Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Four of them went aboard. Rattenbury’s boat was a trim eighteen-footer, with a furled foresail. Its crew consisted of Rattenbury and a boy hardly more than fourteen years of age. The boy, saying nothing, pointed to where they should stow themselves. There was a fresh sea running, and down there with the water breaking in creamy surge along the narrow shore the night seemed much less dark.

  Lucy had taken Louis’ arm as he walked into the shallows, and he stopped, fighting down an unreasonable embarrassment.

  The woman must have sensed this, for she drew away slightly and said in a steady voice: “You’ll get home all right. Jack says it’s an easy run.”

  “Where are they taking us?” asked Louis, more for something to say than out of curiosity.

  “Jack says he’ll try and make a Normandy bay that he knows, but it might have to be Jersey. You must leave it to him.”

  He hesitated, trying to force himself to say a few words of thanks, regret, gratitude, but nothing suitable came to his lips.

  The smuggler got up and splashed into the water. Louis threw his arms round the woman and felt her shiver, as though his touch could hardly be borne. He wondered dimly what had happened between them since the night before when they had lain, like boy and girl lovers, in the warm straw of his loft, but he could find no answer. He had no experience in love. He said the first thing that came into his head and realized instantly how foolish it must have sounded.

  “I shall miss the horses, Lucy.”

  Perhaps it was the best thing he could have said. His gaucherie seemed to melt something inside her, for she laughed aloud and threw up her chin to kiss him.

  “They’re waiting, Louis; go now.”

  He kissed her lightly and stumbled down the sliding bank of pebbles. His feet seemed to make an unconscionable noise. The smuggler’s boy was leaning over the bows, skilfully steadying the boat in a foot of swirling water. Louis climbed in and sat amidships, but the smuggler prised him out and pushed him forward, muttering a string of unintelligible oaths. The voltigeurs looked back as the little vessel bobbed away from the beach and saw Lucy Manaton standing, her skirt spread in the wind. She was not waving, just looking after them.

  As darkness closed on the boat, she turned and trudged up the difficult slope, suddenly overwhelmed by physical fatigue. Two hours later she arrived home to hear that Vince had died without recovering consciousness. She made no comment to Dr. Ellerman, who had been hastily summoned again by old Harris. She did not even notice his odd look, but climbed the stairs, flung herself on the bed and was asleep instantly.

  A mile out to sea, Rattenbury’s boat Kestrel dipped through choppy water, heading due south. Louis and Dominique were curled up in a large locker in the bows. Jean and Gabriel lay astern, both holding long boarding-pistols, their hands cupped over the hammers to shield the priming-pans from flying spray. Rattenbury had said that there was a hundred-to-one chance of running across a cutter, and if this happened they were to fire without waiting for a challenge. When it came to a matter of business Jack recognized no flag. His attitude was logical. One might as well be hung in chains for a dead preventive officer as hauled back into the King’s Navy for running a pound of contraband.

  Nicholas sat with the boy near the mast, now straining under four square yards of canvas. He was elated and stimulated by the swirl of the water, the salt smart in his nose and throat and the cold rush of the empty sky. He thought: “Nicholette—she ought to have been a fisherman’s daughter; this is her world.” At the thought of her a wild longing filled him, and a tenderness that he could not understand.

  Book Two

  PART FOUR

  The Niemen

  CHAPTER ONE

  Endless columns of men were shuffling across Europe, heading ever east. All day long over the sunny roads hung a cloud of fine white dust. Regiments which had not crossed paths since the days of Jena and Friedland, before the Spanish madness split the veteran columns of the Grand Army, intermingled as they debouched from country byroads onto the main highways to Dresden, Mainz, Strasbourg and the other principal garrison towns of the Empire. All the Imperial arsenals were working in triple shifts. Remounts clattered into the depots in jostling bunches, their outriders cursing the baggage drivers when the slow progress of the wagons caused inevitable bottlenecks. The infantry marched stolidly north-east to Danzig and Königsberg, stripping the summer countryside of its fruit, spreading in a slow-moving tide through the rich German plains towards the banks of the Niemen. The Emperor had decided on his Russian adventure, and his assault column was the largest that Europe had seen since Persian Darius led his hordes west across the Bosporus.

