Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  The sergeant spat and began refilling his pipe from the same sealskin pouch that Gabriel had seen him use on the Isle of Lobau.

  “Not bad, eh? Well, maybe you’re still young enough to shape yourself accordingly. But me, I’m like one of those donkeys we used to steal from the wells in Spain, fastened to the bar and going round and round to draw the buckets up. You remember them? They were never any good harnessed to transport. They kept stepping out more to the right than the left and dragged the wagons round in wide circles. You can have peace, Gabriel. What was it for me? Two months of living on your charity, a few weeks cooped up in a bakery hotter than Egypt, three more months taking my share of bread without looking for it, and a few weeks defending myself against pickpockets and me armed with a club! Then gaol, until you came for me, and gaol was the best time of all. In there we could at least talk and expect our food regular!”

  Across the field a drum began to beat, and Jean shambled to his feet, buckling his knapsack, easing the sling of his musket and swinging it onto his left shoulder. The men, cursing, began to gulp down their half-cooked soup. The breeze had dropped and the smoke spiralled vertically upwards; behind the bank an artillery train rattled by, the drivers shouting hoarsely as their teams plunged up the muddy incline.

  Far away in the direction of Charleroi the sun sparkled on a slow-moving column, cavalry advancing at a walk. Jean shaded his eyes and glanced in that direction.

  “Cuirassiers,” he told Gabriel. “Their casques always catch the sun like that. Well, we can’t have enough of them for tomorrow. I wouldn’t care to change these boots for those of an English dragoon.”

  They picked their way through the trampled corn towards the ranks that were forming up on the lower slopes. There was a smell of summer, of wet leather and human sweat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The two armies faced one another across the shallow valley, the French massed in columns on either side of the Brussels road, the British and their allies crowning the ridge of Mont St. Jean, their front presenting a short mile of bivouac fires behind a few advanced field batteries crowning the edge of the plateau.

  Half-way down the slope, on the right of the enemy’s position, lay a huddle of white and grey buildings, the farm and château Hougomont, with a small orchard, a few barns and low stone walls reaching out to the edge of a sparse copse. It was occupied by the English. Here and there the watching French skirmishers caught sight of a flash of scarlet as the Guards garrison moved about the yard, loopholing, digging, barricading.

  “A hard nut to crack,” said Jean, but he knew that he and Gabriel would not be asked to crack it, for their place in the line of battle was farther to the right, opposite the higher bastion of the English line, the smaller, more open farm of La Haye Sainte.

  The Forty-fifth had moved into position late the previous evening, passing the Imperial staff outside the farmhouse of La Belle Alliance. The Emperor himself had been standing by a fire talking to Marshal Soult and Gérard, their own corps commander.

  When the tired men greeted the Emperor he had acknowledged their cheer with a perfunctory lift of the hand and one of his pale smiles. Round about him the grenadiers of the Old Guard were cooking their evening meal; Gabriel noticed that all traces of Ligny mud had been removed from their long white gaiters. They looked as trim and elegant as on the day he had seen them reviewed in the courtyard of Schönbrunn, after the Wagram campaign.

  There was an air of confidence about the camp, and divisions moved into position without fuss or flurry. No one would have supposed that Marshal Berthier was absent, his time-honoured place as Chief of Staff being filled by Soult. There were guns everywhere, and between the batteries were ranged masses of cavalry, more than Gabriel had ever seen on a single battlefield.

  As they bivouacked beside the road Gabriel wished that Dominique had been present to play them a tune. Before they rolled themselves in their greatcoats beside the fire, Jean and he discussed old times and old comrades. The sergeant summed up his last file.

  “They were good boys, all of them—even old Nicky, until he went crazy!”

  Neither of them mentioned Nicholette, but after they had thrown fresh wood onto the fire and Gabriel had rolled on his back and looked up at the few stars, he wondered whether the girl had rejoined the army after the Emperor’s return. He would have asked Jean his opinion on the matter, but the old sergeant had already begun to snore. Jean was never more than a moment in getting to sleep.

