Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  She stood quite still for a moment, gripping the tray, her lips parted, her eyes looking into his. He thought that she trembled a little, but he might have been mistaken. She came over to the bed and set down the tray on a bedside table. He tried to speak, but she stifled the words against her tightly stretched bodice, fingering his hair and his beard and crooning inarticulate words.

  “You’ve been terribly ill, Nico. I kept telling myself that you’d come back, but I didn’t believe it and Jean didn’t believe it, either, even if he always pretended to.”

  After the soup he fell asleep again, his face on her shoulder.

  She lay there until the fire began to go down and cramp racked her body. When his breathing was quite regular she wriggled free and replenished the fire, afterwards going out softly and quickening her step down the stairs, across the wide hall and into the rain. She did not stop to put on a cloak, but made straight for the crowded barracks in the old town. She ran swiftly, for that morning the morose Prussian had presented his three-day ultimatum. He had communed with his conscience and would not continue to house brigands for all the gold in the Imperial treasury.

  On the third day Jean, Gabriel and Dominique came to the house. They entered the room quietly and stood round the bed, grinning. A faint colour had returned to Nicholas’s cheeks, and Nicholette had made an attempt to shave him with a notched razor. Gabriel thought that he looked years older than Jean, and his long hands, white as a woman’s, rested listlessly on the counterpane.

  “How’s Louis these days?” he asked.

  Jean exchanged a swift look with Nicholette, who nodded and smiled faintly.

  “Gone after Manny and Claude,” he said.

  There was silence for a moment. Dominique scratched his nose, and his eyes roved round the room.

  “Got yourself a good billet,” said the farm boy.

  They stood, not knowing what to say, while Nicholette, conscious of the general embarrassment, pretended to busy herself at the fire.

  Presently Nicholas said: “How about yourselves?”

  “Well, we’re here, aren’t we?” answered Jean.

  Nicholas’s eyes smiled. Old Jean looked uncomfortable for a moment. Presently he coughed and looked hard at Nicholette’s back.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here, Nicky, and we’ve got to take risks to do it, d’you understand?”

  Nicholas nodded. “You can tell me. What is it?”

  Nicholette spun round, her eyes blazing, her mouth clamped in a hard, savage line. “I offered the German pig another five hundred. I can’t get any more until the silk merchant comes in from Danzig next month. I held the money out to him, five hundred in gold, and all he did was to spit on my hand!”

  She wiped her palm on her thigh and shrugged her thin shoulders in a gesture of despair. Dominique looked out the window and Jean dropped his eyes. He knew that Nicholette hated them to see her tears.

  Gabriel took up the tale. “It’s the Prussians, Nicky; they’re turning against us. Nico’s been paying a ransom to keep you here all these weeks and now she’s been told to move out by tonight.”

  Nicholas stirred in the bed.

  “What did you say about risks, Jean?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a plan. It’s for you to say if you’ll take the chance of it. You can’t walk and you can’t even stand, but we could get a stretcher and come in here to fetch you.” The sergeant was at ease again. He was always more comfortable when discussing action. “We could jolt you down to the general hospital, of course, but you’d die there. They’re dying there every day; it’s not a hospital, it’s a pest-house. We haven’t got a billet; we’re in barracks and you’d die there just as surely. This rain, it’s ten times worse than the snow.”

  “Well?”

  “There’s an officers’ hospital in the convent at the far end of town. We could take you there and you’d stand a good chance.”

  Nicholette suddenly put a finger to her lips and Jean broke off, looking at her with a puzzled expression. She made a sign to Dominique, who was standing nearest the door, and then tiptoed across the room, tearing open the door and standing swiftly to one side. The Prussian fell into the room, and, as he passed, Dominique beat him down with a shrewd blow on the back of the neck. He lay with his head in the wide hearth, gasping.

  They looked at one another for a moment. Then Jean spoke very slowly.

  “We’ve got officer’s papers and kit. Dominique here has been an orderly for a captain. He’s got a new outfit and he won’t want his papers until we move again. Get Nicholas ready, Nico.”

