Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  “We’ll chance that and, in any case, we’ll be safe enough. A year from now the Bourbons will be back in Paris and they won’t waste time hunting down a corporal.”

  Gabriel avoided Nicholas’s glance. The announcement shocked him and he expected it to shock Old Jean. He was amazed that Nicholas should have the temerity to inform a senior sergeant of intended desertion, especially a sergeant like Jean in whom the habit of loyalty was ingrained. But the matter did not seem to strike Jean in this way; he mused awhile, his scraper circling the priming-pan.

  “It isn’t the future you’d have to fear, Nicky; it’s the present. Switzerland? How far is Switzerland? A good step, even in that.” And he jerked his grizzled head in the direction of the wagon. “Maybe you’d get there, maybe not; I don’t know. It depends on the number of provosts patrolling down south. But if you are stopped and can’t talk your way through the barriers, they’ll hoist you back here, both of you, and she’ll be a widow this time.”

  “We’ve got our story by heart,” said Nicholas, “I speak canton German like a Bernese goatherd. We’re travelling in watches; Nico’s laid in a chest of them.”

  Old Jean put aside his musket and began gathering the accessories together and packing them away in his cotton hold-all.

  “I’m not going to tell you to go or to stop, Nicky. That’s a thing a man’s got to work out for himself. I’d say if I hadn’t gone when we were winning I wouldn’t go at all, but I’m not you or Nico either; you’ve got the right to look at it your own way.”

  “I never believed in it all; you must admit that, Jean,” said Nicholas defensively.

  “I’ll own that,” replied Jean. “You always said that we should break up and it looks as if you’re right, though we’ve had a longer spell than your reckoning gave us. I suppose, if it does come to the Bourbons again, you’ll have earned the right to be out of it, making your own way, teaching school again maybe and taking it easy by one of those blue lakes I’ve heard you talk about. You could do that, I reckon, better than most of us, because you’re a man who knows more about things than any of us. But what of Nico? She’ll never take to it, not if she lives to go deaf and silly. You’d better make up your mind to that now, Nicky.”

  Gabriel, watching, saw Nicholette flush in the firelight.

  “I’ll take to it all right, Jean; you don’t understand.”

  “I reckon I understand all right,” said the sergeant, “a piece more than you think.”

  “You don’t,” said the girl, stubbornly, “you don’t understand me and Nicky. Ours isn’t the usual canteen marriage. All the time we’ve been different. We’re like … like the people in towns who live ordinary.”

  She blushed furiously as she said this and looked down at the ground. Gabriel had a notion that she had forced herself to say it and was wretched at having to go to such lengths to justify herself.

  Old Jean stood up.

  “You’ll go off thinking that I blame you for going. I don’t want that. You asked me what I thought and I told you; but it’s me talking, remember, and I never knew any life but this. I’ll say good luck, and so will Gabriel and young Dominique. You’ve been a good comrade, and we’ve been a long way together. It was good of you to tell me, Nico; I’d never have forgiven you going off saying nothing. But I’m a sergeant and I ought to stop desertions; so go quietly now; pack up when me and these others have turned our feet to the fire. That’ll give you six hours’ start before I report to the provost. One other thing—don’t try to take that wagon any farther than the army lines. If you reach the frontier they won’t bother a man and a woman walking, but they’d look into a wagon. I would if I was the frontier provost.”

  The two men embraced formally, and Gabriel saw the sergeant’s face over Nicholas’s shoulder. His expression was stony and vacant. Nico kissed him lightly and climbed back into the wagon.

  Nicholas stood silent for a moment longer before turning uneasily in the direction of Gabriel and Dominique, who had remained sitting by the fire, quietly finishing their soup.

  “There’s these two, Jean; they’re young enough to start afresh. I wondered—”

  Jean interrupted and Gabriel thought that his voice trembled a little. “I tell you I’m a sergeant. If you’re determined to go I won’t stop you, even if I should, but that doesn’t mean that I can stand by and listen to you persuading others!”

  Nicholas understood. He had understood from the beginning, when he and Nicholette had first discussed their project and the girl had stubbornly refused to leave without telling Jean. He shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “Good-bye, Jean. Good-bye, Gabriel, Dominique!”

