Too Few for Drums

by R. F Delderfield

  The health of the boy Curle began to concern them after ten days in the cellar. He had kept up extraordinarily during the march, but inactivity seemed to drain his strength far more effectively than had the rigors of the trek across the mountains. The prison diet of beans and new wine upset his stomach, and sometimes, as he sat cross-legged on his truss of straw, his eyes seemed to fill his narrow face, and their gaze, hopeless but somehow trusting, became hateful to Graham, so much so that he addressed hardly a word to him and abandoned him to Watson when he writhed with colic. Graham compelled him to take exercise when they were escorted into the yard. There, watching him shamble along in misery, Graham made up his mind that he would demand the boy’s transfer to the hospital, where Lockhart could accept responsibility for him. Occasionally he thought about Gwyneth, wondering if she was installed as an officer’s mistress, or whether in fact she was a prisoner in the sense that they were prisoners. He had no experience to guide him in such matters and did not know whether women captured in the train of enemy troops were regarded as combatant or noncombatant. His sense of abandonment extended to her and it seemed to him that their close comradeship throughout the march over the mountains and down to the plains was something that had uplifted him a long time ago, belonging to the golden period of his boyhood in the woods and fields of Kent. He was aware that both Watson and Curle in their differing ways continued to look to him for encouragement and inspiration, but he had none to give them. He thought of himself as a failure, and because he had failed them he could now regard their future with indifference.

  Then, in the blackness of the night, with the wind soughing through the grille and little spatters of rain driving into the cellar, Watson had gripped him by the shoulder and whispered that Lockhart was there, Lockhart the steady, the imperturbable, the silent, tireless man who walked on ahead with his firelock in the crook of his forearm, his searching gaze sweeping the peaks and valleys for the gleam of enemy metal. Graham’s response to the summons was instantaneous. He sprang up like a man told that the house was on fire and heard himself babbling directions to Watson to make a back that he might reach the grille and project himself from past to present at a bound. Physical contact with Lockhart was a powerful restorative, and news that Gwyneth was still free made his heart soar, for, with this news and possession of the file, his mental vigor leaped within him.

  He said, as soon as Lockhart had gone and he had dropped to the floor, “Curle shall do it! Curle shall stand on our shoulders and cut through the central bar! We shall be out of here by tomorrow night and move north to the woods and then east, level with the river. The woman is meeting us and she will have food and directions!”

  He could not see their faces, but he could sense their excitement. Curle was in the act of climbing on his shoulders when Watson had a better idea, reminding them that the central wine rack was not clamped to the wall as were all the others. They groped around until they laid hands on it, and they were able to drag it under the grille so that its slats formed a serviceable ladder. Graham climbed up and tested the bar, finding it firmly secured at base and top but rusted with years of exposure to the weather.

  ”I could cut through it in an hour!” he exclaimed triumphantly, drawing the heavy file across its surface. But then he stopped, realizing that the cutting of the central bar would be wasted labor, for it was only the centerpiece of the iron lattice. To make a hole large enough for even the smallest of them to wriggle through, it would be necessary to cut the iron clamps at each corner where the frame was bolted into the stone. Even then the operation would require immense patience, for no matter how he turned and twisted in order to apply the file to the metal, the outer surfaces of the bars could be reached only by first removing four horizontal spikes. Four clamps and four spikes meant eight separate cuts by men working in a painfully cramped position.

  He was battling with his disappointment when the boy’s voice reached him, cool and restrained, as though he had sensed Graham’s disappointment. “Might I take a look at it, sir?”

  Wondering at Curle’s assurance, Graham climbed down and stood beside Watson while the boy took his place on the ladder and made a careful manual survey of the aperture. Presently he was down again and there was the same incongruous note of confidence in his voice when he said, “We broke out of a window like that before, sir! First we pulled the tops off the bolts, then Lieutenant Peterson used his belt, sir!”

  For a moment Graham thought the boy must be wandering in his mind and apparently Watson thought so, too, for he gave Graham a discreet nudge. Trying to sound confident, Graham said, “We can take a closer look at it in daylight. Move the rack back in position.”

  But the boy laid an eager hand on his arm, protesting, “But it’s true, sir, we did escape that way, all but Corporal Sedley, who was too fat to get through! We had to leave him stuck in the hole.”

  “You mean you were a prisoner once before?” Graham asked, incredulously.

  “Yessir, at a place called Lugo, in the north. Montbrun’s dragoons cut us off and locked us in a church while they rode off after the Forty-third, but we was gone before they came back for us, sir, all but the corporal, that is!”

  “With a belt, you said?”

  “Yessir, the lieutenant’s sword belt, an’ it was no thicker’n yours, sir!”

  Graham’s fingers sought his belt, from which the empty sword frog still dangled, but again it struck him that Curle was lightheaded. He could see no link between his belt and the heavy iron grille barring the window.

  “At Lugo during the retreat on Coruña?”

  “Yessir!”

  “You lowered yourselves out of the window on the belt?”

  “No, sir.” The boy was impatient now. “Lieutenant Peterson took off his belt an’ twisted it round the bars, then tightened it somehow with his scabbard. The bars snapped, sir—that is, one of them did—and there was room enough to climb through, all but the corporal, sir!”

