Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Nicholas kept his eyes on the cigar end. With this as pivot he inched round in a wide and silent arc, finishing up on the far side of the vehicle, close to a low bank by the oak where the mules were tethered. He could no longer see the red cigar glow, but he knew the position of the big wheel and crawled forward until he was able to pass beside it and under the wagon on the side farthest from the Italian. He heard Luigi begin to hum, probably in an effort to keep awake. Nicholas, crouching within a few inches of the man’s back, reached for his bayonet, but then thought better of it and slipped his hand into his breeches pocket for a piece of cord. Finding a short length, he waited for the moon, concentrating on his own soundless breathing.

  Presently, when the moon appeared, Nicholas saw the Italian’s head, resting against the spokes. He thrust both hands, one holding the cord, through the spokes and swiftly joined his fingers an inch in front of Luigi’s face, jerking the cord tight and bracing his knee against the lower part of the wheel. So rapid was his movement that Luigi’s humming broke off in the middle of a note. All that escaped from the Italian’s mouth was a sharp hiss, his final breath.

  Nicholas held on to the cord until the man’s body had ceased to twitch. Then, reaching through the wheel, he eased the corpse to the ground. He listened for a moment, but no sound beyond that of a snore came from the wagon. He crawled back to the bank and, again, waited for the moon. As it sailed between two banks of cloud he swiftly cut the tether of the nearest mule and moved off to the right. The animal followed, uncomplaining. At a safe distance Nicholas climbed on its back and rode it over to the voltigeurs’ lines. At the bivouac he awakened everyone and called a council of war.

  There was a great deal to be done before it was light. Louis shaved the mule’s back down to the base of its tail and then cropped its long ears. This done, he heated a ramrod and branded a rough diamond on the animal’s wincing shoulder. Having buried the shorn hair, Louis then stoked up a brazier fire inside the wagon and shod the mule with shoes from Nicholette’s harness box. It was difficult to disguise a mule, but he did his best, and had it harnessed beside the surviving horse before reveille.

  At first light the forward sections of the army began to move, surging slowly along a rough track that ran over the spur of the mountain, driving the British sharpshooters before them. But long before the voltigeurs had left the camp area a provost rode up with Gino Carolini at his heels. The wagon, in which Jean was lying, came to a halt. The file gathered it as Gino coolly identified his mule.

  “This one,” he told the provost, “and I demand the arrest of all of them as thieves and murderers.”

  The provost cursed. Halted here, the wagon was blocking the line of march. Men and horses were beginning to pile up behind it, and the two corporals of the provost’s squad were fully occupied directing the flow.

  “Where’s your sergeant?” demanded the lieutenant of Nicholas.

  The schoolmaster jerked his head towards the wagon, and the provost glanced over the tailboard. Nicholette addressed the harassed provost from her driving-box.

  “Do you arrest people on the word of that liar?” she asked. “Where’s his proof?”

  A party of infantrymen gathered round the group. The Carolinis were not popular. The onlookers soon caught the drift of the dispute. “Bayonet the bastard!” advised someone.

  Gino Carolini was not to be deterred by the hostile attitude of the men. Methodically he began to unhitch the harness of the mule, whilst the provost, his attention temporarily distracted by the traffic block, stood by in indecision.

  Gino did not get very far with his task. Nicholette reached for her long whip.

  “Move away from that mule, Gino!” she warned him, but the Italian ignored her.

  The lash whirled above the wagon canopy and cracked down on his bare neck. He dropped the piece of harness that he was holding and screamed. His hand shot to his belt and pulled at the butt of a small double-barrelled pistol. Seeing the weapon, some of the men around him began to jostle and the startled team jerked forward, scattering the group round the shafts. The provost jumped onto the box and pulled hard at the reins. For a moment the wagon lurched and swayed about the rough track. Above the shouting Gino screamed, “Thieves! Murderers!” Gabriel, Louis and the others hung around the shafts and tailboard, uncertain what to do whilst the provost occupied the box. Gino’s pistol went off in the scrimmage, but the ball injured nobody, for Nicholas had grabbed his arms from behind.

