Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  They left the battlefield on their right and, as they passed, Gabriel thought of the battle scenes that he had inspected on the walls of art galleries in Vienna and in some of the larger Spanish towns. The men who had painted them must have had a limited experience of war. He recalled a particular painting, a vast canvas representing the battle of Prague. Dead and wounded men were arranged in formal graceful attitudes in the foreground. Beyond them a team of plumed staff officers, mounted on statuesque horses, were receiving the orders of their chief; the main battle was decently shrouded in lines of battery smoke. There was nothing to suggest bloated corruption, blackened objects that had been heads, acres of filth rotting under grey, drizzling skies.

  They were well beyond Borodino when they bivouacked, but Gabriel sat down and sketched a corner of the field from memory. It was perhaps the most graphic of all his sketches.

  The following day they began to see signs of the pursuit.

  Small squadrons of Cossacks, mounted on swift, shaggy ponies, hung along the line of march, but did not venture to attack the main body. Several stragglers, however, who had lagged behind for one reason or another, failed to return to their ranks at nightfall. It began to grow very cold after dark and the roads became more and more congested with broken transport and abandoned guns. Dead horses, some of them almost hacked to pieces by starving men, lay where they had fallen between the shafts. Grim signs of disintegration were apparent during the earliest stages of the retreat.

  “What did I tell you about all this loot?” asked Jean when they passed a white-headed guardsman ransacking an abandoned wagon.

  Gabriel jokingly remarked that the older the soldier the bigger the brigand.

  “A veteran has rules about these things,” said Jean. “With a good soldier it is arms first, food next and loot third. The order of importance should be obvious even to a fool. What good is a knapsack of gold if you can’t defend it? What good is a pocketful of precious stones if you die of hunger so that some other rogue can rifle your corpse?”

  There was no denying Jean’s logic, and Gabriel reflected, not for the first time, that the old soldier was one of the few philosophers who lived by the precepts that he preached. In all their campaigns he had never known Jean to fail to have something edible in his knapsack.

  Jean clinched the discussion. “How else do you think I’ve kept alive all these years?” he asked.

  “You’ll have the Devil’s own job to survive this campaign,” grunted Sergeant-Major Soutier, who had been plodding along behind him, listening to Jean’s sermon with a tolerant grin.

  Jean pulled his thin moustache.

  “You look to yourself, Sergeant-Major,” he replied. “I’ll be knocking the neck from a bottle of Rhenish wine when you’re still floundering in these birch forests!”

  Whenever he remembered the plump, inefficient Soutier in after years, Gabriel recalled this boast. Soutier, at that time, had four silver ingots, taken from the Moscow mint, in his knapsack, but he had no rice and hardly any flour. Before the Peninsula campaign he had done most of his soldiering in garrison towns.

  Marshal Mortier’s troops came up with them just as the first snow fell, and the two columns were merged to form a new rearguard. There seemed little hope of overtaking the wagon, which was now more than two days’ march ahead, but Nicholas, who should have come back to rejoin the regiment, failed to appear. Jean and the others did not begrudge him his good fortune. It was as well that somebody should stay with Nicholette, and there was something vaguely comforting in the fact that somewhere ahead of them was a reserve supply of food. Their own stock was fast diminishing. In spite of his contempt for their lack of foresight Old Jean could not let old comrades like Soutier, and others, stand by hungry whilst he prepared a meal. There was still plenty of horseflesh, but as the temperature fell men found it increasingly difficult to hack steaks from the frozen carcasses. It was essential that cutting up should take place within a short time of the animal’s death.

  Still no major attack came from the Russians. The Cossacks stayed out of range and Jean said that they must be confining themselves to observation. After the first heavy snowfalls food began to grow dangerously scarce and they passed by the bodies of a number of men who had collapsed whilst marching with columns farther ahead. At night it was almost unbearably cold, but they found it difficult to light fires with the damp branches of pine and birch. There was always a scramble for the meagre shelters available on the line of march when they stopped to bivouac. The men who arrived first would pack into the few huts and staging-houses, bar the doors and threaten to shoot anyone who attempted to force an entry.

