Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

As soon as it began to get dark her pains began again. This time Nicholas could no longer doubt the implication. Prolonged exposure and the endless, jolting journey had brought on the birth.

  They lit a big fire and Nicholas posted Joicy beside it to accost every straggler in the hope of finding a man from a medical unit. He informed Major-General Péliot and the colonel that they would have to evacuate the wagon temporarily. Péliot grumbled, but he realized that there was no alternative. The two officers were lifted out and placed on sheepskins near the fire, whilst a party of stragglers, men of the Mounted Gendarmerie whose horses had died as far back as Vyazma, consented to erect the old hooped tent as a shelter.

  The wind had got up again and more snow was expected. The dismounted gendarmes considered themselves lucky to have found shelter and a share of horseflesh at a bivouac. Some of them set about killing and cutting up the horse. The surviving animal was covered with a blanket and tethered in the shelter of a small fir coppice nearby.

  Nicholas went about his tasks automatically, refusing to consider the immediate future. He made some soup out of horseflesh, meal and a few onions, and shifted Nicholette’s couch to the far end of the wagon, wedging it sideways between the remains of the lockers, in order to give himself plenty of room to work. He knew that no other stragglers would pass them now and that he would have to act as midwife himself.

  When the tent was erected Péliot and the wounded colonel shared it with the gendarmes. Nicholas had confided in the guardsman, Joicy, and the old fellow promised to remain awake all night and do anything in his power to assist. He sat on the tailboard, watching the steaks which he had set himself to grill. The odour of roasting horseflesh filled the wagon.

  From time to time Joicy went into the wood to collect more fuel. It began to snow, lightly at first but more heavily as time passed. The road was deserted, but from his seat in the wagon Nicholas could see the glare of one or two big fires to the east. The sight relieved him of one of his principal worries. With men strung out behind them, they should be comparatively safe from the Russians.

  After he had eaten his supper he went in to Nicholette. She lay on her back, staring up at the smoking lamp that swung in the biting draught from the holed canopy. He followed her glance and tore a piece of rotten canvas from Péliot’s empty hammock, going outside and standing on the side of the wagon with a vague idea of repairing the hole. He soon abandoned the attempt. The canvas was threadbare, and in any case his hands were too numb to use a needle. He went in again and sat down beside his wife, waiting.

  Joicy stirred up the fire, and the glare, penetrating the wagon, threw Nicholas’s shadow on the shuddering canopy. He blew on his fingers and took hold of Nicholette’s hand. She shivered at his touch and he saw that she was sweating. She drew her knees up to her chin as another spasm seized her. He felt sick, dazed and helpless.

  Presently she said: “Do you know what to do, Nico?”

  They called each other Nico; it was a name that had come to them naturally during their first week together in Königsberg.

  “I’ll do anything you tell me. The baby can’t live, Nico!”

  She shook her head. “Another time; we never have any luck.”

  “We’ve been lucky so far,” he reminded her.

  Just before another spasm contorted her body her mind sought refuge in the practical. All her life she had been grappling with hard facts, and even now, in the face of intolerable pain, she was able to think in terms of the commonplace.

  “We shall want plenty of hot water and a warmed blanket, Nico. Turn out those children’s clothes that Gabriel found for us and get your hands clean; you’ll find some yellow soap in the tailboard locker.”

  He got up, marvelling, and found the soap, then climbed down from the wagon to give Joicy the soup kettle and two well-scoured saucepans. Even under these conditions Nicholette had kept her pans clean, scrubbing them after every meal with a stiff brush that hung under the tool box.

  The guardsman Joicy filled the pans with snow and put them on the fire. Nicholas waited until the water in the smallest saucepan was lukewarm and then set about scrubbing his hands, digging into the blue furrows of dirt beneath the fingernails and filing the rough edges on his teeth. Between them they managed to erect a frame to hold the blanket up to the flames. They hung it on the windward side of the fire to protect the blanket from the showers of sparks that were whipped up by every gust of wind.

