Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Old Jean was used to this sort of horseplay and minded it no more than skittles. He kept his file in a close knot at the crest of a little knoll, and this spur of resistance soon attracted a company, which presented a hedge of bayonets to the plunging horsemen. When the troopers went after easier game Jean ordered a retreat, before the Austrian infantry could come up in support of their cavalry. The file moved back to the reserves, where it had the satisfaction of watching the Austrian attack crumple under point-blank fire from the heavy batteries on Lobau, batteries the voltigeurs had helped to erect.

  Across the plain Davout’s guns were firing beyond Wagram church tower, and Jean said that the battle was won. The breathless infantry sorted themselves out, officers standing up in their stirrups and calling out the numerals of various units that had become intermingled in the mêlée.

  It was then they discovered that Nicholas was missing.

  What remained of the fighting had swept far to the north. Masses of cavalry were taking up the pursuit on the smoke-shrouded horizon. Gabriel saw them galloping into the haze like squadrons of centaurs, riding on the errand of some savage deity bent on ravaging the earth. In the middle distance large patches of corn were ablaze, and the soft wind carried the crackle of flames down to the river bank. Jean said:

  “Nicholas is out there; they weren’t taking prisoners.”

  Manny and Louis gathered a pile of branches cut down by grape-shot, and each of the group took one of the boughs for firebeating. Jean obtained an officer’s permission to collect the wounded and they spread out fanwise and moved off across the plain, walking slowly within twenty yards of one another.

  It was not long before they encountered wounded soldiers with shattered limbs, who moaned and writhed among the bloodied cornstalks. Men called piteously in German and French, but the file moved on, heading for the scene of their late encounter. They did not turn aside for strangers. They were looking for Nicholas.

  He had been separated from the others by a spate of fugitives, which bore him away from the low hedges until he was able to fight his way free and stand alone in the trampled corn. On every side Austrian troopers were cutting away at the Saxons, none of whom made any serious attempt to defend themselves beyond the futile raising of arms to shield their heads from the sabres.

  One of the horsemen rode at Nicholas, a small, red-haired trooper with broken front teeth. With a guttural oath he brought up his horse and cavorted round the infantryman, his small eyes ferreting here and there for an opening in the Frenchman’s guard. Nicholas gave him no leisure to find one. He dropped on one knee and lunged upward, driving his bayonet, with the whole of his strength, into the horse’s belly. The animal screamed and flung its bulk sideways, away from the agonizing point. Losing his seat, the trooper fell forward on his face in the corn. Before he could brace his knees for a spring Nicholas had driven his weapon through the back of his neck. The horse, mad with pain, plunged into a struggling group a few yards distant, spilling them in all directions and gushing blood as it ran.

  Nicholas liked this sort of thing. Only when fighting for his life, living second by second as now, had he no opportunity to brood. If there had been fighting every day he would have enjoyed soldiering. Violence had a soothing effect on his brain. Every time he fired his musket at point-blank range, every time he lunged at warm flesh with bayonet or sabre, he felt that he was paying off an old score. He was able to despise war as an art but to enjoy the actual business of killing. He was not naturally cruel, nor did he fight for a creed like Claude or, in another sense, Old Jean. He fought because he had a contempt for mankind and he liked to express that contempt by bayonet thrusts. He preferred killing with the bayonet. It was more personal and direct. It was quick, often merciful, and it had a certainty lacking in the discharge of firearms at whatever range. Nobody recovered from one of Nicholas’s bayonet thrusts.

  Two other troopers cantered across and he awaited them unflinchingly. One he shot through the chest. He was no conscript and had not discharged his musket in the general volley at the top of the slope. The man fell forward in his saddle, his sabre swinging free on its sword knot, his fingers clawing at his mount’s sweating neck. The other horseman pulled at his reins and drew a pistol. Nicholas dropped his musket and ducked under the horse’s belly, the bullet tearing through the blue wool of his epaulette and searing the lower part of his shoulder.