  Ten days after the retreat had commenced the real winter came down on them. The temperature fell rapidly to twenty-six degrees below zero and a bitter north wind sprang up, whirling the heavy snowflakes in their faces. Cases of frostbite soon appeared and men began to straggle in search of food, turning off the main road to follow any track that might lead them to a wretched hamlet where a little flour or a few potatoes could be found.

  Two days after the first fall of snow the dog Fouché became a problem. It got frostbite in its rear paws, and its progress became so painful that Gabriel and Dominique had to take turns at carrying it. One of them passed over musket and knapsack and slung the dog across his shoulders, where it perched uncomplainingly as they plodded through the drifts.

  Fouché was a lean dog, but at the end of the two days’ march it became clear that the dog would have to be abandoned. Gabriel argued, but Jean was adamant.

  The following morning, when they prepared to march at first light, Fouché tried to struggle to its feet and drag itself a few steps, its paralysed paws making an untidy furrow in the snow. When they moved away from the fire it rolled its yellow eyes up at them and made frantic efforts to stand. As the distance between men and dog began to increase, Fouché set up a frantic whining. Gabriel stopped, cursing.

  “I can’t do it, Jean. We’d better shoot him.”

  The dog dragged itself a little nearer and as soon as it saw the three men stop it ceased to whine.

  Jean said: “You two move on. I’ll shoot him.”

  He unslung his musket and glanced at the priming, cocking back the hammer with his horny thumb.

  Gabriel did not look at the dog again. He and Dominique marched on towards the woods. Before they had left the open they heard a single shot. It rang out on the crisp air like a whip-crack.

  They walked slowly and within a few minutes Jean joined them, saying nothing. They had gone nearly a league before the sergeant spoke.

  “Nicholette won’t be any too pleased. She thought a lot of that mongrel.”

  Dominique said: “It’s a meal for someone.”

  Jean, Gabriel and Dominique kept reasonably fit. They were better fed than most and Jean warned them against giving rations to the others.

  “We’ve a long road to travel,” he said, “and if I’m any judge the ration stocks at Smolensk will be exhausted long before we get there.”

  Marshal Ney took over the rearguard from Davout and trudged along on foot with the few battalions retaining a semblance of discipline.

  What was happening up with the main body and advance guard could only be guessed from the débris that littered the road. They passed complete circles of dead men, stretched, like the figures on a clock, round the embers of a dead fire. Hopelessly undernourished and worn out with the endless fatigue of marching day after day over soft snow, these men had lain down to sleep with their feet to a fire and, as the night frosts gripped their bones, had stiffened beyond awakening when the time came to resume the march. At one bivouac, after the third day’s snow, they came up with an even more terrible spectacle.

  All the way along the Smolensk road the Russians had built coachhouses with large barn doors at either end. Here, in normal times, the stages drove in at one end, changed teams and drove out at the other. Most of the buildings had been burned down during the advance, but a few remained and
were in great demand as shelters for the night.

  Arriving at a wide clearing in the forest, the voltigeurs saw the remains of one of these coach-houses. Smoke was still rising from its burned-out shell. Inside, tightly packed against each other, were several hundred corpses, most of them charred beyond recognition.

  They learned what had happened from one of the few survivors, a captain of mounted grenadiers whose hands and uniform bore marks of the fire.

  The previous night nearly a thousand men had sought shelter in the building. Their few horses had been tethered outside. When the coach-house was packed to suffocation some crazy fools in the middle of the press lit a small fire to cook their supper. Within a few moments thick trusses of straw had flared up and ignited the dry beams of the roof. There was terrible panic. Men nearest the exits fought to get out, but the doors opened inwards and escape was almost impossible. The captain and one or two others had succeeded in tearing a plank out of the wall, but hardly a dozen all told had escaped death, either from the flames or from suffocation. The voltigeurs went over to look at the pyre.