  When this was done Nicholas went back into the wagon, turning to lace the thongs of the stiff curtains. The big vehicle rocked in the wind and the fire glowed red. Drifts of snow piled up against the hooped tent where the two officers and the gendarmes slept in a confused huddle.

  The guardsman Joicy had no difficulty in keeping awake. With his back against the spokes of the big wheel and his bloodshot eyes fixed on the heart of the fire, he sat on, occasionally shifting his position when the snow piled up too thickly or he felt a twinge of cramp in his gaitered legs. He could sit like that for hours, his memories making light of physical discomfort. They were good memories, like Jean’s and Old Carla’s. He never remembered the bad times.

  From time to time he heard sounds in the wagon behind him, the clump of boots (good boots, he thought, remembering Nicholas’s feet, braced against the dashboard all that day) and once or twice a choked cry and a long, hissing noise, like a man beginning to whistle and uncertain of the tune.

  A long time seemed to elapse before he heard a single scream, rising clearly above the wall of the wind. It broke off suddenly, and he heard the big voltigeur calling.

  “For God’s sake … !”

  A hand fumbled with the lacings of the tailboard curtains. Joicy got up, unhurried, and lifted the soup kettle from the fire. The curtains flapped and he saw Nicholas standing at the back of the wagon, looking as though he was going to faint and fall forward into the fire.

  Joicy handed up the kettle and the blanket. Nicholas steadied himself and took them, then disappeared again, muttering something which the guardsman failed to catch. Joicy stood by the tailboard waiting, with another saucepan in each hand. The woman inside cried again and he heard the voltigeur curse.

  The guardsman’s curiosity was aroused and he concentrated the whole of his attention on the sounds issuing from the wagon. Close as he was, it was not easy to hear anything. The east wind moaned a long, monotonous note and the vehicle rocked, straining every bolt and setting up a continuous creaking, like an inn signboard in a gale.

  Once he thought that he detected a low moaning as of an animal in a trap, but it might have been imagination. The suspense began to irritate him; he staggered round to the front of the wagon and groped for the brandy bottle among the leather cushions. Finding it, he pulled out the cork and put the bottle to his lips. At the first taste he thought of the man and the woman in the wagon and, with an immense effort, resisted an impulse to take more than the merest sip, recorking the bottle and blundering back to the fire, where he lifted the saucepans from the spit and thrust them through the flapping curtains.

  He saw the man standing in the centre of the wagon, holding something in the blanket. Beyond him the woman lay inert, her pallid face staring up at the swinging lamp.

  The man said “Give her some brandy, Joicy,” as he jumped down from the tailboard into the snowdrift then moved off with long, clumsy strides towards the fir coppice where the horse was tethered.

  Joicy mixed some brandy and hot water in a metal cup and climbed into the wagon. The woman’s face looked yellow in the uncertain light, and he had difficulty in holding the cup to her mouth. Its rim chattered against her teeth like castanets, but she drank greedily, wasting hardly a drop and whispering something that might have been thanks when he withdrew the mug.

  He noticed that she was shuddering violently and he made an attempt to straighten the blankets. His frostbitten fingers moved with rough tenderness, for he felt an immense warmth for these two individuals.

  Nicholas had only glanced at the c
hild to make quite certain that it was dead. It looked, he thought, like a shrivelled monkey and not at all as he had imagined during the hours he had sat awaiting its appearance. Nicholette had been right; it was a boy, but he found it difficult to associate the bundle that he held with people like himself, the guardsman, or the men huddled together in the hooped tent on the far side of the fire.

  He was incapable of thinking of the future, of whether Nicholette would survive or whether he and these others would ever get as far as Orsha. The task that he had just accomplished, a task he had never dreamed himself capable of accomplishing, had stupefied his faculties. He walked stiffly, blundering in and out of the drifts, carrying the bundle loosely as though he were moving across the field with a spare box of cartridges for a hard-pressed sector of the skirmishers’ line. He could think back but not forward. Odd impressions of the last few hours stood out clearly like patches of a landscape illuminated by lightning: a stray lock of hair plastered across Nicholette’s damp forehead, the paleness of her lips, the staccato booming of the wagon canopy in the wind—trifles remote from the business occupying his clumsy fingers.