  The Austrian twisted this way and that, flailing the air with his blade, cursing like a madman. Nicholas ran in under the weapon and seized the man by his tunic, bracing himself to tear him from the saddle and finish the issue on the ground. He never knew whether he succeeded in doing this. A distant roaring filled his ears; the man he held was torn from his grasp and seemed to disappear into nothingness. Lights rocketed up from the trampled corn and hung, like flaming castles, in front of his eyes, telescoping themselves into new and more terrifying flashes that seemed to detonate an inch from his face. When their searing light had faded he was lying in the corn, his feet across the man he had bayoneted. He could see and hear but he could not move or speak. He lay there listening to the distant roll of cannon fire and the confused outcry of the battle as it rolled away down the slope towards the tip of Lobau.

  For several hours he lay perfectly still while all sense of the present left him, giving in its place an odd and not unpleasant sense of detachment. He found himself thinking about trivial, inconsequential things, the glossy shine of Camilla’s hair, the delicate tracery of a ribbon-backed chair in old Cicero’s red study, the smallpox craters on the face of Old Jean, the scent of lilacs, overpoweringly sweet, in the ruined garden of a chateau that they had occupied during a rest period after Friedland. All these things seemed important to him, the sum total of life as he remembered it. Reflection upon them gave him great serenity and he became almost feverish in his anxiety to keep the train of contemplation moving, fearing blackness and oblivion if it were checked or broken.

  Overhead the sky began to recede and grow less blue. A light wind stirred in the cornstalks. Carried on the wind, faint and incredibly far off, came the sound of battle, but Nicholas did not recognize it as such. To him it was a summer sea, sucking and swishing along the fringe of a wide, pebbled bay and sparkling under a noonday sun. It was easy enough to slip off his shirt and breeches, as he had done so many times on the edge of Cicero’s lake, and to plunge headlong into the shimmering water, certain of the moment of ecstasy to follow.

  For a long time he splashed in the pool, and so vivid was the mirage that he could see his tumbled clothes on the mossy bank near the summer-house. Then the wind stirred again and this time it brought with it a smell of burning.

  At first he thought the smart in his nostrils originated from one of the gardener’s bonfires. Griot, Cicero’s lame gardener, was always burning rubbish under the chestnuts near the boundary wall. Then Nicholas knew that the smell could not come from Griot’s bonfire, for he felt the hot breath of the flames in his face and the smoke was so close and pungent that it made him splutter.

  The cough jerked him back to reality. It shook his body and reopened the wound in his shoulder. Feeling the blood flow down his arm, Nicholas wondered, idly, why a shoulder wound should have paralysed the whole of his body. He forced his brain to think back over the last of his encounters. He could remember the bullet wound with perfect clarity, but after that nothing at all.

  Gradually full consciousness returned to him. He knew that he must have been injured in the cavalry mêlée. He knew, approximately, where he was lying and even began to assess his chances of being picked up, realizing that this depended upon the issue of the battle. Then he tried to remember how the battle had been going when this peculiar numbness struck him down, but the effort was too great and he turned his attention to the smoke, which seemed to be growing thicker every moment, trickling through the firm bases of the cornstalks and drifting immediately above his face, blotting out what remained of the sun. A brown mouse, piping its protests, ran acro
ss his chest, where it suddenly halted and peered to left and right, as though trying to make up its mind which direction to take. Nicholas looked into its startled eyes and smiled, thinking how desperately it appeared to be in need of advice and sympathy. Finally, still squeaking, it ran down his leg and disappeared. There was silence again.

  Then a great puff of smoke drifted across his face and he forgot the mouse in a new fit of coughing. This time the pain racked his entire body. “I am dying or perhaps I am dead,” he thought.

  This knowledge did not shock him. The bridge connecting present with past seemed to have been almost painless save for that one sharp spasm. But, at that moment, a sudden panic seized him lest he should be denied a final glance at the past, and should enter upon a new experience without calm and reasoned assessment of the old.

  “I must fix my mind on a single point, as one does when a ship is beating out to sea,” he thought. A whole series of images flashed through his brain, carrying him back through youth and boyhood to childhood, but to none of them would the sliding hook of his consciousness hold fast and he was whirled back on the immediate past again, to Lobau and the events of the last few days.

