Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Gabriel watched Nicholette very closely throughout the day and was puzzled by her serenity. She had always been the sort of girl to accept life, however hard it might be, as it found her day by day, but now he thought he saw a change. There was something in her demeanour amounting almost to demureness, especially when he caught her looking up at the bearded Nicholas, who swung his legs from the tailboard and sipped his long metal flagon of beer with a nonchalance suggesting that he had been a bridegroom on a dozen previous occasions. Gabriel wondered if Nicholette had always preferred him, whether her marriage with Claude had been mere physical attraction on the part of a curious sixteen-year-old virgin. Nicholette, who was only nineteen now, looked a mature woman of thirty and in some ways seemed even older than Jean, who was in his early fifties. At all events, both Nicholas and the girl seemed happy about the arrangement, and Gabriel was interested to note that he did not experience the qualm of jealousy he had felt at the first wedding. When it began to grow dark the four of them left the couple sitting on the tailboard of the new wagon, talking little, looking quietly out across the bare hills dotted with bivouac fires. Old Jean belched as he lay down beside their fire within hailing distance. He unbuckled his broad leather belt and lit up his stub of pipe.

  “It’s a good match,” he told Gabriel, “they’re fond of one another.”

  Back on the wagon Nicholas leaned against the bulge of the canopy strut and pulled Nicholette’s dark head down onto his broad chest, gently stroking her hair. He was filled with a tenderness that he had never previously experienced. His reason told him that this marriage was ridiculous. He was an educated man and she an illiterate waif, not a trollop like most of the camp followers but nevertheless the daughter of a whore who had never been able to remember the name of the girl’s father. She had qualities—pluck, resolution and loyalty, but most cantinières had those things and he had not married her on that account. The fortunes of war, and an impeccable physique, had left her far better endowed with goods than he would ever be, but it was not for her wagon and her seven thousand francs at Strasbourg that he had married her, either. He wondered if it was because he needed a woman, somebody permanent to satisfy the periodical hunger that pricked him whenever he remembered Camilla all those years ago. He thought not; he had gone eighteen months without a woman in England, although he had had plenty of chances among the farm girls of Devon.

  He could not answer the question and knew that he never would be able to answer it. Nicholette was just part of an environment to which he had become lazily accustomed. She occupied almost the same position as Old Jean and the three boys, Gabriel, Louis, Dominique. She fell into place in the background of war; she was a habit, prevailing, established, in the customary scheme of things like the smell of wood smoke, the champ of the horses in the cavalry lines, the rumble of artillery caissons, the rattle of musketry, the deeper chorus of fourteen-pounders. She was as familiar to him as an occasional skirmish in the undergrowth, and the touch of her hand, in spite of the fact that he had never remembered touching it until their chance reunion in Dresden, now seemed as habitual to him as his grip on a musket butt or on the hilt of his sword-bayonet. Yet there was something fragrant about her, a feminine fragrance that all these years in the company of coarse men and hardship had never succeeded in destroying. Her pale skin showed no trace of the burning Spanish sun, she always looked neat in her high-laced bodice and full grey skirt, and the scent of her hair reminded him of the stocks that had once grown so freely in old Cicero’s garden. She knew when to hold her tongue and did not chatter about silly, unimportant things as had every other woman he had known, including Camilla. He wondered, without excitement, how she would respond to his lovemaking and guessed that she would be dutiful and no more. He did not want her ardour; it would have embarrassed him. He felt protective and old, almost as though he had been her nameless father returning from some half-forgotten battlefield of nearly twenty years ago. After the first few months of his army career Nicholas had never really had any serious regrets about the past. Tonight he realized that something like this was bound to have happened to him sooner or later. He was now legally married to a cantinière and wedded, by preference, to a nomadic life in the ranks, condemned to wander up and down Europe until a bullet or a sabre singled him out and gave him the answer to all the questions he had been asking himself since childhood.

  But in the meantime he was well enough satisfied. He had comrades, robust health and enough food and drink for present needs. He also had this child with fragrant hair and an odd regard for him that amounted almost to respect. He looked down on her with a quiet smile.

  “I’ve always wanted you, Nicholette, all my life.”

  She said quite simply, “We ought to have known it before, Nicholas,” and the answer filled him with a great content.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not long after the wedding and shortly before the order for a general advance on the Niemen was issued they lost Louis—but not as a casualty. Louis got his wish. After more than three years in the infantry an order came through transferring him to the Danzig Dragoons, the new regiment raised by Davout especially for service in Russia.

  Louis never ceased to long for a horse of his own; his association with the English thoroughbreds had made him determined to do everything in his power to transfer to a cavalry regiment on his return to the army. His heart had never been in the duties of a voltigeur, but Old Jean said that he would make an excellent trooper. His love of horses ensured this, since there was nothing wrong with him as a soldier. After Nicholas he had been the best marksman in the company, and the Danzig Dragoons had been issued the new short-muzzled carbine, accurate up to three hundred yards.

  Although delighted with his change, Louis parted from his friends with genuine regret. He would have loved to enrol them all as troopers, but Nicholas railed at him good-naturedly when he expressed the wish.

