Too Few for Drums

by R. F Delderfield

  “You know well enough that I have no such wife!” he said sulkily.

  “Ah so,” she said, “but you will find one when you return after the war, and in the meantime there is always the bordello.”

  “There would be no joy for me in a bordello,” he said grimly. Suddenly, seizing her by the shoulder: “You mean to take another husband if we get back to the regiment?”

  She looked at him calmly. “Why, surely! What other way is it possible for a woman to follow the drum?”

  There had never been a moment since the night of their first conversation after the flight from the church when he had been unaware of the impermanence of their association, yet now, as she told him unemotionally that she had every intention of forming a fourth semiofficial alliance with a ranker, he felt a sharp stab of jealousy.

  “I have no intention of devoting my life to the Army,” he told her savagely. “I have seen too much bloodshed and misery to encourage me to soldier until I am retired on half pay!”

  She seemed astonished by this declaration. “What else can a man like you do?”

  “That is something I will think about between now and the end of my present engagement,” he told her, but she made a vague, chopping motion with her hand, as though impatient with his prattle.

  “You talk like a fool,” she said bluntly. “When this campaign ends you will be well trained as a soldier, a captain perhaps or, if you come by nothing worse than flesh wounds, a major! Why should you throw away such hard-won experience? Besides”—a note of contempt entered her voice—”you have seen nothing yet! A few skirmishes in the mountains, a few leagues marched on an empty stomach! Pah, do not let us waste our time with such idiot’s talk!”

  “You think there is nothing in life but marching and fighting?”

  “For men such as you, Mr. Graham? No, there is nothing, not once it is well begun as you have begun it. There are men, officers and privates, who take up arms and lay them down as soon as they see blood on their blades, but you are not such a man, not now, not when you have come this far and done what you have done for men like Watson and the drummer-boy yonder!”

  “What have I done?” he demanded, laying his hand on her as though striving to equalize their relationship once more. “What have I done but blunder from error to error, losing a man at every turn of the road? Tell me, then, where are these qualities of leadership you speak of? What right have I to expect men like Watson to follow me up hill and down dale in a quarrel that I no longer understand?”

  She pushed him away with both hands and it seemed to him that suddenly she was angry, both resenting and rejecting physical contact with him.

  “You have brought us thus far,” she declared. “You have done what you set out to do, brought this file to the banks of the Tagus.”

  “The file,” he said bitterly. “There are two left of the eight who set out under my command!”

  “The two weakest!” she reminded him, and there was a ring of triumph in her voice as though she was satisfied that the strong who had fallen along the route were strays and discards outside his responsibility.

  “There is glory in that,” she went on passionately, “and also in the change you have wrought in yourself. When I first looked on you back where my Highlander was laid you were a frightened boy who puked at the sight of a hussar, but now you are a man fit to lead a regiment over the Sierra to Paris itself! Do you think soldiers like Crauford and Tom Picton will fail to understand this the moment they set eyes on you?”

  He said nothing for a moment. Instead he lay still, looking down at the river, basking in the warmth of her declaration, for suddenly her words were like a trumpet blast summoning reserves of courage and self-confidence he would have thought were spent uselessly along the road they had traveled. And as his blood quickened to her challenge there awoke in him a terribly urgent desire to possess her again and at once. She recognized and welcomed his urgency, yet even in these surroundings she was still a slave to practical details, for she gestured to him to move down from the crest of the hillock, and when he did so she began scooping with her hands to make a little hollow in the sandy soil where they could find protection from the wind.

  “It will not be light enough to watch the river for hours,” she told him, “and what chance will you have if you begin your swim stiff with cold? Here, eat while I make some kind of shelter.” She thrust her canvas bag into his hand and returned to her digging, undercutting the bank until she had scooped out a tiny cave where there was just enough room for them to lie under the downslope of the hillock.

  He put his hand into the bag, feeling among the scavenger’s harvest she had provided, but was disinclined to sample the stale scraps he found there, for he had eaten his fill of maize porridge before they set out.

