Grimly he put away his notes and worked his way back to the foot of the cliff. There was Lockhart, the one reliable survivor of the file, standing on the broad ledge where Graham had made his descent, and when he saw the ensign emerge from the rhododendrons he lost something of his habitual phlegm and waved eagerly. Graham made the climb in the fading light and reached out for the ex-gamekeeper’s outstretched hand for the final scramble.
“We was afeared for ’ee,” the man said. “Leastways, they others was, but I guessed what you was at down there! Be there many of ’em, sir?”
“The entire army,” Graham told him shortly, “but it’s my belief they’ll stick to the road. It might be possible to scramble up here a mile or so back, but the partisans will keep away from them so why should they throw out flanking parties?”
Lockhart looked westward along the line of ridges and nodded confirmation. “You’m right about that, sir, and we’m safe enough, so long as us bides up here. There’s nowt for the pot, tho’, so I’d best try for a coney or two!”
“You can’t fire a shot,” Graham warned him.
The man smiled and shook his head. “I’ll snare ’em, don’t fret, sir,” he said and led the way through the undergrowth to the bivouac.
The men jumped up when they saw him and Graham noticed the look of relief in Watson’s pinched face and the sparkle of excitement in the eyes of the boy Curle. Briefly he told them what he had seen and his information sobered them, so that they stood for a moment in a silent circle, their eyes on the ground. He knew then that he must say something encouraging and added, “Lockhart is going to get something to cook. We can light a small fire in a hollow and tomorrow or the day after we shall cross the road and head south. We should reach the lines by night or the morning after!” He caught Gwyneth’s glance and read approval in it, as though she were a mother who heard someone reassuring her scared brood.
Lockhart came back with one small rabbit, and while they were boiling it Graham motioned the woman to one side. She said, without preamble, “A river follows that valley and I should say it passes less than a mile beyond the road. If we get across the road after the French have gone, we still have the river to cross.”
“So much the better, there will be no French on the far side,” he said. “We can stay close to the bank and work our way upstream until we find a crossing, then push on south to the Tagus.”
But she shrugged in her casual way and said, “Wherever there is a crossing there will be French. We must cross where they have found it impossible to get over with baggage and gun teams.”
”How could we do that?”
“You say you can swim, and we have a rope. Perhaps we can lengthen it with belts or vines, who knows? Let us give them a clear night and a day to pass and then we can reconnoiter.”
She remained crouched on her haunches, deep in thought, and for a moment he did not care to disturb her. It was almost dark now and the roar of the endless columns still reached them from the road. He thought she looked like a savage squatting there, with muscled thighs spread, her head lowered and a tangled mass of hair falling across her face. Suddenly he was shy and uncertain in her presence, knowing that she had temporarily forgotten him and was devoting the whole of her concentration to their problems and the means to overcome them, but presently she looked up.
“It is essential that we succeed now,” she said, “for what you have seen Beaky will wish to hear about. You made a careful count?”
“Yes,” he said gleefully, “I made many notes on the papers we found on the French and I have it all here, the number of guns, draft animals, baggage wagons and a fair estimate of their numbers. I added one corps that must have passed before we came up with them.”
She nodded and then, standing suddenly, smiled. “You are learning very fast, Mr. Graham. We will talk it over after supper!” And she walked back to the fire that Watson had lit in a dip behind the thicket.
The word “supper” flattered the meal they ate that night. There was no bread left and only one of her cakes, but they were able to thicken the soup with the last handfuls of flour taken from the wagon, and the rabbit provided about one mouthful of meat apiece. Watson was very silent and Graham thought he was still mourning his friend. Up here there was no point in mounting a guard, so he told them to lie down and sleep with their feet to the fire. The night was fine and mild, much milder than any they had experienced so far, and when the moon rose he went through the scrub to the edge of the first escarpment, knowing that she would be there awaiting him.
He found her sitting on a flat rock silhouetted against the sky, listening to the unending roar from below, and as he came up she said, “They are marching through the night. So much the better! They will pass quicker and leave the road free for us to cross. We must watch all day tomorrow for the stragglers, for there will be hundreds of stragglers in an army as large as that.”
“Where does he find so many men?” Graham asked suddenly.
She replied, shrugging, “From every village and hamlet in Europe. The price he asks the bourgeois for government is their young and strong to fight his wars. It is not so difficult. Before he came the kings and emperors took the men just the same, but they did not give anything in exchange.”
He was interested in her defense of Bonaparte and asked, “What does he give, apart from wounds and medals?”
She looked at him unsmilingly. “If he was left alone he would give a great deal,” she said. “He offers roads, bridges, good harvests, a thriving trade, manufactories, aye, and something more, I think, judging by what I have heard from French prisoners in Lisbon. He gives them something no other ruler ever gave them, a share in his glory. In our army it is very different, Mr. Graham.”
“Tell me, Gwyneth!”