  Gabriel said good-bye, but Dominique, who was never able to concentrate upon more than one thing at a time, perhaps had not fully heard or understood the conversation, for he contented himself with a nod, as though Nicholas were going to the ammunition park for a brief spell of guard duty. The sergeant said nothing as Nicholas followed the girl into the wagon.

  Although the night was warm and the supper had been adequate, Gabriel could not sleep. He lay listening to the muffled sounds from the wagon and to the voices of Nicholas and Nicholette conversing in low tones. Gabriel’s mind kept returning to his first conversation with the schoolmaster, in the churchyard at Essling on the evening after his first battle. It was difficult to realize that four years had passed since then and that almost every day of those years had been spent in Nicholas’s company. The departure depressed him as the deaths of Manny, Claude and Louis had never done. These three were ordinary casualties of war. Premeditated desertion was different, cold-blooded, somehow more final. Gabriel had always admired Nicholas for his learning and power of detachment. The schoolmaster too had taken a genuine interest in Gabriel’s painting, casting an eye over each new sketch and making clear, incisive comments on its merits and demerits. Gabriel had learned a good deal from him, particularly during the months of captivity in England, and he knew that he would miss him as much as he had missed Manny or as he would miss Old Jean.

  He lay there and wondered what their life would be like in Switzerland, what occupation they would choose and whether they would have any more children. It was fantastic to think of Nicholette as a housewife, cooking meals in a kitchen and sewing children’s clothes. She did not fit into any civilian pattern and he knew that Jean had been accurate in his forecast. He tried to imagine what would happen when eventually the monotony of her existence drove her to urge Nicholas to make a change, and what the legal position of the pair would be if they ever returned to France.

  He was still musing when he heard the thud of boots and the rattle of the tailboard. Over by the wagon a spare figure moved against the moon; Gabriel, propping himself up on his elbow, looked again and noticed that Nicholas was wearing civilian clothes. Instead of a shako he had on a soft felt hat, of the sort worn by drovers who came into the camp with fodder. It looked so ridiculous that Gabriel stifled an impulse to giggle. Then Nico’s voice called to the horse, the vehicle lurched forward and they moved off slowly along the bivouac lines. For a long time Gabriel heard the rhythmic creak and the soft jingle of the harness. As he rolled over and looked at the two sleeping men beside him, he felt immeasurably grateful for their presence on the edge of the fire.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Old Jean got a good deal of gloomy satisfaction out of the muddled campaigning of that summer. He liked to sit by the fire when the company had bivouacked and lecture to conscripts on the errors of divisional and corps commanders. Doubtless it was bad for morale, but it was good for Jean. After an hour spent in explaining where the army had gone wrong, he would lie down to sleep in the best of spirits, determined to prove that tomorrow’s blunders, once they had been committed, would be even more fatal to the success of the campaign.

  Jean’s reasoned pessimism became a byword in the ranks. Recruits, faced with an order to march five leagues in the rain and make a feint at a village occupied by twice as many Prussians, would sa
y to one another: “This is all part of the plan. Sergeant Ticquet says that we always win if we don’t start fighting until we’re exhausted.” Or, “This must be the right road. Sergeant Ticquet says it’s the longest way round, and the general always prefers the longest way round.”

  Gabriel wondered if this was Jean’s method of keeping the youngsters comparatively cheerful.

  After the worthless victory at Balützen, the logic of Jean’s favourite clich, which had once been Napoleon’s own, “Pursuit is more important than the victory,” was clear to the least experienced conscript. The tired, half-starved French hurled themselves at ninety thousand Prussians and Russians and levered them out of a strong position, but for all the good it did the Imperial cause the men might as well have stayed in their hutments. The victors possessed no cavalry, so that the beaten enemy were able to withdraw at a leisurely pace and calmly await reinforcements. There were always plenty of reinforcements for Coalition troops. The French were employing cripples as transport drivers.