  “God help us,” said Jean, turning away.

  Others were not so squeamish. They dragged the bodies into the clearing and searched their smouldering clothes for valuables.

  The company, now numbering about a dozen, was marching somewhat in advance of the main rearguard. During a blizzard that day they lost touch with the corps altogether. When darkness fell they found themselves alone on the road and Gabriel saw some of the men glancing at Jean as though they realized that their sole chance of getting home depended on the sergeant’s generosity. Jean kept Gabriel and Dominique close to him. It was obvious that he did not trust the rest of the men even though they were from his own regiment. He knew that loyalty and comradeship could not be counted on under conditions of extreme privation such as these. Between them Jean, Gabriel and Dominique had more than enough food to see them to Smolensk, but if the contents of their knapsacks were shared among twelve there would be insufficient for another two days’ march.

  During the last hour of daylight Jean pondered the problem. When they bivouacked he plucked Gabriel’s sleeve.

  “We shall have to share out tonight,” he muttered, “but be ready to give these scarecrows the slip in the morning.”

  Gabriel nodded, but said nothing. It was a shock to hear Jean referring to his old comrades as scarecrows.

  They bivouacked in a birch wood and one of the men brought in a dead raven. They made a fire and cooked a miserable meal consisting of melted snow, rice, a pinch of flour, four sliced potatoes and the frozen bird. After supper Jean carefully measured out a little brandy for each man. After that they built up the fire and lay down on their sheepskins to sleep. Every man had some sort of skin to spread on the snow. They had found a pile of them in an abandoned wagon on the road.

  Before it was light Gabriel felt somebody shaking his wrist. He got up, almost paralysed with cramp. The fire had burned low, but there was a faint light in the sky, either from the moon or from the Northern Lights. Gabriel saw Dominique shouldering his knapsack and musket a few paces off.

  “March!” said Jean quietly.

  The three of them moved into the wood. They marched in silence for a few minutes and then Jean began to justify himself.

  “A man can only be responsible for himself under conditions like this,” he said. “My first duty is to myself and then to you two; you’re all I’ve got left. I’m too old to start again.”

  “What do you mean, ‘start again’?” asked Gabriel curiously.

  “I’ve outlasted four files like you and the others,” said the sergeant as they regained the road. “If you go I’m only looking after myself in future.”

  It had never occurred to Gabriel that he and the others were mere replacements in Jean’s life. He supposed it ought to have been obvious years ago, but somehow it never had been. He had assumed, in some vague way, that Jean had taken charge of Manny, Nicholas and the others shortly before he himself joined the group on Lobau three and a half years since and that this was the first time such an obligation had been placed on the sergeant. He had imagined that before this Jean had served with contemporaries, men of his own age and of approximately the same length of service. He realized now that this was not the case; the middle-aged man trudging beside him had mothered several broods, watching each of them grow up and disappear in the ebb and flow of successive campaigns. It seemed a terribly depressing process. Gabriel became increasingly curious to learn something of his predecessors.

  “Who were they all?” he asked Jean.

  The old sergeant tucked his musket under his right arm and thrust his mittened hands deep into the pockets of his greatcoat.

  “They’re all dead,” he said. “What else would you expect?”

  And, as the wan light began to glimmer through the trees and their numb feet shuffled soundlessly through the soft snow that powdered the frozen road, Jean told them of the young men he had nursed along since the day when he had been made a private first class after the battle of Lodi sixteen years before.

  First there had been a batch of boys from Condé, farm lads most of them, sent down into Italy without even the knowledge of how to load a musket. Jean had taken them, one by one, and trained them into soldiers capable of driving the Austrians over the mountains and entering Mantua in triumph, with the young Napoleon riding ahead, dictating peace terms like a new Alexander on behalf of the tottering Directory. The Condé boys were all killed, falling at Arcola, Rivoli and other major engagements, shot and sabred in a hundred skirmishes along the banks of the Adige, shut up in Zurich and Genoa with old Massena, either to starve or to die of plague in one or other of the beleaguered cities.