  “I have enough trouble feeding myself,” said Nicholas, “to hell with feeding a greedy brute of a horse. You wait until you pitch camp after a long day in the saddle and then have your encumbrance to groom and water and your harness to clean before you eat. I bet you’ll wish to God you were back in the skirmishing line!”

  It is doubtful whether Louis ever did pine for the company. He was too happy astride his great, broad-chested Norman mare, which he named, in response to a sentimental memory, Roxy. She was indeed not unlike the great mare Lucy Manaton had ridden through Devon field and coppice, but light brown instead of tan, and with a white diamond on her forehead. Louis fussed over her like a bridegroom. He never tired of combing out the long fine hair of her tail and mane and grooming her shining flanks. Roxy, like every other horse that was put in Louis’ charge, soon came to love him and whinnied with pleasure when he lightly slapped her arching neck or laid his cheek alongside her muzzle. He spent hours foraging on her behalf and more than once, during the long, thirsty advance, took foolish risks under the muskets of Russian skirmishers to fill her canvas bag with fresh water. His troop sergeant, who also loved horses, looked on with approval but told the trumpeter that the new trooper would soon get himself killed if he refused to temper devotion with common sense.

  “If we lose him I’ll lay a hundred francs the horse comes safely out!” laughed the trumpeter, who had himself observed Louis’ devotion.

  The voltigeurs lost sight of Louis for a considerable time. The Danzig Dragoons were attached to Ney’s corps but were working on the right wing of the vanguard, more than two miles south of the men of the Ninth. They caught a glimpse of him once outside Vilna and spent an hour or so with him in the smoking ruins of Smolensk, when he rode over to supper at Jean’s invitation, the file having had the luck to arrive first on the scene of the half-gutted ruins of a provision shop just inside the walls.

  Thus far it had been an uneventful campaign. There was not much fighting, the Russians retreating as the English had done, laying waste the countryside and burning everything that they could not carry aw
ay.

  It was almost unbearably hot on the plains, even hotter and more windless on some days than it had been during the march down to Portugal. There was a considerable increase of dysentery and some degree of starvation, although in the presence of the enemy the advance guard fared better than the toiling columns in the centre and rear. They just managed to live on what they could find, leaving little enough for their less fortunate comrades.

  “This is one occasion when I prefer to be in among the front ranks,” said Nicholas, trudging along beside the wagon. The solid strength of Nicholette’s team and vehicle enabled her to keep up with the advance with ease, whereas most of the corps’ wheeled transport had already fallen more than a day’s march to the rear.

  There was one sharp engagement before the battle for Smolensk. On the outskirts of Vitebsk, a sizeable town beside the main road, the voltigeurs of the Ninth had the good fortune to distinguish themselves, one and all, under the eyes of the Emperor and the entire army.

  Probing forward over broken country between two ranges of low hills, two companies of voltigeurs, numbering approximately two hundred men, were cut off by a sudden charge of Russian cavalry. Columns on the march farther back at once formed square, but the Russians were far too wily to do more than encircle the skirmishers and it looked at first as if nothing could save the column from annihilation. The ground between the voltigeurs and the flat-topped hill occupied by the nearest French was broken up by ravines and dry watercourses.

  Old Jean and the others were in this isolated group with two officers, a captain called Delacroix and the young lieutenant to whom the returned prisoners had first reported in Louvain. Both behaved magnificently, as did the men. By the time the nearest Russian lancers and hussars were upon them the stragglers had run in to form square round Delacroix, his lieutenant and the plump Sergeant-Major Soutier.

  No one could have supposed that the tiny square would withstand the shock of that charge. The French army waited to see the lancers cut their way through the double ranks and sweep on to the level ground beyond. Nothing like this happened. The voltigeurs were among the finest marksmen in the Grand Army, and after ten minutes’ close-range fighting the square was surrounded on all sides by a breast-high wall of dead men and horses. Firing by volley, one rank kneeling, the second standing, the French poured withering fusillades into the troopers as they pranced and cavorted round the isolated infantrymen, stabbing their long weapons into the drifting smoke and jostling one another in a vain attempt to spear their way through at a weak point. The square stood like a rock and the hussars, in the second charge, fared even worse, for their sabres were not long enough to cause a single casualty.

  Nicholas, quietly aiming and firing in the front rank, received a long graze on the cheek, but the man who had held the lance went down before Gabriel’s musket, fired at a range of less than two yards. Jean accounted for two hussars and Dominique for another lancer.

  Throughout the skirmish old Delacroix shouted comic defiance and jocular encouragement to his men. “Give it ’em, boys. Savages! That’ll teach them how to shave, the barbarians! Load again, rear rank! This is how we served the Mamelukes at the Pyramids! Steady there! Here they come again! Fire, rear rank! Wash yourselves, you Muscovite monkeys!” And so on, until some of the men, hearing his running commentary above the crackle of volley fire, could hardly load for laughing.

  In the end the cavalry were called off. An immense cheer went up from the French army when they saw the little group of voltigeurs moving in square back over the broken ground to the safety of their own ranks. They had lost three men and a drummer boy, all caught on lance points before they could reach the shelter of the square.

