Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Even so, the Bourbons might still have been welcomed had it not been for the action of the Allies in sending home one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners of war within a few weeks of Napoleon’s abdication. From the Allies’ viewpoint it was a stupid policy; from the point of view of the Bourbons it was suicidal.

  The freed veterans tramped and begged their way to the frontiers from every direction. They came from the fortresses of Germany and Austria, moved like a tide of scarecrows across Central Europe from Russia, marched down from the north with Davout’s hardbitten infantrymen and up from the south with the wreck of Soult’s Peninsula divisions. They came in by boat from the English hulks, with old scores to pay and plenty of questions to ask. When they met and mingled with the men who had fought in the final campaign, the sum total of their conversation over the café tables was, “Ah, but this could never have happened if we had been there!”

  Gabriel, a realist by now, knew that it would have happened in any case. Six corps of veterans could not have expelled the invaders from France whilst there were traitors like Talleyrand and Marmont scheming in Paris. But Gabriel knew better than to contradict the veterans, especially when Old Jean endorsed their arguments.

  It was a difficult summer for the men of the Grand Army. The civilians called them brigands, and all but the marshals, who were flattered and courted, found it difficult to avoid a round of duels. High-ranking officers like Vandamme and Drouet were insulted almost daily in the salons, and the crowning folly of the Bourbons was to appoint General Dupont Minister of War. The veterans smashed glasses in the cafés when the Moniteur announced this appointment. They remembered that Dupont had been the first French general to surrender, as long ago as 1808 when the eagles were untarnished, and that his incompetence or worse had condemned thousands of Frenchmen to rot in Spanish prison camps. Too late the mistake was made known in the Tuileries and Marshal Soult was given the post. By that time the damage had been done; every man who had served in the army regarded the preferment of Dupont as a personal insult. The unemployed men of the Grand Army were very sensitive in the summer of 1814.

  Gradually the mood of Paris changed. The Cossacks and the Uhlans went home, but the rancour their presence had occasioned remained. Soon it was unpatriotic to smile and the atmosphere of the city became oppressive. People who could remember said that it was similar to the atmosphere of the capital in the last days of the Monarchy, when the Bastille was still standing.

  The secret police of the Bourbons were painstakingly active.

  It was during this period that Gabriel, with time heavy on his hands, taught the old sergeant to read. It did not occur to Gabriel that Jean was safer as an illiterate. In July the pair obtained employment in a bakery kept by an old Imperialist called Grinard who had lost his right leg at Auerstadt, where Marshal Davout defied the bulk of the Prussian army while his master was crushing the remainder at Jena. The baker, whose premises were in the Faubourg St.-Germain, was an active Bonapartist, and his low-ceilinged bakery soon became the rendezvous of a group of old soldiers, some of them officers. These latter were glad to eat the crisp rolls that Grinard distributed from his ovens when the old comrades gathered to discuss old times. Gabriel, although he did not worship the past, soon found himself infected by the trend of their conversation. There was no real treason talked in Grinard’s bakery, but the latest Bourbon outrage was the topic of every session.

  Then one day Grinard disappeared and his bakery was closed. There was no explanation, no charge preferred. The employees were merely told that the baker had left Paris and that they must seek work elsewhere. It was not easy to find employment now; the two ex-voltigeurs had to dip into their reserve for more than three months before Gabriel found a badly paid post at a coach-builder’s on the other side of the Seine and ultimately succeeded in getting Jean there as night-watchman. They did not see much of each other after that, for Jean worked at night, going off duty at sunrise when the workshop opened. In the New Year, during one of many robberies committed by the discharged soldiery, Jean got a crack on the head which kept him in bed for a week. During this period Gabriel brought him in some papers to read, among them old copies of the Moniteur, now a violently royalist publication. He came home the following night to find Jean in a state of violent agitation. The old sergeant flung a crumpled copy of the Moniteur in his direction.

