Ramage's Signal

by Dudley Pope

  In spite of the cloth wrapped round the oars, the thole pins themselves, not a tight fit, still groaned as if protesting. However, thole pins were better than rowlocks for silent work, and he was thankful they were fitted to the cutters. Creak, splash, creak… The men were rowing as silently as possible, and as the gig approached the beach Ramage could hear the slap, suck and gurgle of wavelets as they curled over to break on the sand, and a few small wading birds wakened, calling to each other, passing urgent warnings. And now the smell of the maquis: a mixture of pine, dried grass, herbs and, Ramage thought, nostalgia, too, as well as a whiff of soot from the shielded lantern.

  He realized the absurdity of wearing a hat and took it off and tucked it under the thwart. The semaphore tower began to look like a poacher’s view of the end of a barn. And there was the platform on top described by Aitken. Could he distinguish a system of battens—probably forming slides between which the shutters went up and down to make the signals? They certainly slid up and down: that much was clear when the Calypso passed, though he considered hinges on one side, and opening and closing like windows, would have been easier. The shutters must, he thought cynically, go up and down like guillotine blades … But how did they form the signals? Did the shapes represent individual letters of the alphabet, words or whole phrases?

  About thirty yards to go and he heard Jackson, at the tiller and standing in his little compartment that was cut off from the rest of the boat by the sternsheets, mutter something to Paolo, who stood up, holding the grapnel and lowering it over the stern.

  Although Ramage could feel the tension and excitement spreading through the landing party, the men at the oars continued the same steady stroke and he felt detached rather than excited.

  “Orsini,” he said quietly, “you and I will land first and go round the edge of that hill, looking for the track leading out of the camp. There’s bound to be a guardhouse. If there’s a sentry, leave him to me; if there’s a whole guard we’ll have to see.” He turned forward and said: “You in the landing party—you will follow Jackson, who’ll be fifteen yards astern of Mr Orsini. Any man who makes a noise will have to account to me—after Jackson’s finished with him.” The men chuckled.

  Ramage caught sight of Kenton’s cutter two or three hundred yards farther down the coast. It was now near the beach—that was why Ramage had decided to use the gig, which was narrower, shallower and faster than the cutter, and because he would be leaving the Calypso after the others he wanted to be first at the beach, knowing at the same time that Rennick would be urging Kenton to make a race of it.

  Suddenly there was the coarse sucking and gurgling of the sand and a grunt from Jackson set Paolo taking a strain on the line of the grapnel. And then, as usual, there were a few moments of chaos: Jackson gave a series of swift orders to the men at the oars while he himself lifted the rudder from its pintles so it should not be damaged in the beaching: Paolo was gradually increasing the strain on the grapnel line with half a turn on a cleat and, as Ramage felt the stem of the gig nudge the beach, hurriedly took several turns to secure it.

  By now Ramage, jumping from thwart to thwart, was at the bow and he heard Paolo blaspheming quietly in Italian as his cutlass nearly tripped him.

  The frothing water was phosphorescent; Ramage had time to notice that as, holding up the scabbard of his sword, he leapt down to the beach and kept moving across the soft sand, knowing Paolo and the rest of the landing party would be close behind. It needed only one man to sprawl on the beach and everyone else would jump on top of him, unable to stop themselves as in turn they reached the stem, poised for a moment and then jumped with cutlass and pistol.

  As he moved quickly up the slight slope of the beach and came to the coarse, short grass, the semaphore tower on its hill looming on his right, he knew that behind him Jackson would still be on the beach, mustering his party, while the eight oars-men left behind as boat-keepers would be digging in another grapnel high up the beach to hold the gig’s bow as they pulled her a few feet astern with the grapnel Paolo had laid, making sure she was floating and avoiding any risk that a sudden swell wave would make the stem pound and cause damage. Also, with the gig five or ten yards out, she was safe from a sudden attack.

