Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  The inclusion of Gabriel and Manny in the escort was due to an unusual incident, in which both were unwilling participants. Just before leaving Valladolid the two voltigeurs had ordered a dinner in a tavern kept by a Frenchman. The remaining members of the file were on duty and unable to enjoy Gabriel’s hospitality. On reaching the inn they found more than a dozen soldiers eating in the general room. Among the diners, sitting in an alcove by himself, was Captain Vidal.

  The meal was a bad and very expensive one. Just as they were about to pay their score and depart, the innkeeper, a portly, florid man with an air of self-importance less than justified by the quality of his entertainment, came into the room and announced, in a threatening tone, that someone present had stolen more than a dozen of his silver spoons. Ignoring the indignant denials, he despatched a serving-man forthwith to fetch the nearest provost.

  Captain Vidal told the innkeeper that this was unnecessary, and announced that he, as senior officer present, would search everyone in the room. Vidal was respected in the ranks, and each man submitted without demur to close scrutiny of his kit and pockets. The spoons were not discovered.

  By the time the search was concluded two junior provost officers had arrived, and Vidal explained what had been done. The innkeeper, refusing to be satisfied, insisted on a second search, this time in the presence of the provosts. Again the kits and pockets of nearly twenty men were turned out on the floor. As the last man was being searched the innkeeper’s wife, a thin, sour-faced Spaniard, entered the room. She announced, in a casual tone, that the spoons had been found. They had been mislaid in cleaning.

  Vidal quietly unbuckled his sword-belt and laid it on the table.

  Manny, who knew Vidal well, plucked Gabriel by the sleeve.

  “Watch this, it’s going to be good!” he whispered.

  Vidal advanced softly towards the landlord. The infantry captain was a short, well-knit man, renowned in the regiment for agility and physical strength. At Raab, where he had won his decoration, he had run up a sloping beam like a monkey, gained the ramparts and thrown two artillerymen into the moat, after which he turned their eight-pounder onto a field-gun a short distance away and dismantled it with a single discharge. He had high, arched brows and a sallow complexion, with prominent cheekbones and a small, clipped moustache; this combination of features made him look satanic when he scowled. In the regiment he was known as “Lucie,” short for Lucifer.

  Speaking very quietly, Vidal said: “You seem to have made a mistake, fellow!”

  “I have and I apologize,” said the landlord, but, not liking the expression in the captain’s eye, he began to edge towards the kitchen door, closely followed by his wife.

  “An apology is not enough,” said Vidal bluntly. “You have insulted the soldiers of the Empire, the men to whom you owe every sou of your ill-deserved prosperity. I cannot allow this to pass for an apology. There must be atonement!”

  With a sudden bound he reached the innkeeper and floored him with a terrific blow between the eyes. The man’s wife screamed and two or three tapsters ran in with cudgels. A general movement among the troops, who had been watching the scene with growing satisfaction, was checked by Vidal.

  “If any man intervenes I’ll have him arrested,” he shouted. Then, picking up a chair, he stepped over the dazed host and rushed at the group of tapsters standing near the kitchen door. In less than a minute the chair was smashed to fragments, one tapster lay bleeding and unconscious on the floor, and the remainder had fled into the street, shouting for gendarmes.

  Vidal dropped the splintered chairback and returned to the landlord, who was rising unsteadily to his knees. On his way the captain drew his sword from the discarded belt. The hostess rushed to the window, screaming for help, while Gabriel thought her husband as good as dead.

  But Vidal had no intention of murdering the man. He tossed away the sabre and grasped the heavy leather scabbard, swinging it above his head and bringing it down with enormous force on the civilian’s plump shoulders. At the second blow the man began to bellow, adding his roars to the shrill screams of his wife and the laughter of the troops ranged round the walls. Wherever the victim crawled and darted Vidal moved in pursuit, keeping up a fierce tattoo of blows on the landlord’s head, neck and shoulders. He continued to flail the man thus until he lost consciousness and lay with his face in the sawdust. The moment he ceased to move Vidal sheathed his sabre, buckled on his belt and gave the order to march. As he left the room he called to the hysterical wife:

  “That will teach you to be more careful about confusing soldiers with petty thieves!”

