Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  This time Carla knew she was dying and had told Nicholette as much.

  “Drive back to the island,” she said, “there’s nothing more here. They’ve begun to retreat!”

  Nicholette waited four hours for a place in the stream of men and vehicles, and during the interval Carla tried to take her mind off the pain by asking a hundred questions, all of them relating to the progress of the battle. Nicholette answered her tersely. She had been reared on the battlefields and did not think the pain very important. She was bored with it anyway, her mother having chattered about it for years. She knew that it would soon pass off and that the old woman would climb back into the driving-seat again.

  Nicholette was slim and dark, but already a matured woman. She had straight thick hair, piled in tight coils at the back of her small head. Everything about her was small, neat and solemn. Carla could not swear to her father, but rather favoured a Southerner whom she dimly remembered as having been killed in Dumouriez’s last campaign in the Ardennes. Seventeen years ago would make it about right. Before that it would have been Mouton, the armourer, and afterwards Henriot or Big Hervé, her favourite. She often thought it odd that she had conceived only once and on that occasion a daughter, not a son who could follow the regiment. Carla never craved Nicholette’s affection, and had, indeed, beaten her often enough until the girl grew strong enough to knock the old woman down with a single blow. But their partnership had worked well enough during the last few years, and her mother admired Nicholette’s cool handling of men.

  In the last year or two a good many men had looked her over when they slammed down their sous for a jack of cheap wine or a glass of Carla’s famous black coffee. Some of them had tried a little gallantry, but something in the frigid stare of the girl’s hard brown eyes soon sent them away with a shrug or a light-hearted curse. Several of the officers had tried their luck and one of them, a foppish young hussar who aped Lasalle’s studied carelessness of attire, had told Carla that the girl was sexless. Carla did not think so. In the past she had often looked at her daughter’s wide red mouth, at the graceful curves of her prematurely adult figure, and indulged in lazy speculation about her future. There were so many men and so few women. Nicholette could afford to wait a year or two before she took a husband. Carla hoped it would be someone from the infantry, the Eighty-seventh preferably, for she herself had never married outside the regiment. It seemed disloyal, and in a freakish way that she could never have explained to herself Old Carla was proud of the Eighty-seventh. It was as good and better than most of the line regiments and had seen as much hard fighting since Valmy as any unit in the army.

  Carla lay back on her pile of cloaks and looked at Nicholette’s straight back. The girl handled the wagon well in this press, beating off a stream of mounted gendarmes who were trying to edge her off the causeway, flicking her whip this way and that in the surge of men and vehicles fighting to keep their places on the loose planking. She watched the girl with a touch of maternal pride, and her thoughts returned to the immediate future. The pain clawed and wrenched at her abdomen with every lurch of the unsprung vehicle and she decided that when they reached the island bivouacs she must send for Old Jean, the sergeant she had always felt would have made such a reliable husband but who had always rejected her proposals with the slow, maddening grin of a confirmed bachelor. Carla wondered what Jean had done about women all these years. Nothing, perhaps; some men didn’t, though these were few enough in Carla’s experience. Not that she had ever wanted Jean to climb into the wagon with her. Nobody had stirred the faintest desire in her since a Prussian cannon ball took off Big Hervé’s head in the fighting round Hohenlinden years ago, but a cantinière, especially a young and attractive one like Nicholette, was obliged to find herself a regular husband and replace him as soon as he was killed; otherwise there was always trouble, brawls and bickerings about the dropboard, spilled wine, sword cuts and inquiries by the provost. If a woman married, well, that was an end to it until next time. The men of the regiment respected a canteen marriage as rigidly, perhaps more so, than civilians adhered to a union performed by a priest. Carla wondered, between spasms of pain, why civilians found it necessary to go to all that trouble to get married. Here in the camp you chose a man, opened a cask of the best wine, indulged in a song and dance or two and climbed into the cart with him there and then, leaving the guests outside to drink themselves stupid or stagger away to their fires, whichever they preferred. After that you followed your man until he was either killed, maimed and discharged or had made enough money to buy himself a transfer to a civilian unit and set up business in a garrison town like Strasbourg or Dresden. If you were unlucky enough to have a child, and the child was tough enough to survive its first few weeks, you did one of two things: you either reared it, as she had reared Nicholette, and taught it the tricks of the trade or you claimed your bounty and sent the infant back to one of the military orphanages in France and forgot the whole incident. There was no need to tell Nicholette this, she had known it all before she had reached the age of ten. The simplest thing, of course, was to make sure you didn’t have children. The best of them were an encumbrance on the line of march and they invariably impaired your health at a time when you needed all your reserves for the rigours of a campaign. She remembered old Annette, the mountainous cantinière of the 103rd. She had produced an infant in every campaign and was known in the regiment as “The Factory.” Her carelessness had brought its penalty in the end, for Annette had been drowned the year before in a Spanish mountain torrent, trying to save her youngest, whose father she couldn’t have named for a thousand gold napoleons. Carla had lectured Nicholette on the moral of Annette’s end, but the girl had only smiled her sour smile, as if to say: “Don’t worry, you old fool, that could never happen to me!”

