts were right, but all that morning it looked as if his gloomy prophecies would be borne away on the wings of victory.

  From his loophole on the top floor of the tall building Gabriel stood with Manny, the jovial young Jew, and watched the progress of the battle without firing more than a few scattered shots. Round shot smashed against the outer wall, but the range was too long to allow the balls to penetrate, most of the shots ricocheting from the edge of the yard below and flattening themselves on the second impact.

  Over at Aspern, where the church tower was visible through the trees, all hell had broken loose as columns of Hungarian grenadiers and Croats flung themselves against the fortified houses of the village. Five times Massena’s troops drove them back with appalling losses. At the sixth attack the voltigeurs, watching from Essling, saw bursts of smoke moving rapidly towards the river and noted the sergeant’s frown.

  “I hope they’ve got replacements down there at the bridgehead,” he growled. “Watch out; here comes our turn!”

  The Austrian batteries had been moved farther in, and a heavy salvo of eighteen-pounders thundered down on the wall by which they stood. One ball crashed through the roof and hurled a man across the dusty floor, flinging him, in shapeless huddle, on a pile of chaff in the corner.

  “There goes Tinville,” said Manny, coolly aiming his musket at a blur of white figures moving towards them across the plain. “He owed me six francs. I must look for it when there’s a lull.”

  Firing from behind loopholed masonry, it was easy enough to repulse the first suicidal attempt to drive them from their positions. Despite the increasing power of the enemy artillery, Boudet’s infantry, which had held Essling most of the day, threw back the second, third and fourth attempts on the village, but soon after midday French ammunition began to give out, and Nicholas, who had been sent back to the river with Claude, one of the other youngsters in Jean’s file, returned empty-handed. Nicholas climb
ed the wooden ladder to their loft and flung himself down with a curse.

  “You were right, Jean,” he admitted, “the bridge has caved in; there’s a fifty-yard gap and not a ball cartridge to be had at the bridgehead. They’re bringing it over by boats.”

  Jean shrugged and nodded towards the inert heap in the corner.

  “Look for your six francs, Manny, and don’t forget his cartridge belt.”

  Manny crossed the loft and began to rummage, returning a few minutes later with reeking hands, a dozen rounds of ammunition and a cheap metal watch and chain. “He’d have liked me to have it,” he said, pocketing the watch and throwing the cartridges into the common pool.

  The sun beat through the jagged hole in the roof. Trickles of dislodged plaster cascaded down the cracked walls. They shot off the last of their ammunition, but it was insufficient to stem the flood of white-coated Croats who swept on past the granary and into the main street, which began spewing French infantry of the line, all, seemingly, without ammunition.

  “Out! Out and cut them to pieces!” roared Jean. Gabriel now saw a far different man from the meditative pipe-smoker of the bivouac. His prominent cheekbones were flushed and his eyes were set in a fierce, pitiless stare. His voice, always high-pitched, rose to a shriek under the stimulus of wild excitement.

  They followed one another down the ladder, across the midloft and down a second flight, falling over one another in crazy rivalry to be first in the open. Attacked from each side and meeting with a stiffening resistance lower down the street, the Croats began to give way. Gabriel never got within striking distance of them. Thrust aside on the first floor, he was last out of the building, and when he emerged into the street it was only to see Claude, the good-looking boy of their section, plunging his bayonet in and out of a prostrate body lying across the pump, killing it a dozen times over and laughing into the bloodied stone basin, his face distorted with savage delight. Gabriel, the painter, noted these things, but it was not until long afterwards that he pondered them and by that time he knew more about Claude’s tragicomic hatred of all Austrians.

  On the outskirts of the village Jean and a few other veterans were working like madmen to prevent the inexperienced infantry from pursuing the Croats back to their lines. Their efforts were only partially successful.

  Before the French could rally into groups Uhlan cavalry had ridden up to their infantry’s assistance, and Gabriel, watching the sabres rise and fall with practised rhythm, saw men, a moment since drunk with victory, run here and there like terrified hens, throwing down their muskets and trying in vain to shield their heads with their arms. Infected by their panic, he doubled back to one of the cottages, ran up the short ladder and into a room at the back. Panting and terrified at finding himself alone, he flopped down on the floor and listened to the thumping of his heart.

  He must have been there the best part of an hour. No French came back into the house. Once, when he peered cautiously over the low window-sill, he saw the street full of Austrian cavalry, picking their way over the dead and behaving as though the battle was won.

  Over at Aspern he could hear the roar of guns and guessed that the village was being retaken. Once, when he heard the tread of feet in the room below and the jabber of a foreign tongue, he nearly fainted from fear of being discovered alone, armed and unwounded. He would have surrendered had he dared descend the ladder, but he knew that to show himself in the street would mean instant death. Jean had informed him that men seldom took prisoners in street fighting; it was too inconvenient.

  So he lay there on the bare wooden floor, not daring to move. His eyes roved over the shabby little room and his mind dwelt for a moment on its contents and the family whose home it had been, perhaps less than a week ago. There was a big double bed, a broken cane-bottomed chair, a peasant woman’s cotton dress and straw bonnet and a homemade crucifix over the window. The furniture was pathetically awry. The black and gnarled beam across the ceiling led him to think that the cottage was old, probably the home of generations of men and women who had stayed at home and tilled the fields and never wished their neighbours anything but good harvests and fruitful marriages.

