Too Few for Drums

by R. F Delderfield

  The boy spoke suddenly and Graham saw that his lip trembled so that he looked more childlike than ever, a mere infant faced with a decision that he was unequipped to make. “You will be going, too, sir?”

  “Not until after the war, until we have chased the French over the mountains. Then I shall certainly go home on furlough, and when I do I can teach you to ride. We have some good horses at Addington Court!”

  Watson intervened, pitying the strange helplessness of the gently bred when called upon to state the simple truth.

  “Fact is you’ll croak if you’re left here, son,” he said brutally. “Now get aboard one of them transports, eat some o’ their vittles and breave fresh air, an’ you’ll perk up! Besides, suppose you do foller the drum when we get moving, ain’t a dry bed an’ reg’lar vittles a bleedin’ sight better’n bivvyin’ down in pourin’ rain an’ makin’ do on ’arf-cooked ’orsemeat when we’re on the march? Ain’t it, now? Besides, you got no choice, ’ave you? You bin discharged, son, just like Mr. Graham says!”

  Graham picked up the boy’s knapsack and, making sure that no one but Watson observed him, he slipped two gold pieces under the flap. He knew that Curle was too professional to let the knapsack out of his sight, even when he visited the latrines.

  “Watson’s quite right,” he said. “You will be taken aboard a transport in a day or so and until then he will stay and look after you and see you fed.” And he nodded to the boy and hurried out into the comparatively sweet air of the yard. He knew that his request to Crauford for the boy’s discharge could save Curle’s life and that the drummer would never bear arms again. He was aware, however, that Curle could not be expected to regard this as a service, for it was as Watson had said: in Curle’s vocabulary the word “home” was the same as the word “regiment.”

  Watson fell into step behind him and they returned through the maze of shanties to the stockade. As by unspoken agreement neither of them mentioned Curle or his chance of survival, for both identified the boy’s condition with the deadly attrition of the file as a unit. Then, as they reached the gate, Graham saw the woman.

  His excursion to the camping ground of the Fifty-first had been a tying of loose ends in respect of Watson and Curle. What he had done for each of them represented the closing of the book on their odyssey, and he had not anticipated finding Gwyneth here—in a different but scarcely less tattered gown, with an old chip bonnet clamped on her unruly hair. The shyness he had experienced on meeting Watson and Curle returned to him as he advanced to where she stood, her arms folded across her breast, her weight resting against the square bulk of the gatepost. Many times during his convalescence he had rehearsed words he would say to her when they met again, but now he was as tongue-tied as a youth at his first tryst and their differences in age and experience seemed greater than ever. Watson drifted back to his fire as Graham advanced uncertainly, his face stiff with a forced grin.

  ”I did not know you were in camp, Gwyneth. Watson said nothing …”

  She at once assumed command in the way she had made decisions during the march, taking him by the hand and leading him through the gate to a steep cobbled street that sloped down to the waterfront. As he glanced at her he was struck once again by her essential freshness and bloom, suggesting a background infinitely remote from that of a squalid camp teeming with unwashed men and rank with the stink of wood smoke and cooking fat.

  They exchanged no word until they had left the hutments behind and emerged onto the quay, where the bay lay open before them. Across the ship-studded water lay the white terraces of Almada. The only movement out there was the beetlelike progress of lighters and wherries plying to and fro from the anchored transports and men-o’-war. She pointed to one of the dram shops fronting the quay, most of them empty at this hour of the day, and they passed under the awning and sat down at a table. A pair of excessively fat friars were conversing in low tones in the farthest corner, but they were too engrossed to pay any attention to them. An olive-skinned slattern came forward to serve them with thimble-sized cups of coffee.

  When the woman had withdrawn Graham said, “Crauford came to the hospital and I arranged for Watson to become my servant and also for Curle to be discharged. I am sending the boy to my home in Kent.” Then, truculently, “You have found another man, Gwyneth?”

  “No,” she said, with a half-smile, “but I am considering offers!”

  He had the impression that she was mocking his youth and inexperience, perhaps even his clumsiness as a lover, and at once his temper flared. He was no longer the leader and officer, concerned in maintaining his dignity and social ascendancy, but a young man whose blood was quickened by the presence of a woman he had twice held in his arms and who yearned to do so again and again, but on his own terms, not hers. So urgent was this demand that he reached forward, his fingers enclosing her bare arm, his eyes glancing furtively at the muttering friars in the corner of the room. The laughter went out of her eyes as he declared passionately, “Everything I did out there I did on your account, Gwyneth! What purpose was it all if we are never to see one another again?”

  “What purpose?” She stared back at him without withdrawing her arm from his grasp. “We got through, the four of us! Besides, out there you needed me!”

  “I need you now and always, Gwyneth!”