  The Prussian tried to raise himself on his hands, edging back from the heat of the fire. Dominique drew his sword-bayonet. For a moment longer there was stillness in the room. Then Gabriel took an involuntary step forward.

  “Can’t we gag him and leave him somewhere outside the town?” he said.

  Nicholette turned on him furiously.

  “The swine’s had two thousand five hundred out of me and he still wants to turn us out in the street. Stick him through the belly, Dominique, or I’ll do it myself!”

  They all waited, their eyes on Jean. The Prussian struggled to a sitting posture and began retching, too dazed as yet to be afraid.

  Jean said quietly: “I’ve never yet killed a man in cold blood. Twenty years in the field and every man I’ve sent on his way was trying to send me on mine. There aren’t so many who could say that.”

  The Prussian stopped retching and stared at Jean, his eyes revealing that he was suddenly aware of his position. He tried to say something, but immediately checked himself as though he felt that the first word would be Dominique’s signal to lunge. His gaze left Jean and fixed itself on the point of the sword-bayonet.

  “You don’t have to kill him,” said Nicholette. “Dominique’s itching to do it!” Her voice rose to an hysterical scream. “He was listening, wasn’t he? You smuggle Nico into the convent as an officer. Forged papers, stolen kit! How long do you think he’d be there before this pig rooted him out? What about the rest of us? Is what happens to him more important than what happens to us?” She snatched at Dominique’s bayonet.

  Jean moved suddenly and slapped her hard on the face.

  “Hold your tongue, you silly bitch, and leave this to me!”

  Nicholette recoiled from the blow and fell against the bed. Nicholas, propped up on an elbow, did not move, but the heavy bed canopy shook under the impact. Suddenly she began to whimper and Nicholas turned on her impatiently. “Leave it to Jean, can’t you?”

  “There’s a safer way than killing him,” pursued Jean thoughtfully. “He can go into the lock-up on a charge of robbery. Gabriel and I can swear him in and it’ll be weeks before they get to the bottom of it. He’ll most likely die of gaol fever.”

  Terror faded from the Prussian’s face and his eyes travelled round the group.

  Gabriel said, “Maybe Nico’s right, he’ll only blab about us to the provost.” But he felt immensely relieved by Jean’s decision.

  “The provost is an old comrade of mine,” said Jean, “and nothing this hog says will get any farther than the gaol door.” He seized the landlord by the scruff of his neck, and the man cowered at his touch. “We’ll have that money off him first, though. How much did you say, Nico?”

  The girl remained silent, holding her cheek. Nicholas spoke from the bed.

  “Two thousand five hundred, Jean.”

  Jean addressed the man in German. “Take us to it,” he said.

  They fetched a stretcher from the hospital and loaded Nicholas onto it, wrapping him in the Prussian’s blankets and throwing an officer’s greatcoat over his legs. Gabriel noticed that Nicholas was as thin as a lance; his thinness accentuated his height and made him seem incredibly long in the leg. His patched boots projected over the edge of the wicker stretcher.

  They recovered most of the money and trussed the landlord with some of his own bell cords, kicking him downstairs and into the street. Dominique walke
d immediately behind him with drawn sword bayonet, and all the way down to the gaol the man did not open his mouth. He was signed in and handed over to the acting provost, a sergeant-major who had served with Jean in the Eylau campaign. The arrest cost Nicholette a handful of silver, enough to keep the silk merchant behind bars for months.

  They begged a lift up to the officers’ convent on a powder wagon, and there Jean entered Nicholas on the rolls as Captain Grénard of the Third Infantry of the line. Marshal Davout, the only marshal who interested himself in the welfare of disabled men, had recently reorganized the officers’ sick quarters and there were sufficient medicines and plenty of food. The sisters kept the building spotlessly clean, and Nicholette was able to buy herself a billet at a neighbouring farm. Once Nicholas was off their hands the four of them gathered there for supper.

  When they had finished the meal Jean wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and cocked a humorous eye at the girl.