  Suddenly the violent lurching of the wagon ceased and the struggling group round the shafts melted away. Only the file, Nicholette, Gino and the provost remained. The undirected movements of the wagon had brought its wheels up onto one of the low banks, and the track was partially cleared. A group of brilliantly dressed officers had reined in beside the vehicle.

  One of them, a red-headed middle-aged man in the uniform of a marshal, edged his horse forward.

  “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

  The soldiers in the group immediately recognized Michel Ney and were silent. Once more Gabriel thought: “This is it; this is where Nicholas leaves us.”

  Under the marshal’s terse directions they broke down part of the bank and moved the wagon onto the level scrub. Ney’s staff officers returned to the road and directed the columns onward. Caissons of the Flying Artillery began to trundle past. Standing by the wagon, Gino poured out his tale, his hand constantly returning to massage the thick red weal on his neck. All his cool deliberation now gone, he was almost incoherent with rage. The marshal heard him out, the provost officer opening his sabretache and jotting down a few random notes. Nicholette said nothing, sitting up on the box, chin in cupped hand.

  “Escort this man back to his canteen, Lieutenant,” said Ney at last, and to Gino, who opened his mouth to protest, “You’ll get justice all right. I’ll investigate the matter myself.”

  Gino went reluctantly, one of the provost’s men accompanying him back along the bank towards his wagons. Ney’s grey eyes roved over the file and finally settled on Nicholas.

  “Are you in charge?”

  “I suppose I am, the sergeant’s out of it for a spell!”

  “Come into the wagon,” said Ney, and swung himself from the saddle, tossing the reins to the single aide-de-camp who had remained.

  The marshal and the corporal climbed the tailboard and sat facing one another on the lockers, with the pallid Jean between them. The sergeant was lying on a truss of straw stolen from the cavalry lines by Louis during the night. Jean was conscious and recognized Ney with a quiet smile.

  “This is a bitch of a campaign; what’s happened to us lately?” he said.

  Ney grinned and a current of sympathy seemed to pass between the two men.

  Nicholas noted it and hoped. He said: “The sergeant was at Hohenlinden.”

  “We fight better in low temperatures,” the marshal said, and scratched his chin. He turned from contemplating the sergeant to Nicholas again. “Why didn’t you buy that mule?” he asked. “The girl has money; all these people have money.”

  “She offered him eleven thousand and all her stock,” growled Nicholas.

  Ney looked incredulous. “She did? Why?”

  “Her mother was an old friend of the sergeant’s. She’s like that—one of us.”

  Ney nodded. After sixteen years’ continuous warfare he knew all about canteens and canteen rivalry. He recalled Old Carla, and his mind went back to an evening more than five years ago, on the night after Elchingen, when he had dismounted outside this same wagon to chat with a dying man, an old friend of his boyhood, to whom Carla was giving wine. He did not tell Nicholas that this was the reason why he had stopped after recognizing the wagon by its bizarre tailboard decorations. The marshal had a memory for that sort of detail.

  All he said was: “Eleven thousand and stock!” And then, “Wounded were to be abandoned!”

  Nicholas blazed out and Old Jean stared at him incredulously. There were times when this ex-schoolmaster
addressed officers as if they were stupid children.

  “Go on, then, arrest me and the girl, arrest the lot of us. Six men who win your battles count for less than an Italian civilian’s mule! That’s justice! Give him back his mule and leave a man like Jean, good for a hundred more fights, to be cut to pieces by the Portuguese! That’s logic, that’s about all the logic you get in the army nowadays. No wonder things aren’t going so well with us!”

  Ney’s initial astonishment gave place to amusement. He suddenly bellowed with laughter and stood up. Nicholas noticed then that one of his epaulettes was new, contrasting oddly with its faded and tousled twin. He remembered seeing the marshal half-way up the slope on the day before, after his left epaulette had been torn away by point-blank musketry fire.