  But she shook her head. “No! You understand nothing of women, not even women of your own kind, but because of me you will learn when you go among them again. Do you think that a word from you could change me into the kind of wife you will need when you rise in rank or live among civilized people once more? What would I do in a great house such as yours, with servants to scold and linen to count? And if, so be it, I found myself in such a place, do you think for one instant I would be content to stay there whilst you were away somewhere campaigning? No, Mr. Graham, you cannot play the rich young suitor with me, and you cannot pack me off home like the sick drummer-boy yonder! This is my place and in your heart you know it to be so. All else is no more than a boy’s fancy!”

  “Do you believe in God, Gwyneth?” he asked suddenly. “In the God who brought us together out there in the mountains?”

  She seemed to give his question consideration. “I believe in a God of battles, the God who stood with us when we escaped from the partisans’ camp, who put the file into Lockhart’s hand and then gave you the strength to swim the Tagus when you were numbed and starving.”

  “No God of love, Gwyneth?”

  “Love!” She spat the word, her full red lips curling. “What have the likes of me to do with love that poets talk of? I use my body to give strength and comfort to those whose trade is my trade! Love is for the women at home, to go along with their frills and petticoats and lavender-scented closets! You make me blush for you to make such claim on me!”

  She stood up as though half in mind to turn her back on him, but he seized her hand, suddenly contrite.

  “You want nothing more than to go on forever like this, until you are old and worn out and have too much damp in your bones to follow the drum wherever it leads?”

  “Why should I want anything different? All the men who have used me have been good soldiers and I would never permit anyone but a fighting man to spill himself into my body! That I invited you to do so was because you had become one of the brotherhood and had acquitted yourself like a man when you were alone and desperate! This is my purpose here and without it I am nothing.”

  For the first time since he had seen her kneeling beside her dead Highlander he came close to understanding her true nature. There was, he reflected, no profit in confusing her with women who bore children and taught them their manners and their catechism. She was at once more than a woman and less than one, a creature whose body was a refuge for the only male creatures she accepted as men, warriors unsentimentally dedicated to the arms they carried and the exercise of their own prowess and valor, savages who exulted their strength and their ability to overcome all obstacles interposing between them and
survival. She was something out of the long-distant past, when tribes lived out their short, dangerous lives in forests where death lay in wait for the unwary and the weak, where a cleft in the rocks was hearth and home, and a man’s family was fed in relation to his prowess with bow and spear. He saw this as something revealed by a flash of light on a dark night and ceased, in that instant, to quarrel with its finality. Yet a current of warmth and comradeship for her gushed through him, flushing away the cloying sweetness of the yearning he had felt for her a moment since. He understood, too, that her rejection of him was temporary, that if, in the months ahead, he had need of her, then she would make herself available, perhaps on the eve of some desperate venture, and because of his access to her ripe, vigorous body he would go into battle like a lion.

  He said, smiling, “Very well, Gwyneth, when we move out in the spring I will send word to you by Watson, and the man you take is more fortunate, I think, than if you brought him a dower chest filled with all the loot in Lisbon!” He bent swiftly, kissing her brow, and walked out of the shop into the hard afternoon sunlight playing across the ruffled bay.

  She let him go, a quiet smile playing about the corners of her mouth, not wishing to speak to him of his child which she knew lay in her womb, for this was something she would keep always for herself, nursing the knowledge as a statesman harbors his solution to a vexed and complicated state secret.

  It would be a child conceived in war at the very moment of its father’s transition from boyhood to manhood, from dependence to independence, from uncertainty to proud and fearless conviction, and thus, in a sense, it was a begining for child and man in the same moment of time. Contemplation of this pleased her, prolonging the smile until he had reached the corner of the steep street and lifted his hand in farewell.

  She sat on for a time, sipping her thimble of coffee and letting her mind explore the significance of the conception, of the place where it happened, under the mountain among the wrecked wagons and the crucified Frenchmen, of his clumsy eagerness once the encounter was started so that, as in everything else, it was she who had led and directed. She mused also on the sense of fulfillment it had brought to her, something that had been absent from her submission to other men. She did not understand why this should be but only that it was, and that in bringing solace to him she had succeeded in demonstrating her usefulness to the whole profession of arms, and that now, between them, they had done a little to bridge the gap between the two worlds fighting a common battle among the mountains and torrents of Portugal. The fancy intrigued her so that she wondered briefly what status his child would have as the issue of a raw young officer of the line and a Welsh camp follower in search of a fourth husband. For a moment only she was half resolved to tell him when the child was born, and then she knew that she would not, for the confession might prompt him to begin again his tiresome talk of love and urge upon her an impossible alliance.

  Yet she knew that if the child was male she would tell him about Graham, for it would help to mold his pride and initiate him into the greater fellowship of fighting men everywhere, bringing closer the day when the barriers of class crumbled and all men who went to war fought under the banner of comradeship in the field. For this surely was the banner they had woven together in the mountains and had carried in triumph from the Mondego to the banks of the Tagus.