Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Soutier told Nicholas to take his party across the dead water of the river opposite their billet and carry out the salvage before nightfall. He forgot that at this particular hour the full tide would be sweeping down river to that section of the lower estuary held by the enemy. If the work were left until morning the incoming tide would greatly reduce the force of the current and probably enable the job to be performed without much risk or difficulty.

  Nicholas stated this somewhat obvious fact, but Soutier shrugged his shoulders.

  “Orders,” he explained.

  Nicholas pointed to the current racing past the half-submerged gunboat.

  “We’ll never anchor these rafts in that flood,” he told Soutier.

  “Orders!”

  Nicholas grunted and, assembling the men, told them to take off most of their equipment and their boots. His own group boarded the largest of the rafts, the others distributing themselves among the remaining craft. The rafts were pitiful substitutes for boats. Not a single river craft of any kind had been overlooked by the British in their preliminary inspection of the banks prior to retiring within their fortified lines.

  They poled out to the wreck an hour before sunset, and, as Nicholas had predicted, it proved almost impossible, once they approached midstream, to check their progress down the river with the makeshift anchors supplied. The two lighter rafts were swept past the gunboat like corks and only managed to make the friendly bank by united efforts of their crews and of a line of voltigeurs on the shore, who saw their distress and waded shoulder deep into the water to form a rescue chain. Even so, two of the men were drowned.

  Nicholas avoided similar failure by grappling the wreck as they surged past its protruding stern. The five of them hung on grimly, forcing the raft alongside so that Nicholas could clamber aboard. So swift was the flow of the river, swollen by weeks of autumnal rains, that Nicholas doubted whether the wreck would hold its position if it was shifted on the river bed by the movements of half a dozen men. So he ordered the others to remain on the raft while he himself crawled forward, looking for anything which he could wrench free and toss to them. There were some sealed jars of rum in the stern lockers, three of which he transferred. He also got an anchor and a sopping bundle of charts which he had no opportunity to examine in the precarious position he occupied on the sloping deck.

  Gabriel advised him to jump aboard and abandon the rest of the salvage. At that moment a British patrol, on the left bank, opened fire with an eight-pounder. The first ball plunged into the water not a dozen yards from the wreck.

  It began to rain heavily, and the downpour beat in their faces. Over on the French bank a horde of voltigeurs were dancing and gesticulating, presumably advising immediate return. The British gunners fired again. This time the shot screamed over their heads and fell just short of the group on the bank, causing a hurried surge up the beach.

  Nicholas glanced over his shoulder, to see four strained faces and four pairs of hands clinging desperately to the grappling line. He crawled backwards down the canting deck of the gunboat and dropped back onto the raft, which was already showing signs of disintegration. They cast off and were whirled down the river. A third shot crashed into the exposed side of the wreck and, through the driving rain, they saw the vessel heel over and disappear.

  “Orders!” said Nicholas, but only Dominique gave an answering grin. The others were clinging to the loose planking for their lives.

  The end came like a crash of thunder. Spinning madly in the boiling water, the raft piled up on a snag a hundred yards or so from the French bank. The shock threw Claude and Gabriel into the water. Claude, who could not swim a stroke, let out a piercing shriek, and as the timber splayed out on the surface of the river the other three grabbed at planks. Instead now of a single unit, five men rushed away downstream, Gabriel swimming strongly with the current, Claude thrashing the water to reach a fragment of salvage, while Louis and Dominique still clung to the largest section of the raft.