  “You found the mule straying,” he said quietly. “An English mule, perhaps, that broke loose during the battle. The English artillery mules have a distinguishing brand, a crown over a blank scroll. Much the same as our own Westphalian Hussars, I believe!”

  He winked down at Jean and, climbing out of the wagon, swung himself into his saddle again and spurred down the bank, calling to the provost and his aide-de-camp to follow.

  Before they eased the wagon back onto the track Louis went over to the hussars’ horse lines and came back with a branding iron. The smell of singed hair tickled Jean’s nostrils as he lay listening to the endless shuffle of marching feet along the dusty track. Gino’s mule brayed, protesting against the indignity of two brandings within six hours.

  The file and wagon moved off down the scorching road to Coimbra.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They got Jean to Coimbra hospital, with the 4,500 sick and wounded who had struggled thus far. The old sergeant’s wound was healing satisfactorily. His fever had burned itself out during an agonizing day in the wagon as the army struggled along congested tracks towards the city.

  Autumn weather had set in and it rained every day. The British did not make another stand. They hastened their steps toward Lisbon, where, presumably, their transports were waiting. The pace of their retreat gratified Jean as soon as he could sit up and ask for news. Massena, hoping to wipe out earlier failures by a grand coup which would result in expelling the British forces from the Peninsula, hurled his advance guard down the muddy tracks in a strenuous effort to maintain contact with the British rearguard.

  The army approached Coimbra through a barren, devastated countryside. All round the city and beyond it villages had been burned and evacuated. Food stocks had been destroyed or carried away. Continuing the advance, the Eighty-seventh often marched for days without encountering a single Portuguese civilian. Irregulars of the militia kept up sniping attacks on the flanks, and occasionally the dragoons brought in a sulky prisoner or two, but there was no food, no dry billets, little enough fuel and, worst of all, no loot worth its carriage on the march.

  “This is the toughest campaign of the lot,” Old Jean told them the day before they parted.

  “There’ll be worse before the whole damned Empire topples over,” growled Nicholas.

  The group were missing Manny’s high spirits and often referred to the dead man.

  “God knows what he would have found to chuckle at in this country,” said Claude, with a glance at the dismal sky.

  Even Dominique’s fiddle refused to call a tune. In the constant wet weather of the long march down Portugal the threads of the bow had gone slack and flabby. Dominique tried to replace them with hair, cut from the mane of a cuirassier’s mount, but the substitute was not effective, and the farm hand solemnly wrapped the useless instrument in its oilskin and tucked it back into his knapsack. He could not nerve himself to throw it away and it weighed little enough in any case.

  Jean did not want to be left at Coimbra, but Nicholas and the others thought it best. It would be some time before the sergeant could walk, and the pace of the final advance on the capital was likely to be too hot, even for Nicholette. Her horse and mule were sadly underfed. Fodder was almost unobtainable in a country swept clean by the redcoats and their fanatical allies.

  The voltigeurs hurried on with the rest of the light infantry. Hardly were the columns out of sight when the Portuguese militia swooped down on the hospital, overwhelmed the inadequate guard and carried every wounded Frenchmen a prisoner to Oporto. Only the presence of an English commander prevented an orgy of throat-cutting. The file did not learn of Jean’s capture until later. In the meantime they had worries enough of their own.

  Nobody in the French army, from the Commander-in-Chief downwards, had the slightest inkling of the presence of vast lines of fortifications, erected by the British with Portuguese labour, in the area of Torres Vedras outside Lisbon. Every pass, every gully had been blocked and fortified. The mountains bristled with guns. A chain of small forts, each of which would have defied the assault of an army corps, ran like a granite necklace round the lower slopes of the bare hills.

  The French army swung to the left and ranged along the twenty-two miles of fortifications. There was not a chink anywhere. The British retreat had come to an end. Snug in their impregnable lines, the enemy sat down to await the inevitable starvation of the army which had harried them all the way from the frontier. Massena stayed on for several months, but his invasion was virtually over on the day that he came within range of the lines. A single glance was enough to tell the old warrior that a frontal attack was out of the question. He would lose two-thirds of his men without getting so much as a footing within the first line of defence. If, by some miracle, this could be carried, there were others within it, and a well-fed, well-equipped company to defend every bastion.