  He wondered how clumsy he had been and if any other gross amateur could have done any better. Probably his very tenderness for the woman had increased his awkwardness. He reached the trees and stumbled against the motionless horse crouching in a hollow, half-buried in drifting snow. The collision reminded him of his immediate task and he went down on his knees, placing the bundle beside him and scratching in the light snow like a terrier. He dug furiously for about a minute before placing the bundle in the shallow grave. It occurred to him that he ought to pray, but he had forgotten any prayers that he had known as a boy or a student. Instead he said aloud to himself: “We’ll get away from it, Nico, the two of us, we’ll get away from it. I promise, I swear we’ll get away from it!” It was not so much a prayer as an oath, to himself and to Nicholette. Then he shoveled the child into the snow with his hands and beat it flat with his palms, emphasizing each word with a blow. Crouching there in the storm, he looked like a primeval savage in the performance of some grotesque rite. Icicles formed on his beard as he fought for breath in the ever-increasing violence of the wind.

  He might have died there if the guardsman Joicy had not come and dragged him back to the fire, forcing a cup of brandy and water down his reluctant throat. The spirit made him drowsy and he fell sideways in the snow. Joicy put one arm round his shoulders and another under his knees, lifting him with a titanic effort onto the tailboard and rolling him into the wagon. He climbed in after him, having tossed the last of the wood onto the fire. Nicholette was sound asleep and her rigour seemed to have left her. Joicy foraged around until he found Nicholas’s sheepskin, placing a corner of it, the hair inside, under the schoolmaster’s buttocks. Then he lay down beside him, throwing the other end of the skin over his own shoulders and tucking it beneath him. He was warm and drowsy after his long watch by the fire. He put both arms round the voltigeur and hugged him as he hugged his favourite memories. In a short while he sensed an answering warmth in the other man’s body and his breathing became more regular.

  The wind drove shrieking over the plain like an army of Cossacks, and the lamp danced in the violent draught from the hole torn by the four-pounder.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was fortunate for the men who killed Louis that Gabriel and Dominique had discharged their muskets on their approach. Had they arrived on the scene with loaded weapons, two of the group round the dead dragoon would have been shot out of hand. As it was, running up breathlessly and identifying Louis at a glance, Gabriel retired to the frozen ditch and immediately commenced to reload. His example was followed by the farm hand.

  The men round the horse did not take the slightest notice of the newcomers, but went on drawing off the blood in a tin saucepan and hacking away at the more tender portions of the flesh. The rider was pulled clear and laid alongside the sergeant whom he had killed at the commencement of the struggle.

  Old Jean watched the scene for a moment and then went over to Gabriel, just as the latter withdrew his ramrod and stepped towards the stragglers.

  “Let be!” said the sergeant. “Louis was nothing to them.”

  Gabriel stared at him. He was so surprised that for a moment he could not reply. Then he pushed Jean aside and, raising the musket to his shoulder, pulled the trigger. Jean calmly knocked up the barrel, and the ball passed over the group kneeling beside the horse.

  “Damn you,” shouted Gabriel furiously, “they killed Louis, didn’t they?”

  He began to struggle, Jean still holding firmly to the end of the musket. The stragglers were not disturbed by the shot. Engrossed in their work, they barely glanced at the two men wrestling beside the ditch.

  Jean suddenly lost his temper. He released his hold on the barrel and grabbed Gabriel by the shoulders, shaking him furiously.

  “I tell you they were starving! They had a right to the damned horse!”

  Dominique took no part in the struggle. He stood close at hand, looking indecisively from one to the other and holding his loaded musket poised, ready to point it in any direction. Finally Jean got the best of the tussle and managed to drag Gabriel clear of the group. He began to push him, still half-resisting, a short distance up the road towards the woods.

  “I don’t understand you,” Gabriel was shouting. “They killed Louis in cold blood. They didn’t have to kill him; they’re worse than the Cossacks. Why don’t we exterminate them? It’s your duty, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk to me about my duty,” growled Jean. “Here, calm yourself with this!”