  Nicholas, swirling past astride a beam, was carried within inches of Claude and, reaching out, grabbed him by the collar of his tunic, almost losing his hold on the plank with the jerk. In that brief second Nicholas thought of Nicholette and wondered whether she would thank him for saving her husband’s life. He doubted it. Lately he had noticed her indifference towards the boy whom she had married on Lobau. Claude was a gentle man, and once the boy’s physical charm began to cloy, as it eventually must with a woman as tough and resolute as Nicholette, she had probably found him very tedious. Perhaps this was why she seemed to be turning elsewhere. As he struggled in the water, with one arm wrapped round the skimming beam, his free hand straining at Claude’s collar, Nicholas’s brain swiftly formulated this reflection but did not record it. He was concentrating on a physical crisis. Instinct told him to hang on to the collar and he did hang on, until Claude, struggling for his life, and sacrificing it to his struggles, slipped from his comrade’s grasp and was whirled downward and outward, into the main stream of the torrent. He rose once or twice, a bluish clot on the brown flood, before finally sinking to be tumbled along the muddy bed by playful undercurrents and flung at last on the wrinkled flats of the left bank, where a party of caçadores found him next morning and rifled his sodden clothes.

  Claude never knew that a human hand had reached out to save him. His last conscious impression was of the splintering crash when the raft struck the snag, and the split second of stark terror that succeeded the collision. After that he fought for life without knowing it, beating the water or, it might be, the air with arms that were suddenly leaden. There was a great roaring in his ears, like the boom of the waterfall high up the Garonne where he had often fished as a child. Then, through this tumbling wall of sound, he had a fleeting vision of Nicholette, turning and reaching out her hand to him as they stepped onto their islet in the Danube, but her mouth was not smiling as it had smiled that summer evening. It was as set and grim as when she told them that the Carolini brothers had followed her into camp and that the purchase of a mule was inevitable. That was all he knew, that and the roaring, cramping, murderous cold.

  The other four made the right bank at some distance below the barrier, cut off from their comrades, who ran along their side of the river shouting and calling through the storm. A British naval piquet dragged them, half-dead, from the water. They had been saved by the sweeping curve of the river, which had carried all four of them into shallower water where they were just able to grasp at the ropes and oars held out by the bluejackets.

  They were laid on the bank and a fifteen-year-old midshipman gave each of them a generous tot of rum, before packing them off to the prisoners’ compound and ordering the Portuguese guard to see them fed. The midshipman came along to see that his orders were carried out, and it was as well for the survivors that he did. Caçadores did not believe in wasting good food on half-drowned Frenchmen, even though inexhaustible supplies of beef and pork came in by lighter from the British men-o’-war in the harbour three times a week.

  They remained in the compound for more than a week, during which period they were treated with consideration by the British, with indifference by the Portuguese. Prison food, however, was twice as nourishing and about four times as plentiful as the diet of their own officers inside the French lines. All that they saw through the stockade of their compound confirmed them in the opinion that a single dash from their fortifications by these well-fed, well-drilled Englishmen would hurl the starved and ailing French back along every track and lane leading to the Spanish frontier. It was only here, inside British lines, that a Frenchman could accurately assess the wreck of Massena’s campaign. Gabriel, who discussed these things with Nicholas, could only conclude that Lord Wellington was either excessively cautious or else unaware of the true weaknesses in the enemy’s ranks.

  The prisoners were loosely guarded. Few of the French among the hundreds inside the compound had any desire to escape back to their own lines. They were well content to be fed o
n the beef, pork and biscuits of the besieged. Through the palings of the stockade they could see the life of the city going on very much as usual—regiments of green-clad Portuguese being drilled by sweating English officers and sergeants; lines of sleek transport horses moving up from the quays, their glossy hides in significant contrast to the raw-boned mules that staggered about the French cantonments; crate after crate of stores and ammunition going up to the regimental depots; two-horse wagons, piled high with brand-new muskets and equipment, straining up the incline to the citadel, in readiness for the spring advance.

  Louis stared gloomily at the dragoons’ horses as they were taken out to the beaches for exercise. “God help our cavalry when the redcoats do strike camp!” was his comment.