  “Read about Colonel Debussy; go on, read about it and then think about it! This is how they treat men of honour! This is our reward for pouring out our blood for twenty years!”

  Gabriel, who had heard too much of this sort of talk since the abdication, was not impressed, but he glanced through the newspaper, finally coming across a column dealing with a lawsuit. Its introductory line, printed in insignificant type, read: “Debussy versus State.” Half-way down the column Gabriel had to shift his position in order to turn his back on Jean’s sullen gaze. The younger man felt an overwhelming desire to chuckle, the lawsuit was so typical of the times and Jean’s reaction was so typical of the current mood of the Imperial soldiery.

  It seemed that the Debussy in question was a well-preserved corpse, pickled in a barrel of rum nine years before, after finding a glorious death at the head of his infantry column on the field of Austerlitz. The Emperor, with his characteristic touch of showmanship, had decreed that the remains of certain field officers who had fallen at the head of their troops should be embalmed and ultimately entombed in a Hall of Heroes that he intended to build in Paris. The embalming never took place and pressing affairs constantly delayed the building of the Hall of Heroes. Meanwhile, however, Debussy and the officers on the list were preserved in spirit and sent home to France. Nobody seemed to know what had happened to the other bodies—presumably they were buried by their families—but the barrel containing the remains of the infantry colonel was placed in a storeroom of the War Ministry. It had remained there for years, the relatives knowing nothing of the proposed glorification and supposing Debussy to have been interred on the field of honour.

  Events thereafter succeeded one another with such rapidity that the Emperor’s plan was shelved and ultimately forgotten. One day, however, soon after the Allies had entered Paris in the spring of 1814, the barrel containing the colonel’s remains rotted through and fell to pieces. A startled War Office janitor who had gone into the storeroom came face to face with an unusual spectacle. Colonel Debussy’s corpse was excellently preserved, but the spirit had caused the officer’s whiskers to grow to enormous length, so that he now leaned nonchalantly against the storehouse wall, with his feet in the wreckage of the barrel, looking more like a monstrous caricature of a Viking chief than a deceased colonel of the Imperial infantry.

  The colonel’s story did not end there. The War Ministry notified a surgeon, and the body was taken over to the Anatomical College for dissection. Unfortunately this reached the ears of the relatives; they immediately obtained an injunction against the surgeon and he, in turn, appealed to the Ministry. The result was a tedious lawsuit in which the final verdict went against the family. Colonel Debussy’s last service to humanity was to act as a means of instructing medical students.

  Gabriel put the paper down on his truckle bed.

  “It’s no more than you would expect,” he began, but Jean interrupted him with a snarl.

  “I served under Debussy in two campaigns and he was one of the finest officers in the army. At Raygern, when we were rounding up the Coalition, I saw him carry a wounded sergeant across an open field swept by crossfire. I was not ten yards from him when he was killed below the Pratzen heights. We had just broken through three battalions of Russian grenadiers. Get your brains blown out for your country, then come home to be cut up and served out to a pack of young sawbones. I tell you it’s monstrous, Gabriel, and it can’t go on. I shall send a protest to the Moniteur myself!”

  “You can’t write,” Gabriel reminded him.

  “Then you shall write at my dictation. Come, fetch pens and paper or else I shall run int
o the streets and shout for the Emperor this very moment!”

  Gabriel sighed, knowing that Jean’s threat was no idle one. He fetched pens, paper and ink and began a laborious composition into which Jean intended to introduce a massed protest from Imperial ex-servicemen.

  Gabriel finished the address at two in the morning, Jean having forgotten all about his duties at the coach-builder’s. The following morning when Gabriel awoke, Old Jean was gone and Gabriel guessed that he had already commenced his tour of the Bonapartist haunts in search of signatures. There would be no lack of names on the petition if Jean handled the matter.

