Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  After that there was no stopping, for the column of men poured irresistibly through the tiny gap and streamed up the hill towards La Belle Alliance. Running up the hill, the last of the fugitives once again heard the roar of artillery. It was a battery of field-guns playing on the Guard’s square.

  When the smoke had drifted away, a party of Prussian horse artillerymen found the bearskins lying in ordered ranks; the artillery major, looking down on them, remarked on the strange uniformity of the features of the dead. A few dazed survivors of the discharge were rounded up to be sent back along the road to Waterloo. Jean was not among them.

  The same night, however, a British camp-follower who was systematically rifling the pockets of the dead mused for a moment on the body of a sergeant with the shako numerals “105” who had died with a ramrod tied to his leg. The young moon shone faintly on a pallid face, its drooping moustache in startling contrast with the heavy bristles of the guardsmen, fierce even in death. Assuming that the dead man was a senior non-commissioned officer, the transport thief ransacked the pockets very thoroughly; he found little enough, only an army pay-book, the English watch, a short clay pipe and a quid of tobacco. An expert looter with years of Peninsula experience, he next tore open the shirt and laid his hand on the thin chest. After a few moments he found what he expected to find, a thin cord encircling the neck, and tugged at it. The frayed cord snapped and gratefully he slipped the Cross of the Legion of Honour into his breeches pocket.

  Jean Ticquet, voltigeur sergeant of the infantry of the line, lay where the non-combatant had thrown him, his head resting on the stained waistcoat of one guardsman, his boots in the blood of others, tumbled with a hundred dead, in the middle of the Charleroi road. This was his bounty for twenty-two years’ service in the field, and Jean would have judged it a generous one.

  A troop of Prussians cantered by, pressing the pursuit down the road to Jemappes; their hooves trod on the comical moustache.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The pursuit roared away to the south, through Jemappes, through Charleroi, through Philippeville, no longer an army in flight but a disordered rabble, its former chieftains making their own decisions about the best way to save their lives.

  The Emperor abandoned his carriage and made off on a borrowed horse, Bertrand and Gourgaud being among the few field officers in attendance. The Imperial escort consisted of perhaps forty men riding jaded horses.

  Soult made for his own country; Ney, miraculously alive, went into hiding, lurking here and there until the Bourbons caught him and dragged him to Paris.

  The others, rank and file, did what they could to dodge the sabres of the Prussians, hurrying down the broad road in a compact mass, fighting off the jubilant hussars, snatching what food they could find until the harrying ceased and the solid battalions of the Allies re-formed and moved on the capital.

  Gabriel marched in his sleep, beyond exhaustion, beyond conscious thought, stepping along with the tide of fugitives until he approached Jemappes, where he saw some infantry officers trying to organize a rearguard. Then he turned off, crossing the fields behind the town and losing himself in a stretch of broken country to the right of the main road. When dawn broke he was alone and his normal instincts began to reassert themselves. He felt ravenously hungry and was suddenly conscious of a searing pain in his right hand. Not until the pain shot through his palm like a hot blade did he remember the bayonet at the rout of the square or realize that he had been wounded. He knew then that he must both rest and eat, and his skirmisher’s training came to his aid. Looking round for cover, he saw a thick fir coppice on his right. Stumbling towards it, he fought his way a short distance into the tangled undergrowth that grew round the base of the young trees. There, in a tiny clearing, he sank down and tore at the flap of his knapsack, taking out a few crusts of stale bread. While eating them, he fell asleep.

  He did not awaken until late afternoon and for some moments was unable to recollect how he came to be lying under the briars. Somewhere near at hand blackbirds were whistling. He listened absently to their carolling until a burning thirst assailed him, and he crawled forward through the bushes in search of a stream whose murmur could be heard behind the constant twitter of the birds.