  He thrust the metal brandy flask into Gabriel’s hand, and the three of them fell into stride again and moved into the fringe of the wood.

  “At any rate we’re entitled to our share,” said Dominique, grinning.

  Gabriel looked at the half-wit with disgust. The incident made him feel strangely alone, as though the two men with whom he marched were mere stragglers picked up along the road, without a common background that made them comrades. He drank a mouthful of brandy and sullenly returned the flask, not trusting himself to speak. It was the first time in three and a half years that he had quarrelled with Old Jean. He could not understand the sergeant’s lack of concern at Louis’ murder; it flashed across his mind that perhaps the rigours of the campaign had done more than break up corps and regiments. It looked as though hardship and suffering were reducing tiny units such as their own to individuals concerned only with their own survival. He would never have imagined that Jean could have acted like this. He had seen the sergeant step out of a square whilst they were being harassed by English cavalry during the fighting along the Coa in Spain and risk his life to bring Louis, stunned by a spent musket ball, back into the ranks. He marched on in silence, and Jean must have guessed his thoughts, for he began to talk.

  “You think we ought to have revenged ourselves on them. Well, that’s a lunatic’s action in the first place. They were more than a dozen to our three and they’d have cut us to pieces without so much as interrupting their meal. But even if there had been only two or three of them, I wouldn’t have fired the first shot. Louis must have had the Devil’s own luck to get a horse this far. He was bound to kill it sooner or later, and they’d as much right to it as anyone. After all, Louis didn’t pay for it; it belonged to the army.”

  Dominique nodded, as though he at any rate saw logic in the sergeant’s argument.

  Gabriel muttered: “Louis fought them at longer odds, didn’t he?”

  Jean shrugged. “Louis was a fool. I don’t know what came over him after he left us for the cavalry. They’re all fools in the cavalry. ‘Why wear out your feet, Sergeant?’ I’ve had them say to me often enough, but what good did a horse do Louis? He’s back there with a musket ball in his belly and we, we’re still alive and in sight of a depot. Louis ought to have got down and handed over the horse. He could have fought for his share of it; there would have been sense in t
hat!”

  They tramped on and presently Gabriel’s anger cooled. He reflected that in all these years Jean had never been wrong about anything, and, in spite of himself, Gabriel began to wonder if, after all, the sergeant wasn’t right about this. Supposing they themselves had been without rations for days, trudging over snowfields on frostbitten feet, and supposing a sleek dragoon had trotted by, mounted on a horse that looked uniquely well-nourished in the circumstances of the retreat. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he would have been a party to shooting the rider and eating the horse. The men who had shot Louis had no bond with him. He was just another dragoon, riding while they walked, eating while they starved, and likely to be holding out his kettle in a Smolensk revictualling store long before they had dragged themselves into the town to scratch about for stray crumbs. Jean had been right: Louis’ death was due to his own folly—just like Manny’s, who had stayed behind to search for a man whose escape he had engineered, and was crucified for his pains up in the sierra.

  Gabriel was an honest young man. When they stopped to warm themselves by a fire, he said: “You were right about Louis, Jean.”

  The old sergeant grunted, spreading his hands to the blaze.

  “Recruits never learn until it’s too late!” he said.

  They got into Smolensk that night and were just in time to collect a minute ration of flour at one of the Guard’s depots. Almost every house in the town had been burned during the advance and they searched for a cellar in which to bivouac. It was too dark to look for Nicholas and the wagon, but near one of the huge fires in the main street they encountered Sergeant-Major Soutier. Old Jean was shocked at the man’s appearance. He had lost every ounce of his fat, and his uniform hung about him grotesquely, looking a dozen sizes too large.

  Soutier’s cheeks had fallen in and one of his feet was frostbitten. He had been lucky enough to buy a lift into Smolensk on one of Davout’s caissons. Without it he must have perished days ago. He told Jean that the ride had cost him every sou and every article of value that he possessed.