  “There is a flask here,” he said. “Is it the vinegar wine that gave Curle the colic back at the convent?”

  “No,” she said without pausing in her digging, “it is a swallow or two of brandy, but you must not drink it yet. I have saved it for when you enter the water.” She stood up, peering at him intently in the darkness. “Where is your cloak?” she demanded.

  “I gave it to Curle,” he told her, and she gave a snort of contempt.

  “That was a fool’s action! Curle sleeps dry tonight and has no need of his strength! Come close to me, it is as well I stayed with you!” She wriggled out of her dress and spread it like a blanket in the shallow excavation. “Lie down,” she commanded him, “as far under the bank as you can get!” When he did so she crawled in beside him, taking the loose folds of the heavy material, throwing it over them and reaching across him to tuck it under his thighs and shoulders. With her right arm she pillowed his head, with the other held him closely to her breast, her hair tumbling about his face. Lying so, he was enclosed in her possessiveness, and warmth returned to him, vanquishing the damp and fatigue and suspending him between the ardors of the past and the uncertainties of the morrow. Above them the rain-laden wind came searching down from the mountains; behind, the big river warbled over a million stones on its way to the Atlantic. But he forgot mountains and river in the sanctuary of her strong, wholesome body, and this was not because of the physical protection it offered but because she was willing him warmth and comfort with the whole of her being, drawing upon the reserves of countless Celtic ancestors, each a woman whose usefulness had been measured by the solace she could offer a mate.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Gunboat

  They saw it in the first moment of dawn, breasting up the river and looking, in the far distance, like a cloud riding the water, then as a large, leisurely swan, and finally for what it was, a forty-ton sloop with sails spread in the stiff westerly breeze and its bow wave advancing from perhaps two miles distant, a quarter mile offshore.

  There was no time to deliberate, for it was approaching at a spanking pace and even as he stripped off tunic and breeches the sun caught its brass deck cannon and threw back diamond-hard rays of light, advertising the vessel’s purpose there at that early hour. He said as they scrambled down the bank, “Will you wait in the tunnel?”

  But she replied, “No! It’s all or nothing now, Mr. Graham! I’ll fetch the others as soon as I can and we must take our chance in the open. If you reach it and the captain will heave to, then our chances are good, for there is nothing here to fire at them. Go now and God give you strength, boy!” She seized his hand and kissed it, then ran swiftly toward the culvert, her dress bundled under her arm.

  The first plunge snatched at his breath so that he rose gasping and spluttering, the slow current lifting him and, to his relief, slanting him upstream more or less in the path of the oncoming sloop. He realized this at once and fought to use it to his advantage, swimming overarm at an angle of forty-five degrees to the bank in the hope that their paths through the water would converge at a point his side of the wide bend. He knew that if he misjudged the distance, or failed for one instant to maintain his pace, he was lost, for despite h
is boast he now realized that he would never have the strength to swim back to the shore but would be swept by the slow current clear around the bend and into the presence of the enemy shore pickets. He thought as he struggled, We’ve been so lucky up to now, lucky to get this far and luckier still to find this blind spot in their patrols. It is for me to use that luck and reach the middle of the river before the sloop passes within view of the French. And he gritted his teeth and struck out with all his power, using the crawl kick that his father’s gamekeeper, Rowley, had taught him in the river reaches as a child, keeping his head down but raising himself every dozen strokes in order to keep the prow of the gunboat in view.