  He found the brook a few yards from his glade and plunged his face into the shallow water, gulping until he was satisfied. Then he washed his hands and face and began to unlace his boots. The act proved difficult with his left hand and, when he had loosened the laces, his feet throbbed a dual accompaniment to the agony in his hand. Looking carefully at his wound, he saw that the water had washed away some of the congealed blood, but he was unable to flex his fingers and that not solely on account of the pain which the effort caused him. The bayonet had cut through the tendons of the two middle fingers and, apart from the thumb, his right hand seemed to be paralysed. He unbuttoned his tunic and began to tear at the tatters of his shirt, puzzled at first to find that it was already in ribbons. Then he remembered Jean and the application of the tourniquet on the slopes of Mont St.-Jean.

  Sitting back against a tree, he tried to realize that Jean was dead. For a minute or two he attempted to persuade himself that the sergeant might have been taken prisoner. Then he recalled the merciless sabrecuts at stragglers all along the Charleroi road. If the Prussians were so engaged several hours after the battle, it seemed highly improbable that they would have paused to take prisoners on the battlefield. The English might, providing that they saw Jean was badly wounded, but the artillery firing into the square had been Prussian and, in any case, how could Jean, standing erect in a square, have been recognized as a wounded man?

  Gabriel dabbled his feet in the water, finding the slow current delightfully refreshing. For the moment he was not only physically exhausted but spent mentally as well. He knew that in a day or two he would begin to mourn for his old friend, to curse himself for surrendering Jean’s musket and failing to drag the sergeant out of that absurd square, but for the moment he was unable to focus his emotion. He could only look on the events of the last forty-eight hours as a series of pictures seen in a book, like those illustrating the large leather volumes that Crichot had lent him when he had called upon the ex-priest on Sunday evenings long ago. Then he abandoned recent recollections and began to think of things more remote, finding them strangely satisfying, almost comforting.

  Memories flowed by like a long chain of bubbles on the surface of a stream, steering their own way down the years, sometimes breaking almost as soon as he caught sight of them, sometimes sailing round the stones and twigs of fixed events in his life and riding on out of sight. Tiny, unimportant details stood out with great clarity—the pattern of the leaves when the noon sun beat down on their bivouac in Lobau, the odd, upward curve of the dog Fouché’s tail, the smell of burning corn at Wagram when they had dragged Nicholas from a ring of flame, the softness of Karen’s hair as he had sat stroking it on the hillside the night before the fire.

  Once he checked himself, thinking that he was growing lightheaded with hunger and fatigue, but the memories still came back, building up like floodwater until he stood aside and surrendered himself to them once more. Manny speculatively regarding the plump breasts of Karen’s sister as she bent over the kitchen table to prepare their supper; Claude sitting in the firelight beside Nicholette on the night of the canteen wedding; Louis heating the iron for the branding of Carolini’s mule. And through the memories came a rush of unanswered queries that could never be answered or even guessed at, now that Jean was dead. What had happened to the surviving Carolinis? What fate overtook the English woman, Lucy Manaton, who had made such a fool of herself over horses and Louis? How long did poor old Sergeant-Major Soutier survive after they had abandoned him in the Cossacks’ hut? What were the feelings of Nicholas when he looked down the musket barrels of his three comrades? Where now was Nicholette?

  His memory took a byroad and he began to concentrate on Nicholette, on her strained look, her white, even teeth visible only when
she gave one of her rare smiles, her hair that was constantly working loose from the confines of its coils to fall down across her ears like a dark curtain. He knew then that he had always wanted Nicholette, knew also that she had hardly ever been aware of his existence, even before she took up with Nicholas, yet now that Jean had gone he felt an overwhelming desire to be near her, if only to hear her harsh, male voice shouting to the team. His yearning was sexless, but this made it even more urgent. He wondered, if Nicholas had not been there, if he had been drowned with Claude when they were all plunged into the Tagus on that autumn day, whether Nicholette might not have chosen him as the best of the survivors and a better proposition than changing her file in the middle of a campaign. He thought it possible, even probable, for her manner had never been cordial with any of them except Nicholas. He knew that something had gone sour in her that night by the fire in the Dresden bivouac, when Jean had come into camp and told them that there was no hope of a marshal’s reprieve.

