Too Few for Drums

by R. F Delderfield

  “Dragoons!” the woman said briefly. “On the road the far side of the ditch!”

  “Did they see you?”

  “I think not, but if they did there is nothing we can do against cavalry in this place. It’s a patrol, not more than a dozen or so.”

  They crouched together a few feet below the crest of the slope and Graham heard the measured clatter of hoofs and the soft jingle of accouterments. The sounds seemed terrifyingly close and, listening intently, he could hear the squeak of leather and the rumble of voices. Then the murmur began to recede and after a few moments died away altogether in an easterly direction. After a pause Watson crawled to the summit of the fold, returning almost at once, beaming with relief.

  “They gone by up the river,” he said. “If we wait on a bit we c’n get down to the ditch!”

  In the brief interval of waiting Graham listened to the wheezing breath of the drummer-boy, lying where Graham had flung him, his pallid face calm but expressionless and a wide smudge of dirt across his cheek and forehead. He looked infinitely pitiful and Graham passed his hand lightly across the boy’s face, trying to remove some of the dirt. Curle opened his eyes and stared back, moving his lips as though he wished to say something, but apparently he found the effort too much for him, for he gave a long shudder and closed his eyes again.

  Watson was beckoning eagerly from the top of the slope now and Graham said, “Lie still, boy, I’m carrying you to cover. We’re almost there, you understand?” He gathered him up and went on over the brow of the slope, then down a steeper patch to the welcome cover of the ditch.

  It was a narrow irrigation channel about five feet in depth, with a thick growth of weeds on each side. There was about three inches of stagnant water at the bottom, but they jumped into it, grateful for the shelter. Graham left Curle with Watson, to splash along to a culvert that ran out of the ditch at right angles and then under the road along which the dragoons had trotted. A mile or so to the east he could see the sun sparkling on their casques, but they were nothing to worry about now, he decided. What concerned him at the moment was Curle, who was clearly incapable of marching another step. Some kind of shelter would have to be found for him until they could set about contacting a gunboat, and he looked about him anxiously for signs of one of the grain pits which Gwyneth had mentioned earlier. Seeing none, he ducked through the culvert under the road. The swift flow of water in the ditch told him that the river must be close, for he could hear the roar of its outfall at the far end. The water reached his waist as he entered the brick tunnel at the end of the ditch, but he pushed on, feeling his way step by step. The tunnel would have been an ideal place for concealment had there been a dry spot in it, but in the dim light coming from each end he could see smooth, unbroken walls, festooned with slime and weed.

  Fifty yards farther on he emerged, to find that his guess had been accurate. The outfall led directly to the shingle beach of the river and there was the broad estuary right before him, close on a mile wide at this point and empty of sail. This, he decided, would have to be their line of approach, for above ground there was no speck of cover apart from the ditch and the tunnel. He was on the point of plunging back into the latter when his attention was caught by a prolonged swishing sound that seemed to come from beyond a wide bend upstream, and as he looked in that direction he saw a shower of descending stars as from an exploding firework. Within seconds of the explosion came the steady rattle of musketry, causing him to retreat hastily into the tunnel. As he made his way back along it and into the lateral excavation where he had left the others, he was mystified by the sounds of activity along the bank, certain that they were in some way connected with the gunboat patrol but recalling no precedent for the use of rockets in a ship-to-shore attack.

  The file was no longer where he had left it and for the moment he panicked, stumbling through the shallows and having to restrain himself from calling their names aloud. Then, to his relief, he saw Gwyneth waving to him from the top of the ditch and he scrambled up, a curse on his lips which she checked by an impatient gesture.

  “We’ve found one of the grain pits,” she said. “I was sure there would be one hereabouts, but you must cross the road—hurry, now!”

  He leaped after her, running across the road and plunging down the farther slope, where there were the remains of a gutted cottage and near its standing chimney stack a rock, carved with a crude Maltese cross. Watson and Curle were nowhere to be seen and for a moment he wondered where they could be, but before he could ask, Gwyneth pointed to a heap of stones beside the roofless stable and suddenly Watson bobbed up from ground level and said, with a grin, “Dry as a bone down ’ere, sir, an’ there’s grain enough to make porridge for a regiment!”

  Graham crossed the garden and looked down into the funnel-shaped aperture, to see Curle lying on a bed of maize and staring up at him with his huge, trusting eyes.

  They sat slightly apart from the boy and made their plans. Rank and sex had no place in their deliberations and they might have been a trio of generals, or three sergeants neither possessing seniority over the others. They argued as delegates, as a committee of three, and their terms of reference were the boy’s immobility and their own desperate situation.

  Graham told them of the culvert and the tunnel and mentioned the soft explosion in the sky, a phenomenon that he could define as offensive because it had provoked return fire from the bank. Watson’s face was blank, but Gwyneth said, “It must have been a Congreve rocket gun. I saw one being tested on a frigate in Portsmouth harbor before we embarked. It had just such a sound as you describe.”

  Graham replied, “Then there is a gunboat upstream now and I can go back through the tunnel and wait until it shows round the bend.”