  The inevitable happened. Jean was arrested and taken into custody. Gabriel bribed his way into the St-Germain lock-up to give the old sergeant some tobacco and chocolate. Jean looked happier than he had looked for months. The fact that he had been arrested as a Bonapartist seemed to restore to him much of his self-respect. He lay in prison all through February of that year, cheerfully awaiting trial with other Bonapartists, both civilian and military. Gabriel did not waste much sympathy on him. There were so many old soldiers in the gaols that sentences were sure to be light when the massed trials opened in April. In the meantime the old fellow was in good company.

  As it turned out, the trials were never held. Early in March an incredible rumour circulated the cafés. Napoleon was said to have left Elba and landed at Cannes. Within hours of the rumour’s first circulation Paris was in turmoil; Gabriel, in common with all other infantrymen on the reserve, received a curt notice to present himself at the Guard’s barracks in the Ecole Militaire. He went blithely, having missed Jean and grown tired of coach-building.

  The column was marching down the Lyons road. It was smart, new and well-equipped. Labédoyère rode at its head and the men stepped briskly, as though they were going into garrison after a successful campaign.

  The early-spring sunshine had dried the neglected roads, and the scent of wild flowers came from the woods. Peasants at their ploughs stopped to line the banks and stare down at the troops as they passed, their muskets slung easily on their shoulders, neatly squared knapsacks bobbing between their shoulder-blades, bayonet scabbards swinging, lively fifes playing, only the drums strangely silent and no one asking why. Through the Paris barriers and for a few leagues south the men had sung “Vive Henri Quatre” and “La Belle Gabrielle.” But down here, where there were few white cockades to be seen, they reverted to the old songs and sang them lustily. Labédoyère rode ahead, making no comment, and his staff glanced at him curiously.

  Gabriel, as a light infantryman, had been seconded to the Seventh of the line, being sent with the first Royalist troops to make head against the Usurper, who was reported to be progressing rapidly towards Grenoble. Marshal Ney, who had boasted that he would bring Napoleon to Paris like a wild beast in a cage, was following up with heavier metal, guns and cavalry. Macdonald, at the head of another army, guarded the approaches to the capital. Nobody in Paris thought this kind of nonsense could last very long. That was what they told one another; it gave them confidence. None the less, King Louis’ head coachman had had orders to overhaul the harness of all the carriage horses in the Royal stables. The Bourbons were not a family to leave anything to chance.

  Gabriel felt curiously light-hearted. He had a new sketchbook in his knapsack, together with a good supply of drawing materials, and the rhythmic movement of the line of aigrettes on the shakos of the men ahead made him itch to reach bivouac and start work.

  As they passed through Lyons the Lyonese looked at the Royal troops sulkily. Lyons was a town that had prospered under the Empire. Beyond Grenoble they saw a cloud of dust approaching, and Labédoyère abruptly halted his men. Red wine was served in leathern buckets, being paid for by the paymaster with newly minted louis-d’ors.

  The dust cloud advanced and the men drained their cups, idling about on the highway, waiting. No orders were issued to prepare for either attack or defence.

  A small column of men came into view, marching briskly. As it drew nearer one of the infantrymen in the Royalist column grabbed his musket and ran shouting down the road. Others followed, catching the man’s excitement. The oncoming column halted within musket shot and, in the brief silence that followed, a short, thickset figure came on alone.

  Suddenly tumult broke out. Men tore off their shakos and rushed in two and threes towards the lonely figure advancing to meet them. The men behind him broke their ranks and ran forward also. A confused uproar arose with shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!,” “Vive la Garde!,” “Vive Napoléon!”

  The man who had first detached himself from Gabriel’s column fell on his knees in the highway, and the two columns mingled, men capering, laughing hysterically, embracing one another in the ditches and stream-bed beside the road. Gabriel edged forward, fascinated by the sheer drama of the scene, to hear Napoleon address the old infantryman.

  “Well, old moustache, tell me honestly, were you really going to shoot me?”