  Across these meditations a single musket shot suddenly cut like a whiplash. He leaped to his feet and stood with his back to the tree. Groping blindly with his injured hand for the sling of his musket and not finding it, he realized that he was unarmed and a fugitive. He had jettisoned his sword-bayonet when he left the plateau.

  The knowledge sobered him, jerking his mind from past to present. He slipped into his boots, treading his rotting socks into the stream, and bent, cursing softly, to fumble at the bootlaces with his left hand.

  He listened for a moment, then dropped on hands and knees, dragging himself cautiously forward until he reached the fringe of the plantation and an open patch of fallow land covered with coarse grass. Cautiously he rose to his knees and examined the country. Across the field ran a winding byroad, leading to God knew where, and stationary on the road, less than two hundred paces from the spot where he stood, was a solitary two-wheeled wagon to which was harnessed a single horse.

  A muffled thumping came from the interior of the vehicle and a riderless horse stood by the roadside, cropping the long grass. As he watched, another horse, small but strongly built, ambled from behind the wagon and moved along the edge of the field, looking for richer tufts. There was no sign of the riders and Gabriel guessed that they were both inside the wagon.

  His first impulse was to crawl back into the wood. From the distance at which he stood he recognized the horses as those of a light-cavalry unit, but was unable to read the regimentals on the portmanteaux fastened to the back of the saddles. He felt reasonably certain that the horses belonged to Prussians, while the single shot he had heard indicated that they had met with some sort of opposition from the carter. There were stronger reasons, however, that encouraged him to leave the wood and creep forward through the tall grass. With a horse under him he could get clear of the battle area within two or three hours, and he saw from the saddle holsters that both horses carried pistols, which meant that he would not be at the mercy of the first trooper who overtook him. In the circumstances there was no great risk. If the Prussians came out of the wagon he could easily bolt back into the woods before they could remount to ride in pursuit. He knew that they would never try to follow him on horseback through the dense undergrowth of the coppice.

  He could still hear indeterminate sounds coming from the wagon and it occurred to him that the two horsemen had probably disposed of the carter and were now engaged in ransacking the interior. This would improve his chances of catching one of the horses and of making his escape. He approached the wagon from the side, moving very cautiously and glancing over his right shoulder towards the road to ensure that no other horsemen were in sight. The road, and the heath around it, was bare. It was so quiet in the grass that he could hear the chirrup of crickets. The scent of clover reminded him of summer afternoons on the banks of the Dordogne.

  Suddenly he stopped crawling. Just ahead of him, through the forest of slender green stems, appeared the body of a Prussian hussar, lying flat on his back. In his right hand was a carbine, of the type used by some of the Prussian cavalry. The man was quite dead, and as Gabriel moved into the area of crushed grass where the body lay, he saw that the hussar had died from a shot through the chest. His brief inspection emboldened him. It meant that there was only one Prussian in the wagon.

  He had risen to his feet and was about to make a dash for the nearest horse, when a thought struck him. The Prussians had killed Jean and all through the night they had been cutting down unarmed fugitives. Gabriel hesitated only a second; then he went down on his knees and cautiously drew the hussar’s sabre from the scabbard that hung on the man’s embroidered belt. A sabre was better than a carbine for this sort of job.

  His left hand closed round the hilt. Gabriel had never struck at a man with his left hand, but he felt that his disadvantage was more than outweighed by the element of surprise he would enjoy.

  At that moment the scuffling in the wagon suddenly increased; a woman’s scream, loud and penetrating, shattered the drowsy silence of the afternoon. In ten strides Gabriel was beside the dropped tailboard, tearing aside the canvas flaps that screened the interior. He saw a man and a woman huddled together on a thin mattress laid between two rows of lockers. They were struggling, the man uppermost. The woman screamed again, then began to shriek curses in French. The hussar laughed and grasped at the woman’s free wrist.