  There were men from every Western nation in the ranks. King Murat’s flamboyant Italians from the south, Davout’s well-disciplined Germans from the north, old campaigners from Spain and glad to see the last of the pestilential Peninsular War, Belgians, Hollanders and Rhinelanders, Westphalians from King Jerome’s cardboard kingdom, Saxons, Württembergers and eager Poles, the latter foreseeing their country’s independence as the outcome of the Russian campaign; men of every creed, talking every language, a polyglot army, but an army for the most part of doubtful loyalty and untested skill.

  The survivors of the voltigeur companies of the Eighty-seventh were there, rearmed and reorganized, thrown in to bring the Ninth Regiment of the line up to strength. More than half the company had perished in Spain and Portugal, a large proportion of them during the disastrous retreat from Torres Vedras. Massena, called home in disgrace, was no longer their chief, but Ney had been forgiven for his insubordination and summoned to take over the advance guard, to which the Ninth Regiment was attached. They pushed on ahead, leaving the long, burdened columns to drag themselves to the starting-point days behind schedule, their strength already reduced by a strange sickness among the horses, due to the use of unripe rye as fodder. The voltigeurs did not know what was happening behind them. Had they done so they might have wondered if this were to be another Portuguese debacle, planned only on a much vaster scale. It was rumoured that more than half a million men were on the march against the Czar and that the Emperor was determined to root him out of his Muscovite capital.

  Jean and the rest were there, and the old sergeant looked askance at the motley regiments which they overtook on the march. “It used to be quality,” he grunted, “nowadays quantity counts for more!”

  The five of them had crossed the Channel without incident, hearing nothing but some distant English voices in the dawn mist, and the smuggler, Rattenbury, had deposited them on a Normandy beach, leaving them to find their own way to the nearest depot, which happened to be Caen. Here a good many explanations had been necessary, but after a week of delays and forced marches, followed by a fortnight’s halt at Lille for a refit, the little party had come up with their regrouped unit in Louvain.

  The old town was crammed with troops, all making their way to the rendezvous at Dresden. They had picked their way here and there, recognizing no one, a tiny unimportant eddy lost in a flood tide of horse, foot and artillery, until Jean had chanced across Sergeant Soutier, the man who had replaced him when he had been left behind in hospital at Coimbra in the autumn of 1810. Soutier was the man who had been indirectly responsible for the disaster that overtook the party detailed for salvage on the Tagus. Nicholas remembered him well. He was now sergeant-major. All the survivors of the company had been promoted. Promotion was easy in a motley horde composed chiefly of recruits whose experience of gunfire was limited to the routine spatter of a practice shoot. Soutier expressed great surprise on seeing the five men.

  “You’re still listed as prisoners on my muster roll,” he told them.

  “Orders,” said Nicholas sardonically.

  Soutier pretended not to remember. He took them back to the bivouacs of the Ninth and handed them over to a young lieutenant of the second company. Jean noticed that the boy had not even grown a moustache, having left St.-Cyr before his course had been completed. The sergeant co
mmented that if the Emperor was short of veterans he must be shorter still of experienced officers.

  Jean was offered a commission. He was flattered but turned the offer down.

  “I’m too old for that sort of nonsense,” he said to Gabriel. “Imagine me learning to draw maps at my age. I can only sign my name with a squiggle.”

  “If they want officers as badly as I think they do they’d soon teach you to read and write, Jean,” Nicholas told him. “I could do it myself if you’d let me.”

  Jean chuckled, amused at a vision of himself sitting down with a slate at the bivouac fire after supper.

  “I’m well enough as I am. You’d none of you last a month if I weren’t here.”

  Later the others discovered that Nicholas had been offered promotion to the rank of sergeant, but he too had refused. He said nothing about the offer. They found it out only as a result of a casual conversation between Gabriel and the paymaster’s clerk.