  Paolo was beside him as Ramage slowed down, looking ahead and to his left for some sign of the guardhouse. The hill blocked any view seaward of the five barrack huts but—then suddenly he felt the ground smooth, with no grass. Paolo had stopped abruptly. This was the track, running from left to right. Was the guardhouse towards the huts, or the village? To the right or left?

  Paolo nudged him and touched his nose and a moment later Ramage smelled the unmistakable odour of latrines—and they were to the right, towards the barrack buildings. Which probably meant the guardhouse was to the left—even the most inexperienced soldier didn’t dig latrines outside the camp’s defences …

  Ramage heard a twig snap several yards behind him and whispered to Paolo: “Go back and tell Jackson we are going left along the track and he is to follow.”

  Paolo was back in a few moments and Ramage could by now see the track clearly: it was about six paces wide and rutted, showing that an infrequent cart had come on a wet day, its wheels leaving their mark in the mud. Walking along the track had one advantage—they were less likely to step on dried twigs which could sound like pistol shots as they broke.

  Paolo had his cutlass in his right hand and his dirk in the left, but Ramage told him to put them away out of sight; for the moment they were two men walking innocently in the night; a sentry would neither see nor, more important, recognize their uniforms in the darkness unless, Ramage suddenly remembered with annoyance, the man noted that they were wearing breeches. In the age of the sans culotte, the revolutionaries wore trousers while any escaped aristocrats might still be in breeches—if they still wore heads.

  Suddenly he froze, reaching out to stop Paolo. From just ahead of them there was a curious, regular noise. As Ramage concentrated on identifying it and making sure of its direction, he heard several more, muffled and apparently beyond it. Then, almost sheepishly because already he had half drawn his sword he recognized it and whispered to Paolo: “The guardhouse is just ahead. The sentry is asleep somewhere outside: the rest of the guard are sleeping inside. Go back and tell Jackson I want to talk to him.”

  The semaphore station guard were in for a rude awakening. They were lucky not to get their throats cut with a slash from a cutlass; indeed, Ramage knew that if anything went wrong he would later be blamed for taking needless risks in making them prisoners.

  Paolo returned with Jackson and Ramage described what he had heard and deduced. “We have to work quickly,” he added, “because one of the other landing parties might cause someone to raise the alarm. I’ll deal with the sentry—knock him out—and I want you and half a dozen men to follow me and go on into the guardhouse and lay out the rest of them. We’ll leave them with a couple of seamen as guards while we see if any of the other parties need help. And put two more seamen here outside in the lane by the guardhouse with orders that no one passes—even if they have to shoot.”

  As Jackson disappeared into the darkness Ramage and Paolo began to creep towards the snoring. “We walk how do you say, ‘like a cat on a hot brick,’” Paolo murmured.

  “Silent cats,” Ramage muttered warningly.

  There was maquis on each side of the track; waist-high scrub bushes humming with insects during the day (even now the persistent whine of mosquitoes warned of unseen attacks on his neck, face and hands) and heavy with the smell of wild herbs. He could now hear the waves stirring and gently scouring the sandy beaches on each side of the headland, emphasizing how narrow it was.

  He touched Paolo to stop him, and then dropped down on one knee so that anything higher than the maquis would be outlined against the stars. He was immediately startled to see the guardhouse less than five yards away, although the snoring of the one man had lessened considerably,

  Paolo had also knel
t and, obviously hearing the same thing, said quietly: “He has turned over, away from us!”

  Ramage took a pistol from his belt, made sure that it was not cocked, and resumed creeping towards the guardhouse. Suddenly the snoring was interrupted for a moment by a massive grunt—bringing Ramage and Paolo to an abrupt stop—and then once again loudly resumed.

  “He’s restless,” Paolo muttered.

  Then they were at the guardhouse. It was a substantial though small rectangular building, built of rough stone with a steeply pitched wooden roof and the entrance at the narrow side facing the track. Ramage guessed the building had originally been a donkey shelter: France and Italy were littered with them, and in times of bad harvests—and probably war—whole families lived inside.