  Good food and ample opportunity for relaxation had the effect of raising the spirits of the four voltigeurs. They were cast down, but not unduly so, by the death of Claude. They had received no definite news of him but were convinced, on talking it over among themselves, of his drowning in the Tagus. One morning Gabriel saw a British sergeant whom he had met at the barrier, and asked him to inform the voltigeurs’ piquet of their capture and of Claude’s probable death. Their fate would be of particular interest to Nicholette, who now would have to cast around for a new section. None of them worried much on her account. They knew Nicholette too well for that, and there were too many files in the Eighty-seventh that would be only too delighted to appoint themselves her unofficial escort for the remainder of the campaign. A claim on a canteen, in this particular war, was worth six months’ arrears of pay.

  Only Nicholas smouldered a little at the thought of the cantinière hitching herself to a new team. Claude was dead and Nicholette had to find herself a new husband. Who was better qualified for the vacancy than he? Yet, as things were, they were unlikely to see one another again. Nicholas was one of the few soldiers in the Grand Army who was convinced that these interminable wars could cease only with the overthrow, and possibly the death, of the Emperor. Talk along these lines had often brought him a sharp warning from Sergeant Jean, to whom such an outlook smacked of blasphemy.

  When they had been in the compound for about a fortnight, an officer who spoke fluent French came round and selected the fit men for transportation. Two of the empty transport vessels in the harbour were returning to Plymouth for fresh stores, and every transport took back a batch of prisoners. This sort of traffic had been going on intermittently for years, shiploads of stores to Lisbon, shiploads of prisoners out. Ironically citing the Paris Moniteur, Nicholas remarked grimly that, for an army constantly being pushed into the sea, the British seemed to teach an unconscionably large number of Frenchmen to swim. The newcomers soon discovered, however, that a large number of the captives were deserters.

  The prisoners were escorted down to the lighters by a guard of marines, very trim in their scarlet and gleaming black. On the way the shuffling column passed a handcart in which a half-naked and badly wounded man was being trundled along by a pair of Hanoverian foot guards. The casualty’s back was a bloody pulp.

  Glancing in the direction of the handcart with faint interest, Louis raised a query. “Where are they using grapeshot? I haven’t heard any artillery.”

  Nicholas laughed harshly.

  “That isn’t a grapeshot wound. The man has been flogged, practically to death, I should say.”

  Louis and the others looked after the cart with a new interest.

  “Why didn’t they hang the poor devil?” asked Gabriel.

  “His offence wasn’t a capital one,” Nicholas told them. “The British are great believers in discipline and they’ve only two methods of enforcing it, the noose and the lash.”

  During the ensuing voyage they discovered that Nicholas knew a great deal about the British. He had specialized in English literature at his university and was less surprised than most Frenchmen by the strange inconsistencies of the race. He knew, for instance, that an island that had fought against France for seventeen years, in defence of freedom of the seas and constitutional government, still kept many of its children at work for sixteen hours a day, sometimes for a weekly pittance, often enough for nothing at all but a few meals and a communal bed. He knew that the sailor who leaped the bulwarks of French men-of-war, wielding a cutlass against what he considered the intolerable tyranny of the French Emperor, whom he knew from his cartoons and broadsheets as “Boney, the Robber Baron,” had most probably been torn from his native village by the press-gang and flogged into becoming one of the finest seamen in the world. He knew also that in England a standard of living far higher than that enjoyed by the wealthiest aristocrat who fell by the guillotine during the Terror could flourish side by side with abject poverty and semi-starvation. Nicholas spoke much of these things, but he did not neglect to remind his friends that the very men who were born and reared under these conditions possessed an independence of spirit and a consciousness of race superiority exceeding that of an Imperial Guardsman. He accepted this as part explanation of the continued survival of Britain against the organized might of a Continent dominated by the plump little man who had jocularly asked after their wine on the island of Lobau.

  Kept informed by Nicholas’s flow of laconic comment, and directed by the schoolmaster’s unusually strong powers of observation, Gabriel, Louis and even Dominique rapidly adjusted themselves to their new surroundings. In this way Nicholas partially filled the vacancy left by Old Jean, whom they had all loved as boys in their teens will love and admire a wise old uncle who shares in their games and their adolescent enthusiasms.