  They pulled in under the trees, not far from the bridgehead, and Carla told her daughter to go back to the river and watch out for Jean Ticquet and his voltigeurs. The girl went, leaving Carla with her pain and her satisfied memories.

  The sergeant came to the cart just before midnight. He excused his delay on the grounds that he had been snaring rabbits for the evening soup.

  “There’s a million of them around,” he said. “I never saw such a place for rabbits. Old Massena was thrown by his horse when it stumbled in one of the holes over there. He’s out of action now for a spell and Jean Lannes is finished. This is a bad business, Carla.”

  He settled himself on one of the lockers and looked down on the woman, whose sweating face glistened in the dim rays of the smoke-grimed lantern that swung from the canopy.

  Carla said: “I’m moving on, Jean!”

  “What is it, the pain?”

  She nodded, unable to speak for a moment as a new spasm shook her flabby body.

  Presently she said: “I want you to get Nicholette married. It’s best that way. I don’t want her causing trouble with the regiment the minute they’ve tumbled me into the ground.”

  Jean was thoughtful for a moment and sucked hard at his pipe.

  He did not assure her that she was not dying, knowing her well enough to be certain that she was the best judge of that. Neither did he offer to get a surgeon. He knew they were all too busy to come to a cantinière.

  “Can’t Nicholette get herself a man?” he asked. “She’s sixteen.”

  “She won’t do it, doesn’t seem to mind one way or the other, but I’d like her to be with your file. You could keep an eye on her then. Why don’t you take her yourself? She’s a good girl if you don’t mind a bit of temper now and again.”

  Jean chuckled. “I’d sooner have you, Carla,” he said and meant it, for in spite of the sour stench that rose from the sick woman’s bed he felt a surge of affection for her, the comrade of so many lively years and a woman who had never withheld a drink from a man if he happened to be dying or out of cash. First Lannes, now Old Carla. It had been a bad day.

  “Find someone in your set, then,” she told him. “They’re all young,
aren’t they, and I’ll wager there isn’t one of them that won’t get a dry throat when he lays hold of Nicholette for the first time!”

  Jean agreed that this was probably true, but he felt vaguely irritated by the proposal. The file was enough trouble without a sixteen-year-old girl tacked onto it. The girl, of course, could fend for herself when there was fighting, but a wagon this size was a damned nuisance on the march, hardly worth the extra comfort it afforded if the weather turned against them and, as often as not, a positive menace on a retreat, for the vanguard of the enemy always made for a canteen, where they were likely to find both wine and money once they had disposed of its defenders.

  Carla was finding difficulty in speaking now. The jolting journey across the bridge had exhausted her, and Jean’s seamed face appeared to recede in a halo of winking lights.

  “Get her in here,” she gasped, and Jean, after passing Carla the brandy bottle, drew open the canvas curtains and called the girl from her seat on an empty cask near the small fire she had built.

  Nicholette climbed into the wagon and casually sponged the sweat from her mother’s face. After a gulp or two from the bottle Carla grew more composed.

  “I’ve been telling Jean,” she said, “you’ve got to get married!”

  A smile flickered about the girl’s wide mouth. “I know that,” she said, and Jean could not help noticing the soft bloom of her cheeks and the graceful lines of her neck and shoulders as she bent over the older woman. He decided that Carla was right. Any of them back in the bivouac would be mad about her, but not one of them would be able to manage her, if he knew anything about the strength of the woman’s jaw or the firm, almost savage lines of her mouth. She would have had a man before this if she had wanted one.

  Carla went to sleep for a short while and Jean sat on, smoking his pipe over the cantinière’s fire. He accepted a jug of Bordeaux wine and pocketed the small plug of tobacco she gave him.

  Presently the girl spoke.

  “I’ll have the curly-headed one!” she announced.

  Jean resisted an impulse to laugh.

  “Claude Dupont?”

  “That’s him.”

  It was like a child choosing a doll from a shop-window, but a very determined child, Jean decided, one that would rave and shout and kick if any doll but the one she had selected was placed in her arms.

  “Suppose he’s not agreeable?” grunted Jean, disliking the whole business, which now struck him as a fitting climax to a thoroughly unsatisfactory battle.

  The girl smiled into the fire. “He’s agreeable all right,” she said, recalling Dupont’s hungry glances every time she served him at the drop-board of the cart.

  Jean knocked out his pipe. “It won’t do like that,” he told her. “They’ll have to choose straws!”

  The girl looked straight at him. “I don’t mind how many straws they choose, but you’d better make sure Claude Dupont gets the right one.”

  Jean got up and went back to his bivouac. The file was asleep, utterly exhausted after its exertions since dawn. The mended kettle turned slowly on the improvised spit. The men hadn’t even waited to eat supper.

  The sergeant went over to the nearest horse lines and returned with a handful of straw, selecting half a dozen stalks and breaking them into differing lengths. He preferred straw for a lottery; grass broke too easily and then there were frantic disputes. He held five straws firmly in his clenched palm, and the longest, the sixth, he pushed forward between his finger and thumb. Then he woke them, one by one, touching Claude first.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  All went as Jean had planned. The canteen wedding was held in the company’s glade within a few hours of Carla’s burial. Jean would have waited a day or two, but the girl did not seem to mind and Jean soon persuaded himself that Carla was the last woman in the world to sentimentalize over such a matter. Besides, after the two-day battle across the river the men were in an unpleasant mood and it would not have been safe to let Nicholette stray far from the company bivouacs.