  ”In daylight? They would see you from the bank and take potshots at you,” she reasoned.

  Watson anticipated Graham’s protest, saying, “If he waits till dark the jacks on the gunboat won’t see him, neither!”

  “That is so,” she said gravely, “but there are ways of reducing the risk. He must wait until it is either close to darkness or on the point of dawn and we others must remain here until he can give us some kind of signal. Only then can we carry the boy down to the beach and wait in the tunnel until the boat touches shore. When that happens we can make a run of it.”

  “Suppose the gunboat passes here in broad daylight?”

  “Then we must wait for another one. If necessary we must wait several days. We have something to eat, have we not?” She rose, sifting the grain through her fingers. “There is one other thing. How wide is the river at this point?”

  “Almost a mile,” Graham told her.

  “And the gunboat, how much water would it draw?”

  “Not above six feet,” Watson said. “I watched ’em sail close in when we was took ashore through them breakers at Lisbon. ’Andy little craft, they are, an’ them jacks can ’andle ’em smart as you’d like!”

  “Well, then,” she said, drawing her brows together in a way Graham had noticed when she was considering tactical problems, “they will surely haul over to the far shore the moment they stand off, so as to sail home out of range of fixed batteries. That means you will have the better part of a mile to swim, Mr. Graham.”

  “I could swim to the farther shore if I had to,” Graham said.

  “Then perhaps it is your duty to do that and we need not concern ourselves about the gunboat,” she said quietly.

  When he looked at her in astonishment she went on, “You have information of value, more value than Watson and me and that drummer-boy yonder.”

  Deliberate desertion of them was something that had never occurred to him, not even when he had stood on the beach measuring the strength of the current. Now that she had mentioned the alternative it seemed to him a far more monstrous solution to their problem than that of surrendering to the nearest picket post and being marched into captivity.

  He said sourly, “That is not my conception of duty. Surely my
first duty is to the file, Gwyneth.”

  Watson spoke unexpectedly, avoiding Graham’s eyes and fixing his gaze on the little hillock of maize between his legs.

  “Maybe she’s right, sir, maybe if you got acrost you could still send a boat for us. We’re snug enough down here ’an we got vittles, tho’ they ain’t Christian vittles.” And like the woman he let a handful of maize trickle through his fingers, contemplating the grains as they fell.

  Graham said slowly, “If I got ashore over there it might be days before I could get inside the lines. All the regiments are this side of the Tagus and it’s my guess that there won’t be more than a few outposts over there. Besides, if they once got my notes how much would any of them care what became of you?”

  It surprised him to hear himself saying this, to learn that the bedraggled trio with whom he had shared this odyssey now meant much more to him than the approval of the High Command, more indeed than the outcome of the war, for during the past weeks his entire conception of the enterprise in which they were all engaged had undergone so many radical changes that it was difficult to regard it as anything more than a background to the personal survival of these few human beings. It was as though every man and woman he had known in the years up to the moment the shot from the hill laid Captain Sowden dead were anonymous strangers passing the window of his consciousness and only the members of the file, both dead and living, had the substance and reality of fellow members of the human race. Their survival, and a justification of their trust in him, had become far more essential to him than the approval of beings as far removed from him as, say, Wellington, and at the same time more important than his personal survival because their needs reached out beyond his estimate of himself as a soldier and embraced everything that governed his understanding of manhood.

  They watched him as these thoughts, conscious and unconscious, explored the deepest recesses of his brain. At length he was able in some measure to give expression to them. He said, “We have been through this thing together, as a file, as a unit. The fact that there are only four of us left makes no difference to what I regard as my duty. If, for some reason, I fail to stop the gunboat, then I will swim back to you and we will try some other way. Whatever we do now we will do together, the way we have come this far.”

  The woman flushed as he said this and the flush proclaimed her pride in him. She had found him a boy and now he was the only type of man she could understand and value. He had learned all the lessons she had read him since the night they had been deprived of the sergeant’s leadership. Now he could wear the badge she had sewn for him, and the knowledge that this was so filled her with the deepest kind of satisfaction. She watched him draw off his cracked and broken boot and extract from it a hard-packed roll of paper covered with writing now blurred by water that had leaked in at the toe. He did not know if the notes he had made were still legible or could be made so and he did not attempt to unroll the papers.

  “Keep it for what it is worth,” he told her, “and if they are against coming ashore for you, then I shall have something to tempt them.”

  She took the mess of paper, slipping it into a moleskin bag that hung around her neck and tucked inside her bodice. He had never known what the bag contained and did not ask now, judging it to be some small items of personal loot that she had never disclosed. Then she rose and told them that she was going to risk a fire on the open hearth of the ruined cottage and that he and Watson must watch the road in case cavalry patrols were attracted by the smoke.

  “I shall make maize porridge,” she said, “for it is necessary that we have hot food in our stomachs, you most of all.” She nodded and scrambled up the funnel to the open.