”The French are all one, you understand, the rich and the poor, the officers and the rankers. There is no flogging in the French Army and the provosts do not hang a man for looting. The rank and file are encouraged to loot and live upon what they find, wherever they may be. They made a revolution in France and it will never be the same for them again. Perhaps one day we shall make a revolution, but I think not. We sing that we are never slaves but it is not really so, because in England property is everything and a man is judged not on what he is but on what he owns. As a child he learns to touch his cap to the squire and bob to the parson. In the Army it is much the same. Those men down there are the comrades of their officers, but no man of our Army could win epaulettes such as those you wear on your shoulders. It is possible to buy them, of course, if one has money, but we can never win them in the field as do the French. That sergeant of ours, the one who died back at the church, he would have been a major or a colonel in the French Army, and you, when you got back with what you have written down today, you too would be promoted and wear gold lace!”
“Perhaps I will,” he smiled, but she went on, earnestly.
“No, Mr. Graham, it is more likely that you will be reprimanded for losing your regiment.”
He realized that he was always learning from her, and here were things never to be forgotten, the true difference between imperial France and her opponents, the one fighting as a tribe, the others under a rigid caste system, yet he was unable to abandon all his prejudices without argument.
“Napoleon enslaves people wherever the Grand Army marches,” he argued.
”He has no other choice,” she said simply. “From the beginning he has been ringed by enemies.”
The picture of Napoleon fighting a vast defensive war was as new as everything else she told him, but after pondering this for a moment he decided that he did not want to talk about war, did not, in fact, want to talk at all but to draw close to her and find renewed courage and resolution. He reached over the rock and put his arms around her narrow waist, raising them slowly until her large breasts were under his hands and then lowering his cheek until it touched her hair. Peace came to him the moment he touched her, and they stayed thus for a moment. She lifted
her hands from her lap, pressing his hands to her body and at the same time moving her head so that her cheek touched the soft stubble of his beard.
“You will remember me afterward?” she said, and he thought he detected a hint of teasing in her voice.
“Yes,” he told her, “always, Gwyneth. Forever, you understand?”
“Ah no!” she said and shuddered and at the same moment disengaged herself and broke from him. In an instant she was the soldier again, preoccupied with the passage of the enemy below. He remembered all too vividly what she had said regarding her prerogative in the relationship of man and woman on the march and did not press her. For the moment her presence and the sense of comradeship between them were enough.
“You hear something new?” he asked presently.
“Yes,” she said, “they are more scattered now. There are moments when the road is almost quiet.”
He stood listening, his head cocked to one side, and the more muted sounds from below told him that she was right. All the weight had gone from the column and it was now the passage of detached groups, not of close-ranked battalions and guns.
Thirty-six hours later they found the belfry with its bell rope intact, more than twenty feet of strong plaited cord, as thick as a man’s thumb.
They had remained in camp a night and a day, waiting for the last of the stragglers to pass, and about sunset on the second day Graham watched a squadron of dragoons escorting a string of open wagons filled with wounded and exhausted men unable to sustain the rate of march. When one of the dragoons dismounted to hustle a half-crippled infantryman into the last wagon, he concluded that the squadron was whipping in and that the road behind them was empty. He returned to the bivouac and gave the order to march at midnight.
They did not have to descend the two cliffs, for Lockhart, reconnoitering out on the right, had found a ravine where access to the road was comparatively easy. They came slithering down without incident and in less than a minute all six of them were across and into the woods on the other side, crossing small patches of marsh and belts of scrub, guided to the river by the steady roar of the torrent. Once clear of the woods, Graham turned upstream, taking the opposite direction to that taken by the French. When the moon went down and progress along the rocky bank became dangerous, he ordered a halt in the reeds to await daylight.
Progress thus far had been arduous in the poor light, and they spent a wretched interval without fire or a dry spot to lie upon. Graham could hear Curle’s teeth chattering and Watson’s soft, persistent cough, but he kept them stationary until gray light in the east showed them their position on a wide curve of the stream. The river on their right was ten yards wide and broken almost everywhere by rapids where the water foamed over innumerable slime-covered rocks. There was no way of telling whether it was a tributary of the Mondego or the Tagus, but from where they stood it looked a formidable obstacle. No timber grew here, and there was no chance of finding or felling a tree and using it as a bridge as they had done on the previous occasion. The land on both banks was dangerously open and a belt of trees on the gentle slope of the farther bank was more than a league distant. Graham knew that for the time being they must stick close to the reeds. As soon as it was light enough he ordered an advance across the oxbow of the stream, heading for a low bluff that ran down from the direction of the road, meeting the river at a point where it descended a water chute.