  Old Jean, however, was not so far off as they imagined.

  Gabriel always looked back on their reunion with the sergeant as one of the keenest pleasures of all those years of hardship and vivid mental experiences.

  Most of the time during the voyage up the coast of Portugal and across the Bay of Biscay, the prisoners were penned below, the sergeants having been carefully segregated from other ranks in obedience to what appeared to the French a fantastic notion of class prejudice on the part of the British, and nowhere more punctiliously observed than on board one of His Majesty’s ships. During the early part of the voyage Louis and Dominique were very sick. The food was of far poorer quality than that served up in the compound at Lisbon, and the crowded space between decks grew unbearably stuffy and noisome. The ship’s captain, however, was a man on loan from the East India Company and did not observe the discipline on board that might have been expected from a regular naval officer. He allowed the prisoners to exercise in batches for approximately one hour each day. The voltigeurs usually managed to go on deck together, and by the time the transport was cruising up the coast of France, with its escort of two frigates bobbing contemptuously inshore, Louis and Dominique had recovered and no longer implored the stolid marines who served their food to end their misery with blade or bullet. They reeled up on deck and swallowed great gulps of the stinging sea air, groping their way up to the handrail that divided the prisoners’ walk from the forecastle, where some of the half-naked tars were amusing themselves and a curious crowd of Frenchmen by dancing a hornpipe.

  One of the sailors, sitting cross-legged on a hatch-cover, was scraping away with a home-made fiddle, and Gabriel, who had followed the others forward, noted the rapt expression on Dominique’s pale face as he watched the cavorting bow of the fiddler squeaking out a rhythm, without much melody, for the slapping feet of the dancers. Gabriel saw that Dominique had momentarily forgotten his troubles in an inarticulate yearning to tuck the home-made fiddle under his chin and play once again some of the gipsy tunes that he had improvised all the way from the Danube to Coimbra. Gabriel nudged Nicholas, who nodded his understanding.

  The moment the dance had finished the schoolmaster elbowed his way to the rail and addressed the fiddler. The other Frenchmen showed their appreciation of the dance by shouts and applause.

  “My mate here, he’s a good fiddler, will you let him try?”

  The tar looked surprised
, but a big boatswain who had been lazily watching the dance whilst keeping a wary eye on the ragged crowd by the rail nodded his approval.

  “Give it to him, Taffy,” he said with a grin, “and see if the Froggies can fiddle any better than they can handle topsails in a gale!”

  Dominique took the fiddle, handling it as though it were a fragile piece of porcelain. He tucked it under his chin and drew the bow across the strings, producing a trial note or two.

  “Come on, Froggy,” called the genial boatswain, and he motioned Dominique over the rail onto the hatch-cover.

  Dominique hesitated, glancing shyly at the crowds of men in the forecastle, but Frenchmen pushed him forward and suddenly his diffidence left him and he began to play.

  He chose the tune which Gabriel had heard him fiddle that first evening in the Lobau bivouac. Listening, Gabriel reflected that it was a melody reaching beyond frontiers; it had in it something of the folk-music of all nations. It was violent, provocative, boisterous as a March wind in the trees; it had a theme that had never been committed to manuscript, but although he knew that it existed nowhere outside Dominique’s head, Gabriel felt it belonged somehow to his own boyhood and to days in the sun and rain along the winding course of the river. It moved him deeply and it must have had the same effect on everyone present, for there was complete silence on the crowded deck, the seamen and prisoners standing amazed that a shock-headed lout could coax such a tune from the grotesque little instrument.

  The owner of the fiddle was dumbfounded, finding it difficult to believe that he had sat on that very hatch-cover and carved the fiddle from fragments of a staved-in sea-chest, using only a few odd strands of catgut and a spoonful of glue begged from the ship’s carpenter.