  They both spotted the sentry within a few seconds: he was slumped on the ground to the right of the entrance, his back resting against the wall.

  Ramage walked over to him and carefully hit him across the right side of the head with the butt of the pistol. The man gave a low grunt and slid slowly sideways, away from the entrance.

  There was a low hiss from the track behind and Ramage hissed back. Jackson and his men glided up and Ramage could smell the soot of the shielded lantern.

  “All right if we use the light, sir?”

  “Yes, it’ll prevent accidents. But you’ll have to be extra quick in case one of ‘em is sleeping lightly.”

  Jackson turned and whispered to the man behind him—who was, Ramage realized, holding the lantern—and as Jackson glided through the entrance, the man followed, opening the shutter and lighting the inside of the building. Ramage immediately followed the man even though the next seaman in line, not recognizing him, protested. A second later the inside of the guardhouse was like a box full of wild cats.

  Jackson knocked out the nearest man but they were sleeping in two-tiered wooden bunks along the walls, and although it was easy to hit the man in the top bunk there was little room to wield a pistol butt to get at the lower one.

  The two in the lower bunks farthest from the entrance were awake and trying to roll out by the time the seamen reached them and one was lifting a pistol. Ramage heard him cock it and saw none of the seamen could get to him because of sprawling bodies, before he fired. He hurled his own pistol at the man’s head, lost sight of it among the flickering shadows as it spun through the air, and then saw the man’s hand drop. By then he had pushed his way through the seamen and found his victim sprawled half out of the bunk, blood dripping from a cut by his ear. He retrieved the pistol and turned to find Jackson methodically checking each of the Frenchmen to make sure he was unconscious.

  “Six, sir, and your chap outside. One of ‘em must be the sergeant or corporal in charge of the guard.”

  “Probably. Anyway, hurry up and secure them. Collect up their arms and hide ‘em in the bushes. Each will have a cutlass and musket, but that fellow with the pistol may have been the sergeant.”

  Ramage saw one of the seamen unwinding a line he had coiled round his waist while Stafford stood by ready to cut off lengths with his cutlass, using the end of a bunk as a chopping block.

  “‘Ere, Jacko,” Stafford said hoarsely, “why don’t we just lash ‘em in their bunks: a bit of line tied round one wrist, under the bunk and securing the wrist the other side? It’ll truss ‘em up like a Christmas goose.”

  “Good idea: do that. Start cutting plenty of lengths of line. Here, the rest of you, get these Frogs neatly stowed in their bunks. Two of you fetch Mr Ramage’s man from outside the door—that’s his bunk there, the empty one.”

  The American went outside and gave a good imitation of a sea bird—was it a tern?—calling three times. Within a couple of minutes the rest of his party, waiting just down the track, hurried up.

  At that moment Ramage, by now standing at the entrance to the guardhouse, was almost deafened by a pistol shot behind him and the grunt of a man hit by a bullet.

  He spun round in the lantern light to see that the Frenchman he had earlier knocked out had recovered consciousness, somehow found a pistol and fired it at the nearest seaman. As Ramage cocked his own pistol and lifted it to aim, the Frenchman flung his own empty pistol at the lantern, knocking it off the table and putting out the flame of the candle. As the hut suddenly plunged into darkness, Ramage shouted: “Everyone outside! Jackson, there’s a window each side. Cover them in case any of these dam’ Frenchmen try to escape.”

  He waited a few moments hearing his own seamen in the guardhouse—the only ones to understand the order—scrambling out. That Frenchman should have stayed unconscious longer than that, but more important, Ramage knew he should have collected all the pistols: his carelessness had led to one of his men being wounded, perhaps even killed.

  “Did anyone see who was hit?” he demanded once they got outside.

  “Wilson, sir; we’ve got ‘im ‘ere,” Stafford said. “Not bad, so he says: just caught ‘is right shoulder.”