Every step was an effort, their feet sinking into soft yellow mud that plucked at their worn shoes and sometimes rose higher than the shin. Curle and Croyde each lost a shoe and in spite of repeated attempts Curle failed to recover his. Once Watson sank to his armpits, screaming with fear when he could find no bottom, but Lockhart had had the forethought to noose his length of rope, and between them, floundering on the treacherous surface, they managed to get it under the sweep’s shoulders and drag him free. After that Graham turned away from the river and they made somewhat better progress, until they mounted the bluff and looked down on the charred remains of what had been a small riverside community but was now utterly deserted, for it lay close enough to the French line of march to have been ransacked half a dozen times.
The only building more or less intact was the stone-built church, crowned by a tall conical tower, and when they passed the unlatched door and flung themselves exhausted on the tiled floor they saw the rope passing through a hole in the belfry floor. It was a miracle that it had escaped the eye of the muleteers and artillery teamsters.
When they had recovered their breath and made some attempt to scrape the mud from their uniforms, Watson was for swarming up and cutting the rope loose from the cross-trees, but Lockhart stopped him just in time.
“Will ye rouse half the countryside by a tolling bell?” he demanded, and Watson admitted ruefully that there was sense in this and offered instead to go outside and look for the orthodox way to the belfry loft.
“There are no stairs, they used a ladder,” Gwyneth said, pointing to a centrally placed trapdoor, “and the ladder has been carried away. Someone will have to climb that buttress and cut at the rope where it comes through the floor.”
“We need every inch of that rope,” Graham said. “Watson can go outside, climb up and break through the tiles of the roof to the belfry.”
“The risk of his being seen on the roof is greater than the advantage of another foot or two of rope,” she said shortly and the men waited, uncertain whom to obey.
Graham felt a spurt of irritation but mastered it and forced himself to weigh the alternatives objectively. The rope, he would say, was thirty feet, but if it was hacked off short they would have to make do with twenty, lengthening it with Lockhart’s rope and crossbelts. On the other hand, Gwyneth was right about the risk of being seen by stragglers on the road, or by a partisan lookout on the peaks. The tower was the single landmark in a flat, featureless landscape and anyone clambering on the roof could be seen from the ridges above. He decided in favor of Gwyneth’s plan.
“Take a knife and see what you can do,” he told Watson, and the little man, using Croyde as a springboard, at once swarmed up the wall and gained a handhold on the tall buttress, where, using his toes like a monkey, he hoisted himself to within fifteen feet of the bell rope. From here on, however, progress was much more difficult. They angled the rope within his reach, but he dare not grasp it for fear of ringing the bell and was obliged instead to feel his way an inch at a time along the crevices of the almost perpendicular wall until he reached a narrow window recess where he was able to support himself with one arm wrapped around the grille. From below, his perch looked dangerously precarious, and when he extended his free arm to gather in the rope Graham expected him to slip and pitch headlong to the floor. He held on, however, and they saw him grin with triumph when he managed by dint of various contortions to anchor the rope under his chin, after which he drew his knife and began sawing away at the tough fibers. Twice the invisible bell clapper complained, its harsh note booming through the tower and causing Lockhart to curse softly, but at last the rope parted and the length came snaking down to them as Watson, grunting his relief, carefully disengaged himself from the grating and began his perilous return along the crevices to the buttress. As he jumped down there was a glow of virtue on his mud-smeared face.
“You’d none of yer got up there but me,” he crowed, “which proves yer don’t never know what good comes o’ learning to climb chimbleys! Thought I’d gone once or twice, I did, but I warn’t, was I?” And he capered about the room in childish celebration of his feat.
“It was a good climb,” the woman said, and Lockhart added, “Arr, it were that!” and fell to examining the rope with professional thoroughness.
Graham said nothing. They had the rope and now they would have to look for a place to use it, a spot where the one swimmer among them could cross over, dragging the heavy rope behind him. As this thought crossed his mind he saw Gwyneth regarding him with intensity, and the certainty of her concern made him impatient to prov
e himself as surely as Watson had done in the matter of the climb. He said, “We must look for a ford or the remains of a bridge. If there is neither, then we must find a place where the river is narrower or the current eases a knot or two. We can’t reconnoiter by night, so the risk of moving in the open by day will have to be faced.”
Lockhart spoke up, firmly but with his customary note of respect. “Beggin’ your pardon, zir, that’s a job for one rather than six and I’m the one best used to moving without being spotted.”
Without waiting for orders, he picked up his musket and went out, the others scattering about the church in the hope of finding something edible. Watson scraped the wax deposit from the shattered candelabra and tried to persuade Curle to nibble a sliver or two of the yellow grease, but the boy shook his head and Graham, having ensured that all the firearms had been cleaned, issued orders to search the hovels and vegetable patches in the hope that the French had overlooked a few turnips or potatoes. They had reassembled, empty-handed, by the time Lockhart returned with news that he had reconnoitered the bank a mile or so upstream and had found the site of the original footbridge, destroyed by the British during their retreat or perhaps by the villagers themselves when word came of the approaching French. Graham told the men to remain in the church. He was still very uneasy about the possibility of being overlooked from the road and went out with Lockhart to view the site.
Too Few for Drums Page 14