  A temporary truce saved the French army from virtual collapse. Jean’s comment that the respite was of far more use to the enemy than to themselves fell on indifferent ears. Three months of interminable night marches and constant hand-to-hand encounters with a numerically superior enemy had taken the fight out of youths who stood up to point-blank discharges of grape at Lützen. They had ceased to be interested in the acquisition of glory or decorations. All they wanted was to get home with a whole skin, and once the guns were silent desertions began to multiply alarmingly.

  It was not long before an order came round to shoot one out of every ten men caught away from the regiment, but punishment was a matter of luck. Twenty men would be driven in by provost and mounted gendarmes, two to face a firing-squad the following morning. The other eighteen would be cautioned and sent back to the ranks. Nevertheless desertions continued unchecked. The conscripts were agreed that this chance of survival was more favourable than if they remained for the renewal of hostilities in the autumn.

  When there were no deserters to shoot, corps commanders resorted to all manner of stratagems for the sake of maintaining discipline and cohesion in the regiments. General Milhaud, the cavalryman, engaged a private to play the rôle of a man condemned to death for sticking a pair of shears into the belly of his horse. The regiment formed a hollow square to witness the execution. A grave was dug and the intended victim walked towards it, escorted by regimental drummers beating a solemn tattoo. The squad discharged their muskets and the man fell, but he must have imperfectly understood his instructions, for a moment later he climbed out of the grave and demanded his money. Dominique thought this the funniest thing he had ever witnessed and was helpless with laughter for over an hour. Jean, on the other hand, was furious at such a display of official buffoonery.

  “We used to be soldiers,” he told Gabriel, “then we became brigands, now we are mountebanks!”

  After the expiration of the truce Austria joined the enemy Coalition and thousands of men in flat little shakos trooped across the plains to the Prussian cantonments. Bernadotte, once a French marshal, now Crown Prince of Sweden, was already there, and with him General Moreau, who had once led the ragged French republican armies to victory in the days when the distant strains of “The Marseillaise” tumbled professional armies back from the French frontier.

  Just before the resumption of hostilities, when the company was back on the outskirts of the Saxon capital, a provost of the Alsace Gendarmerie came into camp asking for Sergeant Ticquet. He found Jean by the fire, skinning an undersized rabbit that he had trapped on the banks of the stream. The gendarme presented a roll of papers from his saddle-bag.

  “I want you to come over to regimental headquarters,” he said. “You’re needed for identification!”

  Jean handed the rabbit to Gabriel and told him to finish preparing it for the soup. He then climbed up behind the provost and trotted off through the lines.

  Corps headquarters was established in a large farmhouse. On their arrival the gendarme was joined by two others, and the trio escorted Jean along a flagged passage to the buttery, a small whitewashed room lit by a single barred window too small to admit much light. In the buttery, which was being used as a detention cell, Jean saw a single prisoner sitting on his hams teasing a cockroach with a piece of straw. As the gendarme shut and relocked the door the man stood up. It was Nicholas.

  The senior gendarme said: “Recognize him, Sergeant?”

  Jean said nothing. The prisoner smiled grimly.

  “Hullo, Jean?”

  The gendarme chuckled softly. “I’ve wasted your time, Sergeant!”

  “You’ve wasted your own, Provost,” said Nicholas. “You’ll be sending me back to the battalion tomorrow and any officer, from the colonel down, would step up and kill the fatted calf for me. Are fatted calves still on the menu, Jean? I hear you’ve been having a bad time.” He turned to the guards. “Why don’t you ask the sergeant to sit down, Provost? I’ve killed most of the beetles!”

  “Can I talk to him alone for a minute?” asked Jean. The provost hesitated a moment and Jean went on, “We’ve been together a long time, ever since Eylau.”

  The provost swung his keys. “All right, Sergeant, but no monkey tricks; I’ve had special orders about this joker!”

  Jean nodded and the gendarmes retired, locking the door behind them.

  The two men regarded one another silently for a moment. Finally Jean said: “What happened, Nicky?”

  The schoolmaster gave one of his characteristic shrugs. Jean thought that he looked much fitter than when they had parted on the field of Lützen. His lean cheeks had filled out and his skin was tanned and healthy.