  Gabriel struck first at the man’s foot, holding back the tailboard flaps with his injured hand and slashing with all his might at the calf of his leg, just above the furred top of the short riding-boot. The hussar howled and rolled over onto his side, crushing the woman with his weight. The next moment the point of the sabre was in his throat and he slumped, coughing, into the narrow space between the edge of the mattress and the lockers. Gabriel clambered into the wagon and stood over him, his weapon poised for a second jab. There was no need; his blade had penetrated four inches into the Prussian’s neck, severing the jugular vein.

  The hussar levered himself into a sitting position to rock to and fro, supporting himself by his hands pressed down on the wagon floor. Convulsively he heaved himself forward, his body bending like a bow, and died, crouched, as Gabriel had seen men die before the bivouac fires on the Moscow highroad. His shako slipped forward over his forehead, revealing thick greying hair plaited into a neat pigtail and tied with a black ribbon.

  The woman too struggled into a sitting posture, leaning back against the rear of the driving-seat. She was breathing heavily and her bodice was torn down the middle, revealing one of her small breasts. Her dark hair, which had broken loose in the struggle, framed a face as pale as the paint on the lockers beside her.

  The woman was Nicholette.

  She stared at him stupidly, screwing up her eyes in the glare of sunlight that beat through the join of the tailboard curtains.

  For nearly a minute they stared at one another, neither making any effort to move.

  Finally Gabriel said: “I’d better throw this fellow out, Nico. His blood will damage your stock.”

  He turned and stepped down from the wagon, dragging the dead hussar over the tailboard. As he bent over the body the woman got to her feet and walked unsteadily to the rear of the wagon, casually rearranging her disordered clothes and flinging back the mass of hair that fell across her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t bother to search him, Gabriel,” she said. “I’ve plenty of money and there’s sure to be more of these pigs on patrol!”

  Gabriel went round to the front of the wagon and climbed to the box.

  “Have you a musket?” he asked, addressing her through the canopy.

  “Pistols as well. I settled with the first one, but the other swine came at me from behind, climbing up over the shafts.” He heard her opening lockers. Then, “Come on, let’s move; head away from Charleroi and we’ll pick up the Rheims road in less than an hour!”

  Gabriel gathered up the reins and called to the horse. The wagon began to trundle softly along the dusty road.

  After a while Ni
cholette spoke again from the interior. “It’s a pity we couldn’t take their horses, but that would be asking for trouble now that they’re heading for Paris. Nobody would be such a fool as to buy a Prussian horse after yesterday’s business.”

  Neither of them remarked on the oddness of their reunion.

  They continued a desultory conversation until they came to the junction of the byroad and the Rheims highway. When the wagon stopped, Nicholette jumped down and came round to the box. She was wearing a different dress of plain grey cotton and her hair was bound up under a red silk handkerchief. A little colour had crept back into her cheeks, but Gabriel noticed that she looked a good deal older than when he had last seen her, sitting beside the camp-fire outside Dresden. She threw a neat parcel of clothing onto the dashboard.

  “You’d better change into those,” she told him. “Then we can head back north as a couple of carriers travelling to Brussels.”

  He climbed down and stripped off his uniform, reflecting that no fundamental change had taken place in her since they had all taken turns to ride on the box-seat during the long march across Spain. She was still as tough and matter-of-fact as the hardiest infantryman; she still had an inexhaustible supply of common sense and logic when confronted with an everyday problem. He wondered whether the years had taken the edge off her avarice and if constant brooding over the circumstances of Nicholas’s death had converted her stoicism into bitterness.

  Gabriel climbed up beside her again and she jerked at the horse. The wagon turned north, heading into enemy territory.

  Presently he said: “Jean and Dominique have gone, Nico. I’m alone now.”

  She did not appear to notice the huskiness of his voice, but merely asked: “Since yesterday?”