  The boy’s constant reference to the unlucky corporal stuck in the hole and left to the mercy of the dragoons irritated Graham so much that he could have taken the drummer-boy by the shoulders and shaken him until his teeth rattled. He said sharply, “Never mind the corporal, Curle! Tell us how it was done! You saw it done, didn’t you? Think, boy, and tell us how Lieutenant Peterson broke the iron bars with his sword belt and scabbard!” “Jesus, he means a capstan!”

  It was Watson who was excited now, and he flung himself at the frame and hauled himself up to the grille in a matter of seconds, calling over his shoulder, his voice shrill with delight, “He’s right, sir, an’ we can do the same ’ere, on’y a bit different, because we got a file an’ c’n weaken them nuts before we start twisting! We gotter brace too, wi’ this rack pressed against the wall, an’ the whole lot’ll come away like pullin’ a tooth, it will!”

  He was down beside them again, his hands groping toward Graham.

  “I seen it done, sir. The boy’s right about it, sir! You ties the belt to something as can’t move and slips in a capstan bar, anything as’ll twist round and round an’ tighten up gradual like! Then she gives all of a sudden but it’s like I said, sir, wi’ the file we c’n weaken them clamps so as they’ll come away easy like!”

  They were like three boys now who have found an unexpectedly easy means of reaching a bird’s nest. Graham made a loop of his belt, and Watson, after a brief tussle in the dark, managed to detach one of the iron brackets from the wine rack. They made another rapid survey and then went to work on the clamps, taking turn and turn about until their hands were raw and the sweat ran from them. All through the night they worked, the hiss of the rain drowning the rasp of the file, and shortly before the first glimmer of light showed across the courtyard they had the belt buckled around the central bar and braced to the heavy rack. There was room for only one of them to work at the grille and it was Watson who inserted the bracket, twisting slowly until the belt was taut, then tightening an inch at a time with his face pressed clo
se to the grille. The other two waited immediately below, arms up raised to catch the frame if it toppled, but nothing so dramatic occurred. Instead, as Watson continued to apply pressure, the top left-hand clamp tinkled to the floor and then, after he had tightened and readjusted his belt, the right-hand clamp came away, so that the grille was now secured by its lower clamps. Then Watson ceased twisting and tested its resistance, finding that strong pressure could bend it downward. When he reported this Graham said, “Very well, leave it and push the clamp into position. When they come with the rations we’ll meet them at the door and keep them at that end of the cellar!”

  His palms were stinging where the skin was stripped from them and in the growing light he noticed that Curle’s hands were bleeding. The boy looked feverish again, and he said gently, “That was a very good idea of yours, Curle. Get some sleep, boy, we shall need it if we are to get to the Tagus by this time tomorrow.” Together they replaced the wine rack and scattered straw under the window where flakes of rust had fallen. Then they lay down together near the door and in a moment Watson’s whining snore began to compete with the persistent drip of the rain and isolated, indeterminate sounds that reached them as echoes from the stone passage above. Graham thought, as he drifted into sleep, Surely a man couldn’t wish for better comrades, a gutter rat and a waif, with the courage of lions and the patience of starving cats at a mouse-hole! If ever I get out of this I’ll speak up for them to somebody, to General Crauford perhaps, or even Beaky if I’m given the chance!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Tagus

  She was waiting for them in the shadow of the forge, a canvas bag half full of scraps slung on her shoulder. There was little more than one good meal in the bag, but it was something to sustain them throughout the march which she had planned, and which she outlined to Graham in a few whispered sentences after they had crept down the long slope, past the fishponds and out onto the track that curved across the moor.

  The Tagus was due south, she said, but they must try and strike it about halfway between Santarém and Abrantes, where the French were billeted in strength. In between these two centers it was possible that pickets and patrols would be thinly stretched, for she had been told that the army was dispersed as widely as possible owing to the terrible shortage of food and forage. Her plan went beyond that, however, for she had extracted two vital pieces of information from a Portuguese woman who had been sent north from one of the river villages less than a month ago.

  The woman had told her of the underground grain stores placed at intervals all along the riverbank—deep, funnel-shaped excavations where, from time immemorial, the harassed peasants had stored their grain when the district was visited by bandits or requisitioning troops. There were many such pits, she said, all close to the river settlements, and they were marked by a cipher of white stones usually arranged in the shape of a Maltese cross. Some had been discovered and rifled, but if the fugitives were lucky enough to find one they might lie hidden there in reasonable safety until they could make their bid to cross the river. Graham reflected that the woman must have been a rare patriot to divulge such a communal secret to a British camp follower. He did not know that Gwyneth had purchased the information with her sole remaining possession, a topaz brooch she had carried through all her wanderings as her only reminder of the Welsh boy with whom she had left home when a girl of sixteen. The additional information Gwyneth had coaxed from the peasant concerned the gunboat patrols. Every day, she had been told, British naval cutters mounted with brass three-pounders sailed up the estuary and warped inshore to pepper the French concentrations. A famous French general called Saint-Croix had been killed outright by one of their random shots on the day the woman had been impressed into French service, and the river opposite Santarém, Abrantes and Vila Franca was seldom free from these waspish assailants, who sometimes stood off and fired at a range of under a hundred yards, slipping away the moment a French field battery was run up to reply. Their sole hope of ultimate success, Gwyneth urged, lay in making contact with one of these vessels, and the only person among them who could achieve this was Graham, who could await his opportunity to swim out and persuade the naval commander to make a landing and bring them off under the noses of the shore patrols.