  The battle opened with a murderous artillery duel. From where they were standing to arms, near the main road, the light infantrymen saw something of the havoc created by the French guns among the red-coated artillerymen on the ridge. After a spell the more advanced batteries withdrew behind the skyline, but for more than an hour the French continued to pepper the ridge, screening the entire battle line with battery smoke that hung like a fog on the light air.

  About eleven o’clock the division received orders to march and moved off down the main road towards La Haye Sainte. On their right three other divisions of Gérard’s corps advanced along parallel lines of march, whilst on the road itself a few squadrons of cuirassiers clattered forward in support.

  Then the British artillery opened fire and balls began to plough into the column. As it approached the farm the crackle of musketry was heard and a line of flashes picked out the loopholes. A few men dropped, but the column marched on up the slope, driving in the British skirmishers and striking out for the crest, which appeared to be empty of anything but guns. One battalion inclined to the left to surround the farm, where firing soon rose to a climax. The other, with Jean and Gabriel in the van, skirted a sandpit manned by British riflemen, won the crest and advanced with fixed bayonets against a double line of troops lining the hedgerow. The enemy did not wait for the collision. Badly shaken by the long cannonade, of which they had borne the brunt, an entire division of Dutch-Belgian infantry broke and fled, sweeping back into the second line and making no attempt to rally until they were out of range.

  The French infantry threw themselves at the hedges, and Jean, turning to Gabriel as the latter jumped down onto open ground, shouted for joy. His elation was premature.

  Advancing in column, the Forty-fifth had lost much of its momentum in the act of crossing the hedge. Its officers rushed along the edge of the ditch, shouting orders to deploy into line, but the movement had hardly commenced when the breathless men heard the thunder of hooves on their immediate right. A mass of cavalry bore down on them, squadrons of the royals and dragoon guards, an avalanche of grey and black horses, their riders leaning right and left as they lashed out with their sabres, scattering the disordered ranks in heaps and hurling the survivors back into the hedge. There was no time to form square.

  Hundreds of men went down under the fearful impact; others, seeing what was happening from the French side of the bank, turned and fled downhill, the dragoons streaming through a gap lower down and cutting obliquely into their line of flight.

  Jean and Gabriel rallied a dozen men and fought back with the bayonet, their feet in the ditch, but once the gap had been found the dragoons galloped away to find less resolute victims on the slopes of the incline. Jean took advantage of the respite to shepherd his half-company back over the hedge; then he bullied them into forming some sort of square to fight a way back to their starting-point. Furious at the repulse, he began to curse the officers.

  “God in heaven,” he shouted above the roar of artillery, which had opened fire on the fleeing column, “fancy trying to deploy us in the face of the enemy. We might as well sit down and blow our own brains out! Is this what they learned in the Peninsula?”

  British cavalry, life guards and dragoons, was still pouring down into the valley, overturning the few cuirassiers who tried to oppose them on the fringe of La Haye Sainte. Jean’s square, shaken now into a defensive formation, attracted more and more fugitives. A sergeant of the 105th joined them, his face bleeding profusely from a sabre cut.


  “They’ve taken our eagle,” he growled, dashing the blood from his eyes. “Who in hell would have expected cavalry at that point?”

  “Wait a minute and then watch our own people present the bill,” replied Jean; and indeed, within seconds, the rallying infantrymen began cheering. From their side of the declivity they had a good view of the opposite slopes. There they saw the British cavalry, carried away by its own impetuosity, storm up the valley towards Gérard’s guns and wheel to sabre the gunners as they fled towards the reserves. At that moment a long streak of green and silver lunged from the solid ranks of the French cavalry reserves as whole squadrons of cuirassiers and lancers plunged down the slope into the disordered masses of redcoats.