  “Your mother would have hit you harder than I did,” he told her.

  Nicholette finished off a chicken bone and laid it beside a pile of others on her plate. She ate fastidiously and it occurred to Jean that the only characteristics she had inherited from her mother were Old Carla’s steadfastness and her curiously inconsistent avarice.

  “My mother would have sawed through that Prussian’s throat,” she replied. “It’s no wonder we don’t win any more.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was talk in the ranks of setting stars and twilight over empires.

  By the end of April, 1813, the whole of Europe was under arms, Russians, Prussians, Swedes marching west, the French and their lukewarm allies marching east. The French, as ever, were attacking, threading the forest paths of Franconia and debouching into the open country of Saxony, bad terrain for an army with barely fifteen thousand cavalry and matched against the most powerful international alliance since the Crusades.

  Most of the marshals were there, exhausted in mind and body after nearly two decades of unremitting active service. Napoleon himself was there, tense and eager for decisive battles. But the day of decisive actions had passed and the men who had established Napoleon were dead, gone to gild the eagles of half-forgotten triumphs.

  There is a limit to any nation’s exertions, and some said that the limit of Bonaparte’s France had been reached on the far side of the Niemen the previous autumn. Napoleon, however, did not think so and in those hot, sunny days of late spring it seemed as if he were right once again. France and her satellites had found nearly a quarter of a million men for the final struggle on the plains of Germany, and in the May fighting these men, four-fifths of them raw conscripts, had stood up to the cannonades of a hundred army corps and the charges of the heaviest squadrons east of the Elbe.

  The initial spurt, however, did not last very long. As the summer advanced Austria came into the coalition against France, and the men of the West were outnumbered by four to one, and by ten to one in cavalry.

  There were marches and counter-marches, long dusty crawls across the plains, an endless straining of muscles up the steep, tortuous paths of wooded country, the taking and the retaking of towns and villages at the point of the bayonet, senseless artillery duels in the night, gun firing at gun by the light of bivouac fires. Later came weeks of drenching summer rain that kneaded the dust into a sea of mud and beat down any corn that had survived the passage of a hundred artillery trains.

  Murderous battles were fought in that long, indecisive interim, battles in which boys from Picardy and the Vosges stood row on row, white-faced and resolute, whilst their squares were harried by Cossacks, by Prussian hussars, by eight-pounders that ploughed the ranks in even furrows and built the raw infantry a human rampart against the inevitable cavalry attacks at the end of the cannonade. Early victories at Lützen, Balützen and elsewhere were turned to no profit, could not be turned to profit even by the best captains in the world, because there were never enough reserves, never enough cavalry and always some position lost that should have been held if a theoretically perfect plan were to fulfil its object.

  Some of the legendary figures were there when the corps commanders rode into headquarters for conferences: Marshal Oudinot, with his twenty-six scars, recently repulsed before Berlin; Ney, haggard after his five-hundred-mile walk from Moscow to Kovno; Victor, the fussy ex-drummer-boy; Davout, silent and meticulous; divisional commanders like the resolute Souham and the roistering Vandamme. But the pace was too hot even for Invincibles, and they failed, collectively and individually, to stem the flood. They were tired, like the veterans, like their Commander-in-Chief.

  Bessières, chief of the Guard, was the first man to go down, walking, like any green conscript, into the range of a laid gun on the morning of Lützen and dying like Lannes, but more mercifully. The veterans mourned him as an old comrade, but some of the men, like Jean, could not help wondering if things might have turned out differently had Bessières made the same fatal mistake a year ago. It was the Guard commander who had held back reserves in the battle outside Moscow, when the Russians were on the run and a decisive victory was essential.

  Even the countryside had changed. In the old days Germany had been a popular campaigning ground. Men like old Soutier, who left his bones on the road back into Russian captivity, had once grown fat in Saxon billets and German fortresses. Now it was different, the French found hostility everywhere. Food and forage were hard to buy and had to be pillaged, and every veteran knew that pillage did not pay in a protracted campaign. It embittered the countryside and soon recoiled on the marauders.