  He had forgotten the cold now, for he was fighting a different enemy, a dizziness that sought to confuse sky and water and gave him the feeling of struggling in a world without substance or gravity. The weak sunlight blinded him at a moment when he needed his judgment more desperately than he had ever needed it in the past. The water was choppy out here, and twice he swallowed great draughts, the second dragging him below the surface, but when he rose again there she was within yards of him, looking as huge as a man-o’-war, with snouted cannon peeping fromthe bows and the jib sail rushing down on him like a huge white bird. He threw himself over on his back and raised one arm, reaching up out of the water and shouting with the full power of his half-drowned lungs. Then the bow veered sharply away from him and as the bow wave struck him something smacked into the water within a yard of him. Without in the least realizing what it was he shot out both hands and took hold of a bulky cork float to which a rope was attached, and he knew, as his nails dug into the yielding substance, that he had succeeded, that the vessel was indeed veering to starboard and dragging him through the water at what seemed to him a prodigious rate. Then he heard voices, British voices, very close at hand, and there was another hard splash, this time almost on top of him, and somebody shouted, “Haul away, haul away, damme!” and the feeling of disembodiment engulfed him altogether, the sky and water meeting in tumbling confusion and the sun twinkling on a million points so that he could see nothing but the cordage binding the cork float clasped to his chest.

  He came to himself when they were holding a bottle to his mouth. He could hear his teeth clattering against the neck and instantly recalled his purpose, thrusting the bottle aside so that rum gushed onto the deck as he pointed frantically toward the shore. Two sailors were on their knees beside him, slapping and rubbing him with hard, crusted palms, and an officer in dazzling white breeches and stockings was looking down at him with an expression of angry concentration. The rum they had forced down his throat brought a glow to his belly, and as he struggled to his knees, pushing aside the hands of the sailors, he managed to gasp, “British stragglers on shore—through the lines—vital information—Lisbon!” before rum met the water he had swallowed and seemed to boil inside him, causing him to fall forward on hands and knees and retch over the officer’s buckled shoes.

  Despite his stern expression the man did not appear to resent this indignity but bent down and raised Graham to his feet, waving the grinning sailors on one side and fixing Graham with a pair of piercing blue eyes.

  “Stragglers, you say? How many? Where did you come from?” Without waiting for a reply, he stood smartly aside, grabbed the rum bottle from one of the men and thrust it into Graham’s hand, saying, “Get some more of that into you!” and, turning, “Hard to starboard! Ease her off there!” as the boat shuddered around and the jibs cracked like a salvo of cannon shots above their heads.

  Graham steadied himself, deliberately swallowing two mouthfuls of rum. When he lowered the bottle he noticed the envious expression of one of the sailors, whose tongue shot out around his lips as he dropped his gaze to the pool of spirit on the white deck. Then the officer was back with them and addressing Graham in a rasping voice.

  “Who the devil are you? Where do you come from? How do you come to be drowning in the middle of the river?”

  The second draught of rum must have had a powerful restorative effect, for almost at once Graham’s head and vision cleared, sufficiently so for him to note that the sloop was now on an almost reverse course, tacking aslant the breeze with mainsail flapping and bulwarks rising and falling sharply on the tide.

  “Ensign Graham, Fifty-first Regiment of Foot,” he gasped. “We came over the mountains from the Mondego. The others are in a culvert on the beach and you must send a longboat at once before the dragoons pick them off!”

  He did not address the lieutenant as “sir,” did not in fact so much as notice his rank, but his urgency melted some of the frostiness in the man’s voice and eyes and for a moment the lieutenant seemed bewildered.

  “God gut me!” he suddenly snapped. “You want me to send a boat ashore? Here and now?”

  “There are no French close enough to take you if you went in and out at once,” Graham said, holding his breath as the lieutenant gauged the distance to the shore and then looked at the ship’s boat towing astern. As the man still hesitated he said deliberately, “We crossed the French line of march and I made a tally of their strength. Everything is there, written down for General Crauford, but the woman has it!”

  “There is a woman with you?”

  “A camp follower from the Forty-third Highlanders and two of my men, one of them unable to walk. We have been hiding in a grain pit and the woman is fetching them now!”

  As he said this a squat bowlegged seaman approached and saluted with the careless lift of the hand that passes for an acknowledgment of rank among seamen. “She’s losing way in the scour, sir! Should we drop anchor? There’s four fathoms hereabouts!”