  Then he remembered Nicholette as he had seen her sitting demurely beside Claude during that absurd wedding carousal. Her ripe mouth smiled at him indulgently, as though she had just looked into his brain and read what was written there, as simply as he had read his pupils’ copybooks in the old days at Cicero’s. He knew then that he had outgrown Camilla and that this canteen trollop could more than fill her place at any time when she wished. He knew that if Claude were killed he could begin now to live again. The bitterness of the years had been drained out of him here, among the bruised corn.

  It was Louis and the mongrel Fouché who found him, with the flames licking the upturned soles of his boots and the low blanket of smoke covering him like a shroud. The dog began to bark furiously, and Louis, slashing at the horseshoe of fire with his leafless branch, shouted to Gabriel, who was moving in alignment twenty yards nearer the river.

  A little knot of them dragged him clear of the flames. He was stiff and his face and neck had a peculiar mottled appearance like that of a man long drowned. Jean came over and knelt beside him, his lower lip biting at the end of his moustache.

  “Finished?” asked Manny, awaiting the sergeant’s verdict.

  Jean tore away the bloodied tunic, exposing the shoulder wound. He gave a low cry of satisfaction.

  “That may have saved him,” he told them. “He’s got a violent concussion. A fair-sized ball must have passed clean through his shako. I’ve seen it happen before. This discoloration is due to shock; the jerk must have all but broken his neck.”

  Gabriel noticed that the broad leather chin-strap of Nicholas’s shako had cut its way into the flesh. The top of the shako was beaten flat and the stiff leather had buckled, like a concertina. They examined the shako with interest. Jean said that the flow of blood from the bullet in his shoulder wound gave the man a chance. They made a litter of their boughs and carried him back to the wagon. Nicholas was placed in the care of the girl, who went about the business of tending him with the same unhurried self-assurance that she displayed in everything else they asked her to do, cooking meals, cleaning arms, making a bivouac. She might be Claude’s wife, but she was still a collective possession also.

  Skilfully she cleaned out the shoulder wound and cut Nicholas’s wrist to draw off more blood. Gradually the discoloration about the face and neck began to fade, and in less than a week the girl drove him into Vienna. The voltigeurs took him to a convent in one of the outer suburbs, close to the ammunition park which they were detailed to guard. None of them trusted doctors or hospitals. They would have kept Nicholas in the wagon had this been possible, but garrison work meant that Nicholette would be busy and it would have been unfair to burden her permanently with a sick man. So two of them went to see Nicholas every morning as they came off guard. When the ex-schoolmaster asked for books they went over to the Schönbrunn library and helped themselves. The others waited, whilst Gabriel selected something suitable. He was the only other member of the file who could read.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gabriel explored Vienna in the company of Emmanuel, the Jew. He could hardly have found a better guide, for Manny had attended the Viennese fairs half a dozen times and knew every street, every market and most of the cheaper cafés.

  Gabriel had received money from Crichot, and together they spent freely. Their guard duties were not exacting, for Vienna was full of troops awaiting the signing of the peace treaty. The voltigeurs were under arms every other night, but the rest of the time was their own and they made the most of it, drinking the sweet local wine in the gardens, listening to better, if less appreciated, music than Dominique provided, flirting with the friendly Viennese, who seemed to bear the French no grudge on account of the recent campaign or their defeats and humiliations of the past fifteen years.

  The hospitals were pest-houses of sick, verminous men. Hundreds of labourers were required to dig graves for the dead, both in Vienna and on the Marchfield. At the Schönbrunn Palace the marshals gave a series of balls, and the Emperor’s civil staff were already whispering of a marriage that would make Napoleon’s late enemy his father-in-law.

  Old Jean was more than usually depressed when he heard of the Austrian marriage. Like most of the veterans he was attached to the Empress Josephine. The army regarded her as a symbol of victory, dating back to the early Italian campaigns, when Napoleon, as an experimental general of twenty-six, had turned aside from his mountain of maps to dash off impassioned love-letters to his ex-courtesan wife in Paris, the woman who cost him a king’s ransom each year in clothes and jewels, but whose warm smile and regal dignity had won the goodwill even of the gossips in the salons.