  “There goes a man,” said Manny joyfully, following Vidal into the street.

  Vidal wrote their names in his notebook as a precaution against civilian prosecution, but nothing further was heard of the incident. An hour later Vidal was given charge of the conscript column and sent his orderly for Gabriel, Manny and the other voltigeurs to join the escort. They all set off together down the Salamanca road.

  At the first halt Manny called Gabriel on to one side.

  “Follow me!” he said, leading the way down the column to a small clump of trees, where the conscripts were sitting in their irons.

  Manny halted in front of a sturdy prisoner who was sitting cross-legged on the grass, smoking the broken stub of a pipe. He was a gipsy-like man of about thirty with an enormous amount of hair showing through the tatters of his shirt.

  “Hullo, brother?” Manny said, with a wry grin.

  The prisoner looked up and smiled back at him, showing no surprise at the recognition.

  “I saw you two leagues back,” he told Manny. “How are you going to get me out of this?” He raised his manacled hands and winked.

  Manny considered. “How did you get into it?” he asked.

  The conscript gave up trying to light his pipe and yawned, stretching out his hands and letting them drop suddenly so that the chain rattled.

  “I got into a fight with gendarmes in Blois,” he said. “I ought to have known better. They took me to the watch-house and asked for my papers.” He let out a loud, derisive laugh, as though the very idea of his possessing satisfactory papers caused him vast amusement.

  Manny laughed, too. “He’s a kinsman of mine,” he told Gabriel. “We teamed together for more than a year in the Low Countries.”

  The provost’s whistle shrilled and the column shuffled to its feet. Gabriel looked along the line of sullen, defeated faces. Only the gipsy appeared to take his situation philosophically.

  Manny had an abstracted air during the next day’s march. He seemed to be turning over a problem and Gabriel suspected that the problem had some relation to the plight of Andreas, his kinsman. At night Manny went along with some rations and a half bottle of wine. He also gave the prisoner a little tobacco borrowed from Old Jean.

  A short march beyond Alaejos, when the army had split, one half to take the main road and the other, consisting chiefly of draught horses and baggage wagons, to follow a parallel road that gradually deteriorated, Manny woke Gabriel as they lay beside the bivouac fire. They had camped in a half-deserted village, but the night was warm and they preferred the open street to vermin-infested houses.

  “I’m going to pass Andreas a farrier’s file and let him take his chance,” he said. “We’ll be handing them over and rejoining the main body tomorrow,”

  In low tones Gabriel did his best to dissuade Manny.

  “If Lucie finds out that one is missing he’ll halve the column and comb the whole country,” he said.

  Manny chuckled. “He’ll never catch Andreas once he’s off the chain. I’ve known that monkey to dodge the gendarmes of a whole department for years on end. And he’s safe enough from the guerrillas; Andreas can speak better Spanish than a Spaniard.”

  Gabriel shrugged and said nothing. He was familiar with his friend’s obstinacy, and knew that the young man considered it his plain duty to do what he could for an old comrade in trouble.

 
The following morning, when they were about to set off, the escort sergeant reported one of the prisoners missing. Captain Vidal, already half a day’s march behind the main column, cursed violently in Italian, his favourite medium for fluent blasphemy.

  He went into the cattle compound, where the prisoners had been housed, and personally checked the tally. They showed him the neatly filed links of the gipsy’s chain. Manny stood by expressionless. Gabriel made himself scarce and found employment at the far end of the column.