  Outwardly Massena did not despair. He regrouped, built cantonments, sent out strong foraging parties for food, despatched messages for help to France and to every other independent commander in the Peninsula. Inwardly, however, he knew that the game in Portugal was over. Years later he said to Wellington, his opposite number, “You turned every hair on my body white!” It was not an overstatement.

  In the first days of autumn the voltigeurs found themselves billeted in the ruins of several small towns along the banks of the Tagus. The countryside around had obviously been rich and fertile, but it was no longer capable of supporting a single company for more than a few days. Fruit had once been plentiful there, but now the harvests were ruined. Millions of plovers soared over the rotting olives. Vines had not been stripped and the figs shrivelled on the trees. In the string of villages and small towns along the river there were no sheep, no goats, no chickens, no men and no women.

  British gunboats patrolled the wide river, keeping up a desultory but highly annoying fire on the main road and causing a good many casualties.

  When the weather mended for a while Gabriel sometimes forgot his hunger in admiration of the country, the broad strip between the river and the hills encouraging him to take out his sketchbook and make three or four hasty impressions of the sweep of orange trees, lemon groves and oleanders, under a vivid blue sky. But by far the most interesting page in this section of his book is a lively sketch of the barriers, where the hostile camps merged and the voltigeurs sometimes took a turn at sentry-go.

  The relationship between the infantry of both armies was cordial. The British did not want to come out, not, at least, until Massena’s troops were sufficiently thinned to make victory certain, and the French were resigned to their rôle of simulated siege. Every private in the ranks knew that it was only a question of time before they were forced, by hunger and excessive wastage, to retreat to the Spanish frontier. Then it would be their turn to be harried over the mountain ranges that lay between them and the modest refitting and revictualling depots of occupied Spain. A sort of careless stupor descended on the victors of Austerlitz and Friedland. Down at the barrier they did not even bother to return shots fired at them during the first days of the siege. The British soon showed themselves ready to live and let live. When the trumpeter sounded a morning summons officers and men of the two armies ex
changed newspapers while some of the redcoats, after a brief exchange of raillery, tossed over navy rum and ship’s biscuits to their scarecrow opponents. Gabriel’s sketch shows a grinning British sergeant, his flesh straining at the buttons on his red tunic, his black shako pushed back from a broad, sunburned face, handing a bottle to a melancholy sergeant of the Eighty-seventh whose blue greatcoat hangs on his shoulders as upon a peg. The sketch is entitled “Villafranca, October, 1810.” It is a vivid commentary on the situation existing in the camps, but Gabriel’s titles reveal no sense of humour. Manny might have called it “The Taking of Lisbon,” but Manny was dead and lay in his shallow grave high up on the slopes of the bleak sierra. His lighter suggestions are missing from the later pages of the sketchbooks.

  Some of the voltigeurs of the Eighty-seventh were soon to enjoy British hospitality for a more prolonged period. In mid-November the surviving members of the file were taken prisoner. For the best part of two years they remained out of the war.

  One of the British gunboats had been sunk by a lucky hit from a shore battery, on the outskirts of the town. The vessel went down in fairly shallow water, and at low tide part of it could be seen lying exposed. The crew had made off downstream in dinghies and, the ebbing tide favouring them, were soon back within their lines.

  Captain Tinville, the good-natured but somewhat stupid successor to the ruthless Vidal, decided that an attempt should be made to salvage anything of value on the gunboat. He therefore ordered one of the sergeants, an obtuse Breton named Soutier, to detail a reliable file to punt out to the wreck at low tide, employing home-made rafts for the journey. Nicholas and his file were allotted the task.

  Soutier was no Sergeant Jean. A veteran recently promoted, he tried to cover lack of self-confidence with a maddening reiteration of the word “orders.” Once something was “ordered” Soutier considered that his responsibility ended with the passing on of instructions to the men in the ranks. The blunt rejoinder “Orders!” met any remonstrance, however reasonable.