  It was a daring yet well-conceived plan, Graham thought as they trudged on through the darkness, but it depended upon a combination of lucky chances—the finding of one of the grain caves for lying up, the intervals between shore-posted sentries, the location of a gunboat within swimming distance and, above all, the willingness of the Navy to risk a sortie ashore for the purpose of bringing off an ensign, a private, a drummer-boy and a camp follower. Pondering this, he referred glumly to their diminished numbers, but the woman brushed aside his self-criticism, speaking with a note of authority that suited her assumption of the leadership of this final bid for the lines.

  “You have held us together this far,” she told him, “and if you can swim a slow current as surely as you swam a fast one back yonder, then we’ve a good chance of rescue!” She smiled in the darkness, adding, “Man, but I thought you were drowned that time and all the hussars would have had of us was a corpse full of flood water!”

  “That and the information I carry in my boot,” he said grimly, remembering what it was that caused him to turn his left foot outward in an effort to ease the pressure on his instep. They were still there, those sodden sheets covered with a French boy’s scrawl and his own meticulous tally of Masséna’s battalions, and he wondered if an officer like Crauford, who always seemed to know how many cartridges every enemy voltigeur carried in his pouch, would laugh scornfully when he presented himself and submitted the information for what it was worth.

  They made good progress in spite of the darkness, following the track across the open moor and down through a thin growth of spruce into what appeared to be a semicultivated area. They could smell the sea now, but they had no real means of correcting their direction until they reached the river. Dawn found them seven to eight miles from the convent, and they paused to discuss the wisdom of getting under cover until darkness but decided against it, for their food would not last them another twenty-four hours and nothing seemed to stir in the gray landscape that unfolded below as the light steadily grew stronger. Watson was very cheerful now, but Graham noticed that the boy was wilting, and they had to stop once or twice to wait for him to catch up. Graham told Watson to take his arm and when the sun rose, promising a mild, windless day, he limped on, his bootless foot swathed in a pad made of a waistcoat and secured with strips torn from his shirt. Graham found that the journey did not tax him overmuch, for they had no baggage or weapons to carry.

  “If we run across a single armed man we’re done for,” he told Gwyneth, but she shrugged in her offhanded way and replied, “If we were armed to the teeth we could not fight 75,000 men, Mr. Graham. At least that number will be within field-gun range the moment we catch sight of the river!”

  They got their first glimpse of it from a low, scrub-covered hill an hour or so later, and because the trek to it had been so arduous and so checkered with sacrifice and adventure, they paused in a forlorn little group looking down upon the broad, steel-gray ribbon of water that divided them from the hazy outline of hills on the farther bank. From this distance it did not seem as formidable an obstacle as had some of the torrents and defiles they had crossed during the march south from the Mondego.

  Graham said, in an effort to hearten them, “Across the river is safety, plenty of beef and barrels of British-brewed beer! We shall be there by this time tomorrow!” He turned his gaze left and right, searching out signs of cover or evidence of town or village. There was none so far as he could see. The ground was flat and open, covered on all sides by what looked like extensive vineyards. It seemed as empty and uninhabited as the mountains behind them.

  They ate sparingly from the bag and then began to thread their way through the vines, neglected and unkempt since the forced migration of the peasants in
the days leading up to the British withdrawal into the fortifications. The going was much harder here, for the soil was loose and there were scores of small obstructions, a wild tangle of trailing vines and broken-down boundary fences. They had gone less than a mile from the hill when Graham heard Watson shout and, looking over his shoulder, saw the woman hurrying back toward Curle, who was lying on his face, with Watson bending over him. He retraced his steps to the foot of the slope and Watson said glumly, “The kid’s about done, sir. Stuck it well, he has, what with no boot to ’is foot! Would it help if I give ’im one o’ mine? This ain’t as bad as footing it over them bleedin’ rocks!”

  “He can’t walk with or without boots,” said the woman, flatly. “We shall have to carry him.”

  They lifted him, debating the best method of moving on over the hill to a long, scrub-sown ditch they had observed from farther back. The boy was only semiconscious, and Graham was struck by the ease with which they were able to lift him. He seemed to weigh less than a firelock.

  ”I’ll carry him myself,” he said, and took the inert bundle in his arms, stumbling up the slopes, with Watson and the woman ten paces ahead. There was no path here, only a series of broad, sloping terraces where the vines grew in loose, shifting soil into which their feet sank ankle-deep, but as Graham topped the last rise the woman uttered a sharp exclamation and Watson shouted a warning, so that instinctively he flung himself down, pressing himself and the boy into the furrows as the others came slithering back to him.