  The bed fascinated him. He shut his mind to the horror of the street below and tried to think of all that the heavy, canopied couch had meant in the lives of the people who had lived in this house. It was a plain, solid piece of furniture, hand-made by a craftsman who did not believe in frills and fancies. Gabriel pondered on its functions, sleep, love, childbirth and death. How many times had it been a marriage-bed? How many times a death-bed? Who had sewn the gaudy patchwork quilt that looked so incongruous on its plain, unpolished surface? Where had the mattress gone, if there had been a mattress? Probably at this moment it was stuffed into one of the lower windows to serve as a barricade.

  There was a slight scraping on the ladder in the room below. Someone was ascending, a man alone, moving with caution.

  A dozen plans raced through Gabriel’s brain: to flatten himself against the wall behind the trapdoor and brain the man as his head rose above the level of the floor, to surrender on a pledge of clemency, to scramble through the tiny window into the yard, to pretend to be dead or badly wounded—that was best, to sprawl on the floor, stop breathing and lie perfectly still until the Austrian had glanced round the room and made certain that there was nothing worth the trouble of carrying away.

  He lay on his face and then, realizing that this would expose his back to the man’s weapons, rolled onto his side, twisting his legs and arms in a grotesque pose and half-closing his eyes.

  A shako appeared from below, followed by the head and shoulders of a bearded man of about Jean’s age and with Jean’s hardbitten features, but with a much heavier growth of hair on his face. He had small, piglike eyes, inflamed with powder and lack of sleep. There was a vivid white scar running slantwise across his forehead, the slash of a sabre in some half-forgotten battle of the past. A veteran, this one, a man as old and cunning in war as the sergeant who had befriended him by the campfire the night before.

  Gabriel lay still and let his jaw sag, fixing the man with the glassy stare of the dying.

  The Austrian paused, as though mildly surprised at finding a Frenchman in the room. Then, reassured by Gabriel’s empty, loosely clenched hands, he mounted the remaining rungs of the ladder and stepped into the room. He crossed the floor, muttering something to himself, and immediately dropped on his knees and began rummaging in the recruit’s tunic, running expert hands through his pockets and strewing Gabriel’s few personal belongings on the floor.

  Gabriel wondered if the man was really taken in or if he assumed that the prostrate Frenchman was merely wounded and helpless. The effort of holding his breath made his ears sing and his eyes fill with moisture. The man seemed to be an age rummaging down his left side.

  The Austrian knew his business. He wasted little time on pockets but was rapidly thumbing the lining of the Frenchman’s waistcoat. Almost immediately he grunted, having felt the outline of the ten gold pieces that Gabriel had sewn into the lining. The looter sat back on his heels and whipped out his sabre, applying the point to the scam of Gabriel’s waistcoat and ripping it up in a single movement. The touch of the gold seemed to excite him. Gabriel felt his breath on his check. He began to squeeze the coins through the tear in the cloth.

  Gabriel could not have said what it was that suddenly stirred his indignation to the point of submerging his fear. It might have been the fellow’s roughness as he tumbled the unresisting Frenchman this way and that in an endeavour to extract the money as quickly as possible, or it might have been Gabriel’s sudden appreciation of an opportunity which would last no more than a few seconds.

  The grenadier’s chin was within an inch or two of Gabriel’s shoulder and was turned conveniently sideways, presenting an ideal target. Gabriel did not pause to think out his action. Had he done so he might have reflected that the Austrian would probably stab or shoot him the moment he ceased to be preoccupied wit
h the gold.

  The recruit merely obeyed an impulse. Hoisting himself to a sitting position, he swung his fist and struck the man on the side of the head with all the force he could muster. The Austrian rolled sideways across Gabriel’s knees, overbalanced and partially stunned by the unexpectedness of the blow.

  Gabriel knew then that he must kill this man, kill him within a few seconds or be killed there and then, struck through and through with the man’s sabre, left to rot in this dismal little room perhaps for days, until burial parties came to toss him into the street and drag him off to share a pit with all those other mutilated corpses in the sun-drenched street outside.

  A mad rage overwhelmed his fear. It was like a barrel clapped on a candle flame. He whipped his musket from the bed, where he had flung it in the first moment of panic on entering the room, stood over the man on the floor and drove the stock hard into the face, striking again and again and uttering sharp animal noises with every blow.

  The man’s face seemed to sink under a red torrent. His legs contracted feebly and automatically, as in helpless protest. Gabriel remembered the same thing happening to a clumsily butchered calf in the slaughterhouse at Agen, when he had called in one morning with some of Aunt Marie’s cakes. He recalled the calf’s mild eyes rolling up at the slaughterman, making the same unspoken plea as this man’s legs. When all movement ceased Gabriel let fall his musket and sat on the bed, his hands upon his knees. He watched a dark pool of the man’s blood crawl like a blind-eyed reptile into the dust-choked cracks of the plank floor. He was quite unconscious of the renewed uproar in the street, of shots, screams, shouts and the confused clatter of iron hooves on the cobbles. He sat there a long time, stupefied and speechless, his gaze riveted to the spreading pool but somehow remote from the huddle of limbs at his feet.

  He was roused from his stupor by the movement of a wood louse which crawled out from the skirting-board and commenced a purposeful journey across the floor. Gabriel wondered what the insect would do when it reached the pool, whether it would turn back or make a detour round the edge of the trap to reach its destination. It did neither. It stopped on the brink, then gingerly edged forward until all its legs were engulfed in the flood. Then it stopped again, its feelers weaving, the amber glitter of its back fixed in a sunbeam. It seemed to Gabriel to be drinking.