  Then there had been the recruits who went out with the army to Egypt in 1799. Almost all of them had perished in a single campaign. Jean’s tuition could not compete with the heat and the flies and the fevers of the march up to Acre, the fruitless assaults on its bastions and the plague-stricken march back into Cairo. The last of the second batch had perished in the battle of Aboukir or died in a native uprising after Napoleon had abandoned the army and sailed home to seize supreme power.

  The third batch, Bretons, were recruited after Marengo, and these were the lucky ones. They had at least time to learn their trade in the crowded camps of Boulogne before marching across Europe to fall at Austerlitz and in the Prussian campaign that followed. A few of them lived to squelch through Polish mud to Eylau or to go down under the raking fire of the Russian batteries at Friedland. Jean was alone again, until the new light infantry regiments were formed for the first campaign of the Spanish war and he was given one-campaign men like Nicholas, Manny and the others. Jean thought a good deal of the final bunch. They had done well, he said, to get through the Saragossa and the Danube campaigns without a fatal casualty, and in the Portuguese adventure they had lost only two, Manny and Claude. They would not have had such luck if they hadn’t been captured and shipped overseas. As for the present campaign, he could no longer pretend that any of them stood much of a chance. They were not yet in Smolensk and that was less than half-way along the road to comfortable German billets and a supply of regular rations.

  They had marched three to four miles along the road whilst he was talking and were beginning to pick up with the stragglers again. Men walked in twos and threes or hobbled along on their own, eyes fixed on the ground. Some had bloodstained faces, but the blood was not their own. They had been gnawing raw horseflesh, and the remains of their wretched meal were smeared about their mouths. They walked blindly, frequently stumbling over equipment and dead men strewn in their path, now only half visible under the snow.

  It was not quite so cold, however, and a thaw seemed to be probable. As they crossed an open patch of wood to a long stretch of road directly ahead, in the distance they could see what at first appeared to be a skirmish between a single Cossack and a group of infantrymen. The horseman was prancing about in the middle of a knot of figu
res, dark shapes against the blinding whiteness of the snow.

  They did not take a great deal of interest in the scene until they were within a few hundred paces of the skirmish. Then Jean stopped and shaded his eyes.

  “That isn’t a Cossack,” he exclaimed. “He’s wearing a helmet and the horse is too big.”

  As they hurried forward they saw that the horseman was wearing the blue and white of the French dragoons. He was defending himself with sword and pistol against the attack of at least a dozen men armed with bayonets. He had cut down one man and was trying to ride off, but someone was dragging at his bridle and the big animal was plunging wildly on the treacherous surface of the road.

  They were within extreme musket range when they saw a flash, then another. The horseman bowed forward over the crupper, and the horse sank to its knees. From a distance the action looked synchronized and graceful, like that of a circus rider. Instantly the attackers closed in, shouting and brandishing their weapons.

  All three voltigeurs began to run, slithering over the road and firing as they advanced. The group round the fallen horseman ignored them. They were too intent on dragging aside the dead rider and holding a saucepan to the gashed throat of the dying horse.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  During the last few days Louis had not been unconscious of the looks given him by stragglers as he picked his way carefully along the road that ran through the endless birch forest. Most of the time since leaving Moscow he had been alone, but his sufferings had been trivial compared with those of the majority of the soldiers. For one thing, he had a good horse under him and was spared the dreadful fatigue of day-long marches through the snow. He felt the cold a good deal, but before leaving Moscow he had taken the precaution of obtaining a long yellow waistcoat of padded silk, which he wore under his tunic. The waistcoat was part of the wardrobe of a Russian count and had been looted by the men of Louis’ troop from a mansion a few miles east of the city, in which they were temporarily billeted. It was astonishing how well the odd-looking garment kept out the cold.