  Old Carla had died within a few hours of the lottery. Jean, who had lain down to sleep with the others after supper, was awakened by the girl shortly before dawn. She told him to hurry and he got up and ran through the long, wet grass to the wagon.

  He found Carla in a delirium from which she never emerged, and sat down on the locker to wait for the end. There was nothing that he could do. Carla was beyond the relief of the brandy bottle and no one knew better than Jean that it would have been quite useless to go over to the medical camp and ask for a surgeon. They were all too busy with wounded officers, while their orderlies were engaged in patching up any rankers with a fair chance of recovery.

  Jean sat down and listened to Carla’s wanderings. Some of the names she muttered stirred his memories. Once a grim smile crossed his lean face, for Carla croaked out the name of Denis O’Sullivan and tagged it with a picturesque curse. Jean remembered Denis, an Irish volunteer who had died of cholera in the siege of Genoa nine years back. Carla never forgave O’Sullivan for dying, he had owed her four hundred francs, and she couldn’t even get at the body, for Genoa was ringed with enemy forces and soon afterwards surrendered. Jean remembered how Carla had cursed when a straggler came into the camp with the news after Marengo. She had known that O’Sullivan was shut up in the town but thought her money safe enough. The Irishman’s death infuriated her, and, with a woman’s logic, she never felt the same about the Emperor again for keeping them all hanging about before the battle instead of marching directly to the relief of the town.

  Just as it began to get light the gross body under the sheepskin gave a shudder and the coarse features of the old woman relaxed. Jean covered her face with one of the cloaks and went out to make arrangements for the burial, taking the girl along with him to the bivouac. The reveille had sounded and Claude was astir brewing coffee. The recruit, Gabriel, was blowing embers of the fire, and both looked slightly sheepish when Jean arrived with Nicholette in tow.

  The girl looked at her bridegroom frankly, but Claude looked away. Gabriel bustled off into the woods for more fuel.

  The lottery had been a mild business after all. Jean found that only three of the six men showed any inclination to take it seriously. Of these three, one, the schoolmaster, Nicholas, tried hard to conceal his feelings in the matter. Jean thought that he seemed miserably anxious to demonstrate that he cared nothing which straw he plucked. He did not deceive Jean, however, who knew him far better than he supposed, and the old sergeant was mildly shocked by the man’s eagerness. He had always supposed that education lifted a fellow above that sort of thing. He could have sworn that Nicholas would have given a year’s loot to win.

  Emmanuel, ex-acrobat, showed a purely professional interest in the woman. He was always determined to try his hand at the fairs again when he left the army, and was inclined to think that Nicholette might have been trained as a partner in a black-magic act. She certainly would have looked attractive in scarlet tights, disappearing and reappearing inside a coffin, or being apparently dissolved in a few spirals of sulphur. His business instincts were not aroused by the prospect of a canteen. Emmanuel Jacobsen knew better than to tie himself to unwieldy stock-in-trade. He liked to carry his wares on his back and sleep on them. There would be times when the wagon would be out of sight.

  The eagerness of Gabriel, the recruit, had also surprised Jean. He noticed how the young man’s hand had trembled when he drew his straw. Jean could not have known that Gabriel, going down to the river to draw water on the second morning of the battle, had seen Nicholette combing her thick hair on the driving-seat and that their eyes had met for a second as he came up the bank, bowed under the weight of the two leather tubs he carried. He had stopped, in sheer amazement at seeing a woman in the wagon park. Framed in the oval canopy of the vehicle, with the rising sun sparkling on the swift current behind, she reawakened in him his old urge to paint, to capture something of the movement and colour of the crowded scene on the white pages of t
he bulky sketchbook that made his knapsack so unmanageable. It was the first time he had wanted to paint since leaving home. The vision did something else for him. The glow of the girl’s pink cheeks and the strong, graceful line of her neck helped to obliterate the memory, not twenty-four hours old, of an amber-backed insect wading in a pool of blood. It was comforting to find how rapidly that memory, which he could have sworn would have dogged him to the grave, could be wiped out like a scribble on a slate by new scenes and sensations. The previous night it had been so vivid that he had shuddered to look at the portion of horsemeat they splashed onto his plate. Then he had seen Napoleon, the short, pale-faced author of it all, the arbiter of every man’s fate, the cold, concentrated brain behind the whole sprawling Empire. Looking at the man, as he stood listening to Dominique’s tune, Gabriel had felt curiously dwarfed, as though he were in the presence of a god neither good nor evil but magnificently indifferent, not only to the fate of men but to the fate of nations. And with this feeling came an odd sense of completeness to supplement that of the first night by the camp-fire. All the major pieces of the new mosaic that was now his life had been fitted into place; the pale-faced man who dispensed gold pieces for badly played tunes was the missing centrepiece.