  During the march eastward they made continued enquiries for Nicholette. According to some of the men she had managed to get her wagon back from the Peninsula, and later, early in the spring, Sergeant-Major Soutier seemed to remember seeing her in Mayence. They went down to the artillery park and questioned some of the transport drivers. One of them confirmed that she had been in Mayence, but beyond that they could learn nothing. The regimental rolls could not help them; cantinières were not shown on the muster.

  The regiment joined up with Ney’s corps in Strasbourg, where they were paraded for review. Nearly everyone had been reequipped, and the marshal rode slowly along the ranks with a satisfied expression. He seemed to hesitate a little abreast of the voltigeurs, and Nicholas fancied that he caught the Alsatian’s eye. Perhaps he recognized the corporal and remembered the dispute over Gino Carolini’s mule, or perhaps the twitch of the marshal’s lips was imagination on Nicholas’s part. He passed on without saying anything beyond a gruff “Well enough, colonel!” to the officer in command. Ney was never lavish with parade-ground praise, but, unlike many of the senior officers, he kept his eyes open during the battle and was seldom far from the upturned heels of the most advanced skirmisher. The men knew this and were satisfied. The deserving usually got recognition from the marshal himself and were not obliged to scan the tedious distinction lists issued by corps headquarters.

  “If we’re with Ney we’re for it again,” was Nicholas’s comment when the battalion received orders to dismiss.

  “We’d have been better off in Oudinot’s corps on the flank,” said Old Jean. “Those rascals won’t get any farther than Poland.”

  But nobody believed that Jean meant what he said. They all knew that after eighteen months’ inaction the sergeant was itching to be out with the advance guard again.

  They were slopping through Dresden in thin summer rain when it happened.

  The long greatcoated column marched head down, muskets at the underarm trail in an effort to keep the water from the locks. They looked like a vast muster of duck-shooters splashing along the street on their way to a shooting party.

  A convoy of canopied wagons, ambulances and sutlers’ vans had been forced into the shallow brook at the side of the road in order that the advance guard might have a clear passage through the city. As the voltigeurs passed there was a minor commotion beside one of the wagons. A lean dog, barking furiously, sprang from under the shafts of the listing vehicle and dashed into the ranks, lashing its plume of a tail and doubling its body in a frenzy of excitement.

  The group wavered, disconcerted by the plunging animal. Louis spun round with a shout of recognition.

  “Fouché! It’s Fouché!”

  Hearing its name, the dog stopped dead, head lowered between its muddy paws.

  “Fall out!” shouted Jean, dashing the rain from his face. The five of them broke ranks and gathered round the dog. Fouché began to whine and whimper, while Louis bent and patted its sopping coat.

  “There, boy, there … where’s Nicholette? Where is she?”

  “I’m up here!”

  She was smiling down on them from the box of the wagon, her shoulders hunched under a dripping cloak, her dark hair sticking in a maze of small tendrils to the taut skin of her prominent cheekbones.

  Nicholas leaped onto the step of the wagon and flung his arms round the girl.

  “Good old Fouché, good boy, Fouché!” he laughed, hugging her.

  “I’d seen you,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t have let you go by.”

  Old Jean hurried ahead and told Sergeant-Major Soutier that they would be falling out for a spell.

  “As long as you pick us up again by the time we break camp tomorrow,” said Soutier, and then, grinning, “I shall expect a bottle of Moselle, Jean!”

  They waited for the road to clear and then edged the wagon into a field on the far side of the brook. The rain ceased and a watery sun came out. Gabriel found part of a harrow in an old barn and they soon had a camp-fire going. They sat around it baking oatmeal cakes and watching Nicholette prepare a celebration stew. Onions and potatoes went into it, and a scraggy chicken which Nicholas cornered in an isolated pen on the outskirts of the town.

  It was a lavish meal and they all enjoyed it; Nicholette broached her last two bottles of Madeira, left by a wounded hussar as part payment for a three-day lift across the Leon plain during the withdrawal from Spain. After supper they had leisure to look at her and were pained, though not surprised, by her thinness. She was still as agile as ever, but her prominent features gave them the impression that she had but recently recovered from a long illness. There was not much stock in the wagon, but the team and vehicle were brand-new.