  During the short nights the veterans sat in their bivouacs and talked about setting stars and twilight over empires. It was their own empire that they referred to now, not those that had crumbled before their battery smoke at Rivoli, Austerlitz and Jena.

  Nicholas had made a good recovery in the convent, and the four voltigeurs concentrated at Erfurt in late April, when Marshal Victor was making up his light-infantry battalions for the great advance. The Eighty-seventh Regiment was reformed, but Jean knew none of the men and only one or two of the officers. The four sharpshooters were the only seasoned troops in their company, and even so it had cost them money to stay together. Victor’s plan was to stiffen his square with the few veterans at his disposal.

  Nicholette had acquired another wagon, second-hand, of much lighter construction than its predecessor. She had learned her lesson in Russia and would never again invest in a heavy vehicle that required two horses to drag it over bad roads. The new wagon was hardly more than a cart, but it was well sprung and canopied. She joined up with the Eighty-seventh again, and Nicholas, still too weak to march, got permission to ride with her providing that she could maintain the pace of the general advance. He could have gone back into the garrison over the Rhine if he had wished. All convalescents discharged from the convent at Elbing had been issued a six months’ second-line voucher, but Nicholas shed voucher and false identity the day he left hospital, to sneak back into the line barracks as a returning straggler. Hundreds of men were coming in from Polish and Lithuanian hide-outs, and his return went unquestioned. As a veteran he was worth his weight in round shot.

  He did not talk much to Jean and the others. They would have liked to question him about the child, but, beyond informing them that it had been born dead on the road home, he volunteered no information and Gabriel got the impression that it was a subject which neither he nor Nicholette wished to discuss. Nicholette told them about Major-General Péliot when that officer rode over from Oudinot’s headquarters to pay his passage money. He was one of the few officers well-mounted, for he would never walk again, although he had volunteered for staff work in the field rather than sit in Mayence counting paper divisions. In addition to the money, he gave Nicholette a jewelled locket worth as much again as the sum she had charged him.

  “A gift from a disappointed godfather!” he told her and galloped off across the lines, his fat buttocks rising and falling comically as he tried
to master the art of riding with a single stirrup-iron.

  Nicholette looked at the locket a long time before putting it away in the wagon chest where she kept her few personal belongings and her one change of underclothes.

  The voltigeurs got through Lützen without a casualty, but the company as a whole was decimated in the afternoon cavalry charges. That night Gabriel saw Nicholas and Nicholette talking together in the wagon and he fancied that both of them looked unnaturally startled when he climbed the tailboard to collect the communal kettle for supper. Jean also noticed their absence and grumbled over his cooking. Dominique played his fiddle, but neither Nicholas nor Nicholette came out to join the bivouac circle. After calling once or twice, Jean divided their suppers among half a dozen famished conscripts who had been attracted to the bivouac by the music.

  About eleven o’clock, just as Gabriel and Dominique were rolling themselves in their greatcoats and preparing to lie down feet to the fire, Nicholas and Nicholette jumped from the wagon and approached Jean. The old soldier was sitting cross-legged, cleaning his musket with rag and linseed oil.

  Nicholas said: “Nico says that we must tell you, Jean!”

  The sergeant did not look up. He went on oiling the hammer-spring and squinting down at the polished stock.

  “Well?”

  “Nico and me, we’re pushing off!”

  Gabriel and Dominique moved nearer, watching Jean’s lowered eyes.

  The sergeant laid down the oily rag and picked up a scraper, gouging away at the fouled touch-hole.

  “Where are you aiming for, Nicky?”

  “Switzerland. We’ve worked it out, the two of us. I was a student in Berne and Zurich and I know most of the cantons. There’s a place behind Lake Thun—Spietz, it’s called—I stayed there all one summer and, if the same people are there, they’ll have us so long as we pay our way.”

  The sergeant looked up. “That was a long time ago, Nicky; supposing the same people aren’t there?”