  Claude Dupont shared his sergeant’s pessimism. To him Josephine was symbolic not only of victory but of the Revolution. She had lived in Paris prisons through the last stages of the Terror, and her husband, who had gone to the guillotine, had known Claude’s father when the latter came up from the Gironde as a deputy to share in the blithe business of making a new society in which all men were equal. Claude had been brought up to detest Habsburgs. One member of this accursed family with whom the Emperor now saw fit to unite represented the system that had brought his grandfather to the gallows for stealing a pheasant. How could a free France hope to profit by such an alliance? He went in to have a long talk with Nicholas on the subject, but the schoolmaster, wan but fast recovering his accustomed irony, only lay back on his sweat-soiled pallet and laughed.

  “Hang on to your republican dream, Claude,” he told the young man. “It’s all you’ve got!”

  Claude was detailed to join a guard of honour for the Archduke Charles when he visited Imperial Headquarters for the armistice preliminaries. He saw the punctilio observed by the hundreds of gold-braided flunkeys bowing and bobbing round the members of the staffs, and he recalled Nicholas’s caustic remark when the two of them had witnessed a similar function at Tilsit two years before. “A million Frenchmen died to get rid of all this!” Nicholas had muttered. Claude felt the same misgivings, only now they were the more acute, for at Tilsit he had at least seen the King of Prussia treated like a wilful schoolboy.

  Neither Manny nor Gabriel bothered themselves about politics. Manny went off on his own now and again, to sample the Viennese brothels, but he was never able to persuade Gabriel to accompany him. The young man was far too absorbed in the colour and bustle of Vienna, the first capital city he had ever visited. He applied himself to the German tongue and became fairly fluent. He sketched odd corners of the older part of the town and invariably attracted a crowd of curious urchins to his sketchbook. He carried out a small commission for a café proprietor, who paid in wine for some mural decorations, and he wandered with a watchful eye along the lines of the relaxed army, observing and storing up his impressions for the future.

  One hot afternoon while on twenty
-four hours’ leave he hired a punt, poling his way into one of the many backwaters that flowed into the main stream above the bridge. It was on this solitary occasion that he found Karen.

  Not far from the centre of the city, the buildings on each side of the narrow stream gave place to a string of flat meadows, broken, here and there, by an overgrown copse. He had tied up his punt in the shade of an overhanging bank crowned by a clump of dwarf oaks and alders, all in rich green leaf. The low-hanging branches formed a green cave, concealing the punt from the opposite bank, where the shallow stream spread itself into a tiny bay hemmed in on all sides by foliage.

  Gabriel was lying here, too lazy to take up brush or crayon, when a gentle splashing attracted his attention. He looked across the stream and saw a small herd of cows wading into the water, their stumbling hooves stirring up the mud and sending out a ring of gentle ripples that splashed softly against his punt.

  After the last animal had entered the water he saw their drover, a buxom, sunburned girl of about eighteen, with honey-coloured hair swinging in long, thick plaits to her waist.

  He watched, idly, as the girl slipped off her heavy clogs and sat down on the bank, dabbling her feet in the stream and humming to herself as she leaned back on her hands and watched the cows drink their fill. There was a pastoral perfection about the scene that delighted Gabriel. Its appeal lay in its very ordinariness, the contented cattle reveling in the cooling ripple of the water, the dappled pattern of sunlight on the still leaves, the girl’s relaxed contentment as she wriggled her pink toes in the stream. Cautiously he reached for his book and began to sketch.

  Gabriel’s original study of Karen is one of three sketches, among a total of close on four hundred, in which a layman can discern real merit. Some of the others are good, particularly his early work in the camps, and a few are arresting, like the crayon drawing of the young dragoon called “Remount Demand,” but this picture excels by the charm and freshness of the cowslip bank upon which the girl is sitting. Her head is thrown back, displaying a strong neck but unexpectedly delicate chin. Her figure is that of a peasant, prematurely developed by ceaseless toil in the fields, a woman who would be middle-aged within eight or nine years. The features, however, have a delicate bourgeois caste, and the eyes, blue as the Austrian sky, have a sparkle that makes the stream ripple and the drowsy summer air hum with the music of bees. It has a simple title. Gabriel signed it “Cowherd, Vienna, August, 1809.”