  Among the minor casualties was the dog Fouché, who scurried into the square the moment it formed and emerged with a bullet graze on the shoulder. The dog had followed them all the way from Dresden, and Nicholette encouraged it to sleep under the wagon and growl at prowlers. Gabriel cut away the clotted fur and bathed the wound, the dog submitting to treatment with the resignation of a veteran. When he had finished the dressing Gabriel playfully pulled Fouché’s ears.

  “That’s one back for the nip you gave me on Lobau,” he said. The dog grinned and backed away, wagging its plume of a tail. It occupied itself throughout supper by gnawing away at the bandage.

  Later that evening Marshal Berthier, the Chief of Staff, detailed a sergeant of Imperial Guard to go out and count the Russian dead. He reported one hundred and ninety-eight, almost a man apiece, together with two hundred and seven horses.

  The following day, when the town was occupied, Napoleon held a miniature review. Every man in the voltigeurs’ square received a reward of fifty francs; Delacroix, his boy lieutenant, Sergeant-Major Soutier and Jean all received the Cross of the Legion of Honour first class.

  The ceremony was impressive. “Napoleon knows how to manage these things,” said Nicholas with a grin, but he was as pleased as any of them to see Old Jean stand, tears streaming down his face, whilst Napoleon pinned the coveted insignia on his tunic. Ney was present and this time he recognized Nicholas.

  “Found any more stray mules?” he asked and they saw him turn and recount the anecdote to the Emperor, who listened with interest and nodded approval when Ney told how he had settled the dispute.

  The Emperor turned to Jean, who was contriving to look down his nose and squint at the cross whilst still maintaining the stiff pose of attention.

  “Where did you serve before that?” he asked.

  Jean told him, the old familiar recital—Italy, Egypt, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau and Friedland.

  “Ah, yes,” mused the Emperor, grasping his riding switch with both hands extended behind his back, “at Aspern-Essling as well; I saw you in the churchyard.”

  “That is so, sire,” replied Jean, in a voice suggesting that he would not have been surprised if the heavens had suddenly opened and a golden chariot had swept down to convey him straight to Valhalla.

  “One of you played a fiddle!” said Napoleon, unable to disguise the triumph in his voice at such a brilliant display of memory for minute detail.

  “My comrade here played the fiddle, sire,” said Jean, nodding at the grinning Dominique.

  “And where have you all been since Busaco?”

  “In England, sire. We were captured in the Peninsula, myself at Coimbra, the others on the Tagus.”

  Napoleon’s eye gleamed and the staff officers edged nearer.

  “You escaped?”

  “We came back on a smuggler’s fishing boat, sire. He was bribed.”

  “How much?”

  “We never knew, sire. The money was not paid by us.”

  Napoleon nodded. It was obvious that he was deeply interested. Possibly his brain was turning over the possibility of organizing large-scale escapes among the fifty thousand soldiers and seamen held by the British. The exchange system had broken down long ago. It had no chance of success whilst the British held twice as many men as the French.

  “Can you write, Sergeant?”

  “I regret, not, sire, but my corporal writes well!”

  Nicholas gave Jean a sour look, but it was too late.

  “I should like a report upon the circumstances of your escape; see that I get it tonight!”

  The Emperor and his staff moved on and the companies were dismissed. Nicholas spent two hours in the wagon laboriously compiling a report of their sojourn in England and their ultimate escape. It was years since he had written more than a couple of lines, and the effort made him sweat. He cursed Jean at the completion of every laboured sentence. A grenadier of the Guard was waiting to conduct them into the Presence. Jean was fidgety, Nicholas pretended to be bored.

  The grenadier handed them over to a staff colonel at the entrance of the Imperial marquee. After a brief delay they were conducted into Berthier’s tent, used as an anteroom.

  “Straight through, Sergeant!” said the red-headed Chief of Staff, without looking up from the im
mense map he was studying. They passed through the silken hangings and found the Emperor lying back in a deep-seated chair. Constant, his valet, was shaving him. For an instant even Nicholas felt a trifle awed.

  “Read it, Corporal!” said Napoleon, without a glance in their direction.

  Nicholas read the manuscript. It was blunt and factual, giving brief particulars of the capture, of the Lisbon compound, the voyage and general treatment of prisoners, the Otter Bank breakwater construction, Louis’ engagement as groom and the incident that led to their escape. The only fact withheld was Louis’ association with Lucy Manaton. Nicholas tried to give the impression that the incident had been due to a ridiculous fit of jealousy on the part of the returning husband.

  The Emperor mused for a while. There was no sound in the marquee except the steady rasp of Constant’s razor on his master’s bluish bristles.

  Presently Napoleon said: “How is it that men like this smuggler Rattenbury are willing to transport enemies of their country out of captivity?”

  Jean looked at Nicholas, and the corporal shrugged. It struck the sergeant as extraordinary how composed Nicholas could be in the presence of exalted rank. He seemed to mind Napoleon no more than he minded Sergeant-Major Soutier.

  “Well?”

  “I can only express an opinion, sire!”