  The execution was fearful. Caught in the flank, their horses blown by a long gallop over soft ground, the dragoons did their utmost to turn and race for their own lines, but hardly one of them escaped the long, straight swords of the heavy cavalry or the points of Jacquinot’s green lancers. Within five minutes the valley was dotted with scarlet, while riderless greys reared and cavorted in the mêlée. Only a few well-mounted survivors galloped past the retreating infantry and rode for the plateau; the jubilant French infantry gave them a scattered volley as they passed.

  “So much for that,” said Jean, as they reformed behind the cavalry screen.

  Over at Hougomont a terrific battle was in progress. Orchard and wood were veiled in drifting smoke, and a confused roar spread right along the valley from the sector where Reille’s infantry battered impotently on the château gate, falling in heaps before the well-directed fire of the British Guards.

  Before La Haye Sainte there was a short lull, men of the light infantry companies occupying the time by rifling the bodies of the dragoons. Jean pocketed a silver watch but gave its owner, a trooper dying from a lance thrust in the back, a few swallows of brandy. The man thanked him with his eyes. He did not appear to grudge the loss of his watch.

  The din from the direction of Hougomont had increased; the artillery exchanges were deafening when Ney, attended by a group of staff officers, rode up to the regrouped battalion.

  The marshal had just led an unsuccessful attack on the château gate, and his face was smudged with powder. He pointed towards La Haye Sainte with his sword.

  “We’re going to take that!” he shouted. Then, clapping his spurs into his horse, he cantered towards the head of the column and took his place in the front rank.

  The division was set in motion, up the slope once more, this time heading directly for the farmhouse.

  A storm of round shot and grape struck the column; Gabriel saw Ney’s horse stagger and fall, throwing its rider from the saddle. Donzelot having helped the marshal to his feet, he continued to advance on foot, breaking into a run and turning to urge the leading files forward.

  “Good old Michel,” cried Jean as he too hurried towards the head of the column, Gabriel following.

  They stormed into the courtyard, to be met by a feeble spatter of musketry. Inside the farm a British major and his German garrison crouched behind the barricades. They knew that there was no hope of holding the position against this fresh assault. Their cartridge pouches were almost empty.

  All the farm buildings, however, including the great barn, had been manned by light troops, and for a brief space there was a fierce struggle for possession of the sheds and byres, the French closing in at the point of the bayonet and fighting their way through fires started by their own field artillery. The door of the great barn resisted all attacks until some of the voltigeurs clambered onto the roof, tore loose sections of the tiles and fired into the interior, shooting down the garrison to a man.

  Inside the main building the British major in command, seeing that further resistance was useless, cleared the back door for a retreat into the garden and across the fields to the plateau. He and a few others succeeded in getting clear, but the French soon smashed in the front door, carrying the fight into the narrow passage that ran the length of the farmhouse.

  Jean and Gabriel were among the first over the threshold, lunging at the Germans packed in the narrow space. The struggle could not last long, for the French, with full pouches, fired volleys into the struggling mass jammed in the passage. Gabriel shot a sergeant at point-blank range and Jean took another man through the throat. The din was hellish, the passage reeked of powder-smoke. In the uncertain light Gabriel saw a young officer, his shoulder shattered by a musket ball, reel into a room branching off the corridor. He was quickly followed by two of his men. A crowd of skirmishers, shouting “No quarter,” followed at their heels, and when Gabriel forced his way into the room the two men were being bayoneted. One of them, a boy of about eighteen, screamed for mercy, but the other, a veteran, continued to lunge at his assailants’ feet until he died. There was no sign of the German officer and Gabriel guessed that he had crawled under the broad four-poster bed that occupied the centre of the room. It was clear that Gabriel was the only man to have witnessed him enter. The Frenchman took a single step towards the canopy, then stopped; a vivid memory seared him, revealing another bed, in another violated dwelling on the banks of the Danube.

  For a second he stood quite still, staring down once more at the first man he had killed more than six years ago and suffering the same revulsion. There was the same patch of sunlight on the floor, the same dust motes hovering in the beam, the same dark pool of blood spreading round the body of the young bayonetted German. Nausea gripped him and he leaned heavily against the smooth surface of the massive bedpost.