  The man rose to his feet and, whipping his ramrod from its sockets, dropped it into the barrel, where it fell home with a metallic clang. At this the Emperor and the men close by roared with laughter. The musket was unloaded.

  Labédoyère now stepped forward and saluted, Napoleon embracing him. Ringed by grinning Polish lancers, the younger officer produced an eagle from under his cloak; its appearance was hailed with renewed shouts of laughter. Two drummers provided another surprise. Smashing the skins of their drums, they up-ended them and a stream of tricolour cockades poured out onto the road. There was a mad scramble for the emblems as the two columns formed up together in line of march and took the road back to Grenoble.

  That night Gabriel sketched the scene from memory. On this occasion, apparently, he did not feel that a date title was adequate. He called the picture “Reunion, Grenoble, March, 1815.”

  The troops marched north, and on the way they encountered Ney’s troops, who joined them en masse. Ney came, too; there was no more talk of the iron cage.

  The army entered Paris without firing a shot and Old Jean was turned out of his prison cell. He blinked in the strong sunlight and asked his way to the nearest arms depot. He could wait for a uniform and kit issue.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Old Jean lay in the green corn, his back to a bank, his short pipe gripped between broken, discoloured front teeth. Overhead the rain-clouds had drifted off to the north and the sky was a brilliant blue, Vienna blue; a warm, drying wind blew in from the sea. The old sergeant shifted his position slightly and grunted with contentment.

  “This suits me, Gabriel,” he said, and Gabriel was aware of his utter sincerity. The sergeant seemed to have shed twenty years since they had rescued him from the St.-Germain lock-up.

  Gabriel sketched, slowly and thoughtfully. He wanted to capture Jean’s benign and satisfied expression, his bald head gleaming in the June sunshine, his narrow shoulders framed in the riot of cow-parsley and speedwell that clung to the bank.

  Round about them the men of the Forty-fifth Regiment, Donzelot’s division, sprawled in the trampled corn. A few smoky fires fought a sulky battle with the breeze, but the brushwood was damp and the preparation of soup was a slow process. Jean and Gabriel had not troubled to cook. During the previous day’s march they had half-filled their knapsacks with bread and goat’s-milk cheese found in an abandoned farm. Jean had his usual brandy flask and they had fared better than most of the infantry.

  Notwithstanding their lucky find at the farm, the previous day had been a great disappointment to Jean and he had laid himself down to sleep in a querulous mood. The Emperor had been heavily engaged by the Prussians at Ligny, while Ney had fought a drawn battle against the British at Quatre Bras. Gérard’s corps, to which Donzelot’s division was attached, had marched aimlessly to and fro between the two battlefields, arriving too late to participate in either action. The army of two years ago would have considered itself fortunate thus to have evaded pitched battles, but the army of 1813 had been composed of conscr
ipts whereas the men in the cornfield were veterans to a man. Most of them had waited years in British and German prison camps for this, and they were eager to teach the enemy that they had not yet forgotten how to use the bayonet.

  Propped up against the bank, puffing contentedly at his pipe, Jean felt his spirits improve. He was convinced that the Emperor would give battle again within the next twenty-four hours, for it was known that the Prussians had been hurled back on the Wavre, while the British army, with its feeble Dutch-Belgian allies, had been cut off from Blücher and was said to be making a stand along the ridge which they could see on the skyline. Jean wondered idly what the next battle would be called.

  Gabriel, having put the finishing touches on his sketch, passed the book to the sergeant. Jean examined it critically.

  “There’s flesh here that I haven’t got,” was his comment, “but the face is good!”

  He closed the book and returned it to Gabriel, rolling over to tap his pipe on the heel of his muddy boot.

  “This is a good life, Gabriel,” he said. “If I live to my dotage, I’ll never hanker for peace again.”

  Gabriel studied him affectionately. With the sun in his face the old sergeant looked more Mongolian than ever. Gabriel said with a grin: “Peace wouldn’t have been so bad, Jean, if you’d learned how to keep your mouth shut!”