  “We tried to be greedy,” said Nicholas. “You were right, Jean, we shouldn’t have taken the wagon as far as the frontier. I ought to have insisted, but Nico, well, you know what she’s like about property!”

  Jean began to prowl up and down the tiny room, two steps east, two west, biting savagely at the rough skin on the edge of his thumbnail. Finally he stopped and opened his mouth to speak, but Nicholas checked him with a wave of his hand.

  “Too late for belly-aching, Jean. We tried and we had bad luck. I always have bad luck when I leave you. You’ll die in your bed when all these pranks are ancient history.”

  “Where’s Nico?”

  “Looking for you.” Nicholas grinned ruefully. “We always start looking for you when it begins to get dark!”

  Jean ceased prowling. “For heaven’s sake stop joking and think, man. There must be some way out; you’ve got a first-class record. I might even get hold of Ney!”

  “I’m in debt to the marshal already, Jean. Remember the late Sr. Carolini and his mule at Busaco?”

  A series of desperate plans jostled through Jean’s brain: to return that night and file the window bars; to find Nicholette and bribe the provosts; to appeal to General Bonnet, to Bertrand or to any of the high-ranking officers under whom he and Nicholas had served in former campaigns. After all, Nicholas was no conscript whose place in the ranks anyone could fill. He was a veteran, and veterans were growing scarcer every day. Jean mentioned this, but Nicholas only grinned.

  “It’s because I’m a veteran that they’ll shoot me. I don’t have to tell you that; you knew it the moment you came in here. I’ve got a romantic last request, Jean.”

  The sergeant looked at him shrewdly and saw that although Nicholas was still trying to speak lightly, all trace of flippancy had gone.

  “If it’s about Nico, don’t worry. She’ll tag along with us again.”

  “It’s not that; she can always look after herself, Jean. It’s something more immediate.”

  “Well?”

  “After the drumhead has passed sentence they’ll pass me to the company for disposal. You’ll have a sergeant-major round, picking a firing-squad.”

  “You aren’t dead yet,” growled Jean, but he stopped pacing nevertheless.

  “Will you, Gabriel and Dom
inique volunteer? I’d like to be shot by somebody who can hit a cow at ten paces. Those conscripts you’ve got would puncture me in half a hundred places.”

  Jean turned and hammered on the door, which was hurriedly unlocked. “I’m going to Michel Ney,” he said and went out past the gendarmes, without looking back.

  Gabriel was alone at the bivouac when Nicholette finally located the company. He looked up from the turning soup kettle and saw her staring at him through the eddying smoke.

  He had never seen her look so haggard and pale, not even when she ran up to them as they marched into Elbing in the spring. She looked as if at any moment she might fall forward into the fire. He jumped up and went round to her.

  “Where’s Jean?” she demanded.

  “Over at the Sixth Corps headquarters; he’s trying for Ney!”

  Gabriel noticed that she had developed a nervous habit of jerking her head sideways, and with each jerk loose strands of hair tumbled across her cheek. She began sentences and forgot to finish them; all the time she was talking she clasped and unclasped her long fingers. Sometimes their joints cracked under the pressure. The woman who had sat in the circle of firelight on Lobau and had driven down the main road from Burgos in the blinding heat of the sun was a thousand miles away. Standing there, squirming and twitching, she looked now more like an epileptic child.

  “It was my fault …” she began. “Nicholas said sell the wagon … we couldn’t get a good price … they aren’t so short of transport down there … down on the frontier they’re questioning everybody….”

  “Jean’s gone for Ney,” repeated Gabriel. It was all that he could think of to say.

  She picked up a billet from the brushwood pile and tossed it onto the fire. It was a mechanical action, but to Gabriel it seemed at the same time grotesque.

  “We planned all this at Elbing,” she went on. “Nicholas thought of it long before that … outside Smolensk he first talked about it … I had the baby then …”

  She turned on him eagerly. “You didn’t see how good he was delivering that baby. I couldn’t help much … he gave me a cartridge-box to bite on … I left marks on it; his cartridge-box it was, but none of you could have done it so well; just like The Drummer, he was.”