  Anyone less resolute than Vidal, any officer to whom the army was more of a profession and less of a religion, would have written off Andreas then and there, but Vidal had the Pau Commandant’s manifest in his pocket and on that manifest 114 recalcitrants were listed. Not 113, or 115, but 114, of whom Andreas, now off the chain, was one.

  Vidal rubbed his blue chin. The man could not be far. There was no food to be had between their present position and Salamanca, a day’s march to the south. The fugitive would not make for the cities, which French troops garrisoned and others were traversing every day. Neither would he push on into Portugal, for his intention must, ultimately, be a speedy return to France. What would he do? What would Vidal have done in his place? Hang around the fringe of the village and wait until the column had moved on, then slink back and beg or steal the means to carry him north of the main road.

  He turned to the escort sergeant.

  “Take eight men and keep out of sight. Wait here until tomorrow and see if he turns up. If he doesn’t, push on after us at top speed. If you catch him you can share this,” and he spun a gold napoleon in the air, catching it and returning it to his breeches pocket. Vidal was probably the only officer in the French army who valued a deserter in gold.

  The sergeant thought it a pity that such a good soldier should be going stark, staring mad. He said nothing, however, and selected a patrol of eight. Manny was the first man called.

  The main column handed over the conscripts and picked up the army route once more at the crossroads, a short day’s march farther on. Massena had ordered two days’ rest, in order to allow time for the rearguard to come up and to conduct a general overhaul of wagons, many of which were breaking down under the severe strain of the Peninsula roads. Gabriel rejoined his file and they lay up in the scrub. Dominique shot a stray goat during one of his hide-and-seek rushes with the guerrillas, and the regiment shouted with laughter when they saw him picking his way to the road with the carcass slung across his shoulders. Many of the jokers were glad of the pickings, however, when Old Jean had filled the communal kettle.

  At noon on the second day a sergeant staggered past the bivouac, looking for Captain Vidal. Gabriel barely recognized the man whom the captain had left in command of the detachment three days earlier. His uniform was in tatters and his hands and face were covered with scratches. He walked as though he had been bastinadoed.

  Gabriel went after him for news of Manny and the fugitive conscript, Andreas.

  “A curse on the conscript,” muttered the sergeant. “Lucie was right; we should have shot them all in the mountains. My detachment was ambushed and wiped out. I only escaped by a miracle. In the name of God take me to Lucie and let me sleep.”

  They took him to Lucie and heard his tale. The detachment had waited at the village for a day and a night, but there had been no sign of the runaway. At dawn the next morning a local man well disposed towards the French had offered to guide the party by a short cut over the spur of the mountain. They would be within sight of the main road all the way, and the Spaniard had come to them seeking protection, saying that his wife had been French and that the peasants in the village had threatened to kill him the moment the troops moved on. He led them straight into the hands of the irregulars, barely five leagues out of the village. The other seven had all been killed or taken. The sergeant himself had only escaped by leaping over a precipice and rolling hundreds of feet down the mountainside. The guerrillas must have assumed that he was dead, for after firing a few random shots in his direction they moved off to one of the passes.

  Vidal’s lip jutted. “I ought to have you shot for incompetence,” he growled. “Could you guide a party to the spot?”

  “Easily, it’s not half a day’s march from the camp,” said the sergeant, looking ruefully at his feet.

  “Get the company under arms,” said Vidal.

  In less than an hour the voltigeurs of the Eighty-seventh were marching back over the road the guard party had travelled. The sergeant, his wounds bandaged, rode Vidal’s horse. The captain followed, riding a tall mule which soon abandoned its attempts to unseat him.

  An hour before sunset on the second day they reached the scene of the encounter, a narrow track worn in the lower slopes of the mountain. One or two items of equipment, too worn or broken to be salvaged by the Spaniards, were all that was left to mark the fight. Following the sergeant’s directions, they marched into the pass higher up the slope.

  It was a gloomy place, shut in by towering crags, broken through by outcroppings of granite that jutted, like broken teeth, from the gritty soil. The valley was flooded with the red light of the setting sun. Gabriel shivered involuntarily.