  One of the voltigeurs, casually wiping his bayonet on the patchwork quilt, glanced at Gabriel. “You wounded?”

  Gabriel shook his head, and the man looked round the room.

  “Any more in here?”

  In his fancy Gabriel heard the German officer’s heart beating, felt the man’s sweat beading on his forehead, choked with the effort of controlling laboured breath. He made an immense effort to push himself away from the bedpost.

  “Come on, there’s more outside!”

  They went out into the passage and Gabriel closed the door. In a strange way it seemed an act of atonement for murder done long ago.

  Jean joined them in the yard, where the column was re-forming. The old sergeant was sweating and the muscles of his face twitched. Gabriel saw that Jean’s tunic was coated with white dust and blood; it crossed his mind that the sergeant had become more savage since the last campaign. He had never formerly been a man to kill in cold blood. During the years that they had fought side by side Gabriel had seen him spare a dozen men whom most veterans would have despatched without a second thought, but today Jean was as vicious as any of them. This was a different war, more relentless and unforgiving even than Leipzig. Gabriel remembered something that Jean had said when they were crouching in the pine forests of Russia, watching the convoy of prisoners being driven along the road: “After Austerlitz I saw French staff officers dive into a freezing lake to bring a couple of wounded Russians ashore.” That act of mercy now seemed remote and absurd, like a chivalrous exchange at the barriers in the Middle Ages. Men were dying on all sides of them, piled on the manure heaps in the yard, crawling painfully away from the blazing byres, crying out for help and getting none. The elation of yesterday had gone. Today it seemed incredible to Gabriel that he had contributed to this slaughter, that some of the men at their feet had fallen before his musket and his bayonet. He glanced at the bayonet tip and saw that it was as red as any man’s in the yard.

  A shower of grapeshot whipped the only instinct that mattered into awareness again, the instinct of self-preservation, of keeping alive as long as possible. As they dived for cover officers began shouting and pointing towards the plateau. Now that La Haye Sainte was in French hands the British gunners on the ridge had opened fire once more and the shots were flailing down on the shattered buildings, splintering tiles, pitting the cob walls of the farm and sending out spurts of choking dust. The battalion poured from the yard, fanned out in the
field between farm and plateau, and advanced in skirmishing order, kneeling, firing and loading, closing in on the emplacements, where little red figures crouched and ran, sponged, sighted and died.

  For the second time the French infantry gained the flat crest, leaping over still figures of men who had marched into bivouac with them the previous evening. Gabriel ran behind Jean. In this tempest of sound he found comfort in fixing his eyes on the sergeant’s bouncing cartridge-box, dreading to lose sight of the one sure reality in a succession of terrifying nightmares. He felt like a small child pursuing his mother’s apron across a crowded fairground peopled by screaming lunatics. But, just as they reached the guns, Jean’s cartridge-box ceased to bounce; it seemed to hover for a moment before falling sideways and rolling over and over into the shallow emplacement beside a stationary field-piece.

  Gabriel went over to the gun and fell on his knees, turning the sergeant onto his back and staring down at the lean, contorted face. The lips twisted in agony and the moustache about which they had made so many jokes jerked comically, as though determined to maintain the joke to the last moment. The battle rolled past them as they crouched in the trench; over the lip of the little crater Gabriel could see a red, compact square of British infantry, stationed well back, a hundred paces from the crest of the plateau. He immediately understood why they could never win this battle.

  He stripped off Jean’s equipment and tunic, appalled by the pallor of the sergeant’s face, but the wound was not mortal—a musket-ball graze along the right side of the neck, a near-miss leaving a thick red weal but hardly drawing blood.

  He began to laugh, semi-hysterically, with sheer relief, but Jean continued to writhe and pointed down at his left leg. Then Gabriel saw that a second ball had passed through the lower part of the thigh, a clean wound the size of a thrush’s egg, blue at the edges and pumping blood steadily.