  Watson followed at once, but Graham remained a moment to talk to the boy. All the time they had been deliberating Curle had lain quite still and Graham wondered if his silence and immobility were caused by physical exhaustion or whether in fact he was dying. His eyes showed that he was aware of what was taking place around him, but the will to contribute was gone, wasted over the long hungry marches and the spell in the wine cellar. Graham lifted the boy’s hand and pressed it, feeling as he did so like a physician at the bedside of a dying child.

  ”We shall soon be out of this and back with the regiment, Curle,” he said deliberately. “You have been as good as any grown man and I shall tell the sergeant major to give you a new side drum as soon as we get to Lisbon. Then, when spring comes round, we shall all advance and push the French back into Spain and afterward across the mountains to France. You will be marching with the regiment when they do this, Curle, and it will have been a fine thing to have chased Boney a thousand miles! You will eat the woman’s porridge if I bring you some?”

  The boy smiled and nodded and suddenly Graham felt his throat constrict. He rose quickly, climbing into the open and taking up his position east of the cottage where Gwyneth was already mashing maize in the battered canteen, the sole communal possession of the file. The landscape was still empty except for Watson on guard a short way down the road. A faint sound came to Graham as he stood looking toward the east. It was the irrepressible Cockney whistling a snatch from his favorite tune, “The British Grenadiers.”

  Gwyneth insisted on accompanying him through the tunnel, declaring that a reconnaissance was necessary on her part if they were to carry the boy to the boat when Graham alerted them by signal. He was aware, however, that this was not the real reason she followed him as far as the beach. She wanted to stand behind him up to the moment he plunged into the river and began his swim. They had been unable to decide in advance what kind of signal he would give. It would depend, she said, upon whether the skipper of the gunboat carried colored signal flares and was prepared to use them, or whether he would allow a signal to be made at all. So much, indeed, had to be left to chance and the exigencies of the moment, and now that it was within an hour of dusk and the river was quiet and empty, it was more than likely that there was no gunboat within miles. All that was settled was that Graham should maintain a shore watch from dusk to dawn and be ready to swim out if there was the slightest chance of intercepting a vessel and bringing it inshore to the north bank. It had seemed a workable enough plan when they had discussed it, but now, as they waded through the slime of the tunnel toward the pinprick of light at the far end, the entire project struck Graham as absurdly optimistic.

  The beach here was no more than twenty yards wide, narrowing to a strip where the river swept around in a wide easterly curve beyond which lay the French cantonments at which the rocket gun had been firing earlier in the day.

  There was a sandy hillock crowned with coarse grass near the tunnel mouth and they climbed it, taking up a position on the summit where they could look across to the southern bank and downstream for more than a mile. Their view upstream was blocked by the bluff.

  The last rays of the sun lit up the sky in the direction of Lisbon. It was difficult to imagine that no more than ten miles in that direction lay Wellington’s army or that upstream, and almost certainly downstream as well, were the greater part of three French army corps strung out along the bank and in occupation of every town, village and hamlet between the river and the foot of the mountains. They remained there without saying much until the light faded and a fresh breeze, rain-laden as always, blew down from the mountains, chilling them and causing them to draw together for warmth. Yet they were neither unhappy nor tense, for the sense of companionship they drew one from the other was like hot food in their bellies, spreading comfort and confidence throughout their bodies.

  “The gunboat has gone,” he said finally, and she replied cheerfully, “Ah so, but it will come again at first light. I shall watch with you through the night, Mr. Graham.”

  A shared vigil had no part in their plan, but he accepted her decision most gladly, telling himself that perhaps it was a better course for her to remain within full view of the river, where she could not fail to see any signal he was able to send from the gunboat. Watson would not fret, he
was safe in the grain pit and had implicit faith in her judgment.

  “Then I am still ‘Mr. Graham’ to you, Gwyneth,” he said, smiling. “I told you my name was Keith, but you have never once used it.”

  “I have lost the habit of using given names,” she told him, with a shrug.

  “But you referred to the Highlander as Donald.”

  “Because his name was Donaldson. I do not remember ever calling my other husbands anything but the names by which they were known on the muster rolls.”

  Something in the way she said this, as though she was already anticipating a string of future file husbands, made him sharply aware that the gunboat would mean the end of their association, and the thought dismayed him utterly. He said anxiously, “If we are lucky enough to get picked up and taken to Lisbon, will we continue to meet and talk to one another again, Gwyneth?”

  ”Ah yes,” she said lightly, “for our army is too small to get lost in and from time to time, no doubt, we shall meet on the line of march or in bivouac and perhaps, when we do, you will stop and exchange a joke or a flask of rum with me!”

  “Nothing more than that? Chance meetings by the roadside?”

  She turned on her elbow and regarded him intently, and in the swiftly fading light he thought that her eyes were smiling.

  “You must know that there is no provision for officers’ women on the march,” she said. Then, with a note of laughter in her voice, “Officers have wives who await them in the garrison towns at home, pretty, scented women, who occupy their time with embroidery until such time as their man returns to give them children to console them during campaigns overseas.”