  They did not have to search far. A short distance up the valley, where the guerrillas had judged themselves safe from any immediate pursuit, the company rounded a bend and disturbed a flock of carrion birds. They rose heavily and flapped away to ledges nearer the summit, blinking down malevolently on the little column of men toiling up the mountain path.

  On a flat rock, where the shelf widened, the voltigeurs found their comrades, six of them, with bullet wounds and throats cut, spread naked for the mountain eagles and laid in a neat row, as though the Spaniards had planned an obscene parody of parade-ground precision.

  The men began to curse. Captain Vidal examined the corpses, then ordered the men to get busy with mattocks, scratching shallow graves in the space between the flat rock and the towering mountainside.

  “There’s one missing,” the sergeant told him. “The Jew, Jacobsen!”

  In the fading light Gabriel scrutinized each vacant face. Manny was not there.

  The thought occurred to him that Manny had deserted, too, and found means to join his fugitive kinsman, but this idea Gabriel dismissed as wildly improbable. If Manny had intended to go he would have slipped away with his kinsman when Andreas had filed his fetters. He had accompanied the detachment up to the moment the main column moved off, and obviously in so small a party the sergeant would have missed him on the march.

  His conjectures were interrupted by a loud cry from a voltigeur higher up the path. Men began running in that direction, forming a ring round a gnarled, twisted tree that clung, by some miracle of hardihood, to a crevice in the rocks just above their heads. Fastened to the tree by his hands, through which had been driven two strong nails, his ankles roped a few inches above the ground, was a naked man.

  The last rays of the sun, dipping behind the rugged horizon of mountain peaks, fell on a pallid face and a mop of tight black curls. The body was Emmanuel Jacobsen’s; some freak of agony had twisted his wide mouth into a dying grin, a grin neither defiant nor resolute but with a sidelong twist of the lips that made even Vidal and other veterans turn their eyes away.

  Claude spoke first, his voice dry and unnatural.

  “Why single him out? Why Manny?”

  Old Jean laid down his musket and crossed over to the tree, methodically unfastening the rope that held the ankles.

  “Manny was a Jew,” he said, his voice trembling; “some of these Spaniards have long memories.”

  They took him down and buried him alongside the others. Old Jean climbed on a voltigeur’s shoulders and gently prised the nails from the splintered palms, easing the iron out of the bloodied wood as though Manny was alive and would still feel pain.

  Captain Vidal spurred on the gravediggers with a steady spate of blasphemy. The men sweated in spite of the chill wind that soughed through the valley with the going
down of the sun. When the sparse soil had been stamped down the company received the order to march, not westward towards the main body, but north-east, to the village. Soon after the march began the sergeant guide collapsed. He was tied to the saddle and the march continued. Vidal did not need a guide for the remainder of the journey. He followed the winding track, his mouth set in a savage line, and behind him trailed the company, more than a hundred strong. They had forgotten equally their weariness and prospects of an evening meal.

  The little column burst into the village within a few hours of leaving the pass. The Frenchmen went from house to house, dragging men, women and children into the street. Torches were lighted and the entire population was paraded in the miserable little square. The men, not more than twenty of varying ages, were sullen. Some of the women screamed, dragging sleepy children this way and that, turning and spitting at the men who drove them forward at the bayonet point. Vidal massed them in a hollow square in front of the one sizeable building in the place, a squat stone-built storehouse. Then he climbed onto the wooden steps with the voltigeurs drawn up at the rear of the civilians, and asked, in halting Spanish, if anyone present understood French. There was complete silence, except for the occasional wail of a child.

  At length two of the men pushed forward a man of about thirty.

  “This dog understands all right; I remember him well enough. He tried to sell us some wine,” said one of the original escort.

  Vidal wasted no time in parleying. He addressed the man crisply, his metallic voice ringing across the square.