  “No, damn you!” roared the lieutenant. “Heave to and take four men ashore for stragglers. And be sharp about it! If they run out one of their field batteries I shall scud away and leave you to it! Gantry!” he bawled at a knot of pigtailed seamen standing between twin cannon in the stern. “Keep your guns trained on that hillock yonder, but if you fire without orders I’ll flay the four of you! Ensign,” he flung back at Graham, “in the name of God get below and find some clothes.”

  Suddenly, as the vessel swung in a slow, graceful circle toward its former course, the deck erupted with running figures and Graham was hustled below and pushed into a tiny cabin amidships, where someone flung him a jersey and a pair of canvas trousers. They offered him food, but he refused it, hurrying on deck and taking his stand near the wheel. Here he hardly noticed the mad bustle around him but fixed his attention on the strip of beach immediately adjoining the hillock, gazing across the gray stretch of water in an effort to pinpoint the half-submerged tunnel mouth through which he had waded the previous day. He could not see it and for a moment his belly contracted with fear lest the tide should have carried the vessel upstream out of reach of the spot where he had commenced his swim. Then he recognized a hump in the shingle where the culvert ended and he knew they were no more than two hundred yards upstream of the outfall. He watched the longboat pull around in a close circle before shooting inshore, the harsh rattle of its keel carrying across the river. His mind was now frantic with calculations of time and distance, how long it would have taken Gwyneth to wade back through the tunnel, climb the culvert bank, summon Watson and Curle from the grain pit and return the way she had come.

  The lieutenant had said he could not wait, that if fired upon from the shore batteries he would abandon boat and crew to their fate and stand off out of range, and Graham found himself praying for the trio battling their way through the waist-high sludge of the tunnel. He heard himself muttering over and over again, “God make them hurry, God give them strength!” Suddenly somebody jogged his elbow and, turning, he saw the lieutenant, his glowering expression softened somewhat by a quirk at the corners of his mouth.

  “Take the glass! There are cavalry coming down the road, but I doubt if they’re mad enough to ride in under our guns! If they do I shall liven them up with grape.” And the lieutenant strolled aft, calmer now, to address a gr
oup of gunners standing between the two brass sternchasers with linstocks and slow matches in their hands.

  Graham’s hands trembled so violently as he lifted the brass telescope that at first he could see nothing but the empty stretch of shingle between hillock and culvert. Then the boat and its crew leaped into focus, and as it did so two of the sailors began to run up the beach toward the culvert. Leaping ahead of them, Graham’s glass picked up three bunched figures coming out of the dip. It was the woman and Watson, carrying the boy between them, and Curle seemed to be held semi-rigid on what looked like a length of pole. In spite of their burden the two seemed to cross the shingle with great speed, and Graham, in his eagerness to keep them in focus, overreached the group and swung to the left. Then, before he could pick them out again, he saw a little cloud of horsemen jostling down the gully higher up the beach and he swung the telescope down like a flail, screaming the news to the group beside the cannons. But the gunners had already seen them and Graham’s warning shout was lost in the roar of the guns, and when he raised his glass again the gully was empty and the little group of figures were already swarming around the boat.

  A single discharge at French cavalry appeared to have mellowed the lieutenant, for when he returned to Graham he was grinning like a schoolboy. “The cavalry never learn,” he said casually, “perhaps because they once captured the Dutch fleet with a squadron of hussars! That was in the Texel years ago and anyway the ships were icebound. Yesterday I dropped a shrapnel shell into the middle of a bunch of cuirassiers. It was like cracking lobsters with a belaying pin!”

  Watson had seen the cavalry a few moments before the woman came storming up the bank and across the road to the grain pit. He had climbed into the open to get Curle some water and because the canteen was half full of maize porridge he used his battered shako, dipping it in the running water at the bottom of the culvert. On his way back across the road he saw a stout oak beanpole and it occurred to him that if Curle had to be carried through the tunnel to the beach this might prove useful, so he tucked it under his arm and was on the point of jumping down into the garden when he saw the group of horsemen approaching from the west.