  “I shall restock in Königsberg,” she told them. “I got more than half the money out of Spain!”

  She smiled at them and Gabriel noticed that months of strain had not succeeded in ironing out the two dimples he had noticed that first afternoon when he had seen her watering her horses in the Danube. Nicholas noticed them, too, and felt strangely warmed. He tucked her hand into his damp greatcoat pocket and she left it there, folded within his. Old Jean beamed and Dominique began to unlace the waterproofing of his original fiddle. She had kept it for him. It needed new strings but was otherwise intact. He could easily repair it in a German town.

  Nicholette told them her story. After their capture and Claude’s death, the English sergeant whom they had met in the compound had carried out his promise and taken their message to the barrier beside the river, so that she was not long in doubt about their fate. She did not attach herself to any other group, although she had several offers. When the retreat began she pulled out in advance and got a good start, marching with a company of the Young Guard. She chose this unit because she knew that the retreat would be a difficult one, and the Guard seemed the safest bet under the circumstances. She got as far as the frontier without much trouble, although they were attacked once or twice by guerrillas in the mountains and lost a number of men. The Guard had used the canteen as an ambulance, and after leaving Portugal it had been a canteen only in name. They had lived on salted mule during the march and judged themselves lucky. Most of the regiments had no transport left to slaughter.

  Nicholette would have lost her own horse and mule had not a senior officer been included among her patients. She drove the old fellow all the way to Almeida, where he died, much to the company’s annoyance, for they remembered the abandoned men who with the use of his space in the wagon might ultimately have recovered.

  The wreck of the army from Portugal was regrouped under Marshal Marmont. Nicholette said that there had been a flare-up in the ranks when Massena was recalled in disgrace. Everybody who had been to Portugal knew that no general, not even the Emperor himself, could have made a success of the campaign, and the troops admired Massena’s doggedness. Only that old miser could have succeeded in getting any of them back into Spain, while Marmont was full of amateurish ideas about a new offensive against Wellesley. He fought several battles, which did nothing except
reduce his available strength, then finally marched off to the aid of Soult, in sunny Andalusia. This made him popular with all ranks. Soult’s veterans had looted Andalusia down to its last piece of church plate, but at least its climate was bearable.

  Nicholette did not follow the army south. She had caught some sort of infection at headquarters and after a long spell in a filthy hospital crawled out and decided to nurse herself in the wagon. The remains of the regiment had returned to France, so that when the general recall was issued she attached herself to the Flying Artillery and marched back with them to the border. She had come across stragglers of the Eighty-seventh in Bayonne and again in Tours and Mayence, but had left them to refit. At the latter town she bought a new outfit and moved eastwards towards Dresden, first depositing seven thousand francs with a banker in Strasbourg. The rest of her money had been used up in the purchase of a good wagon and three strong draught horses. The group thought it a magnificent equipage. Each of them was touched by her loyalty in not accepting one of the many chances she must have had to join up with a Guard or cavalry unit. Instead she had resolved to rejoin the voltigeurs, but owing to their absorption into a new regiment had had some difficulty in finding them. She spoke lightly of her steadfastness.

  “I like the light infantry, they don’t hang about!”

  Nicholas and Nicholette were married by a priest in Königsberg.

  None of the others was greatly surprised by the event. Nicholette had reattached herself to the group after the Dresden reunion, and her choice of Nicholas was obvious. If she was to stay with them she would have to marry someone, and Nicholas was the senior after Old Jean, who said he would have preferred the galleys to marriage at his age.

  What did surprise them, however, and other men of the company, was the formality of the occasion. Nicholas would have none of the canteen wedding nonsense that had characterized the ceremony on Lobau. If he was marrying, he said, he would be married conventionally. He was not a savage, and, although they were all in the army, Nicholette was a woman of means and there might be civil claims to be considered in event of his or her failure to return from Russia. Only a dozen of them were invited to the wedding. Old Jean gave the bride away and Gabriel was principal groomsman. Afterwards they sat round the wagon drinking a good deal of the light German beer, and Dominique played a tune or two. It was almost like a bourgeois union in a provincial town without the guests and their wedding gifts.