  “Is everyone out of the hut?” Ramage called loudly in English. There was no reply, and he asked Jackson: “Windows covered?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ramage then said clearly and slowly in French, directing his voice through the doorway: “Surrender! You are surrounded and the camp is taken!”

  “Merde!” growled a voice from the far end of the hut, and another Frenchman obviously still dazed but able to think, exclaimed excitedly: “The camp taken and not a shot fired? You think we are drunk to believe that?”

  Time, Ramage thought; he did not have time for a long argument with these idiots. With one shot fired up to now (and, as luck would have it, at the nearest point in the camp to the village) another couple of dozen would not matter.

  “You will come out, one at a time,” Ramage said conversationally, “with your arms in the air.”

  “And be shot down like sheep going through a hole in the hedge,” a third voice said bitterly. Three out of seven had regained consciousness.

  “Paolo,” Ramage said, and the boy came to him out of the darkness, cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other. Ramage said in English: “Curse them in French for fools. I want to confuse them. They’ll never credit two French speakers in a landing party.”

  Succinctly Paolo told them that their hut was not the Bastille; on the contrary it was a pigsty which would in a few minutes become their coffin because they were—

  Ramage tapped his shoulder after a suitable torrent of abuse and then continued, in a quiet voice: “If you do not come out, we shall wait for daylight and shoot you down, one at a time, like starlings on a bough.”

  There was no reply. Ramage heard whispering and crept up to the side of the door, where the sleeping sentry had been sitting. At least four of the guards had recovered consciousness. Two were for surrendering and two, including the man who had fired the shot, reckoned there had been only four or five rosbifs, and the seven of them, when the others had recovered, would be able to overpower them. They would all rush the door, he said. Any moment, he added, more of the garrison would arrive, roused by the shot. “Merde!” he hissed. “You saw how I shot one of them. Dead, the way he dropped. They’re just privateersmen. You’ll see.”

  “What about that frigate that passed this afternoon?” a second man asked.

  “We saw she was French—her colours were clear enough.”

  “Why didn’t she capture the privateer, eh sergeant?” the man persisted.

  Ramage crouched by the entrance and, knowing the stonework would stop a fusillade of musket shot, waited for a pause in the Frenchmen’s discussion and then said, in a conversational tone: “You are outnumbered seven to one, gentlemen. Your rosbif enemies do not care whether they kill you or take you prisoner. They, through me, are leaving the choice to you. If you are thinking of waiting for daylight so you can use your muskets, let me remind you that a grenade thrown in at either window, or through this doorway which has no door, will blow you all to pieces. And if you doubt that …”

  Ramage lobb
ed into the room the heavy rock that he had picked up from the edge of the track and waited ten seconds after the ominous thud as it landed on the wooden floor and rolled two or three feet.

  “—you can now consider yourselves lucky to be alive because that was a rock, not a grenade. I have just given you your last chance. Do you and your men surrender, sergeant?”

  “Yes, mon colonel!” the sergeant said hoarsely, obviously deciding such perfidiousness with grenades could be contrived only by someone of such exalted rank. “We lie in our bunks awaiting your orders.”

  “Very well. Do you have a tinder box?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pick up the lantern and light it.”

  Ramage heard the man’s movement, then the scraping as he found the lantern and set it on the table, the faint click as he opened the door and the scratching as he began striking flint on steel. Then Ramage went back to the track and told Paolo and Jackson what had been agreed.

  Paolo, who had heard most of the talk in French with the sergeant, said miserably: “Only one shot fired and it’s all over.”

  “You’d feel differently if you were Wilson,” Ramage said unsympathetically. “How is he, by the way?” he asked Jackson.

  “Oh, Staff and Rossi bandaged him up and he’s around here somewhere—he’s left-handed anyway and wants to find a Frenchman to shoot.”

  By now the glow in the guardhouse was turning into a strong light as the sergeant lit the candle from his tinder box and called: “Colonel—we have the light. Now what are your orders?”