Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  The great and the defeated stood by watching, watching Spain and the Danube, hoping that the roar of battle would not end once again in a fanfare of Imperial victory trumpets and the boom of triumphant salvoes from the Paris depots. For seventeen years the fanfares and the salvoes had been the final notes of every attempt on the part of Napoleon’s neighbours to arrest an annual extension of the French Empire.

  Over in London the exiled Bourbons waited, and in Berlin the Prussian King waited. In St. Petersburg the Czar toyed with the idea of dividing Europe with an ex-artillery officer.

  In the third week of May, 1809, the Grand Army was enjoying one of the last of its victorious sweeps across hostile territory, driving all before it in the fashion of earlier and happier campaigns.

  Austria, beaten more than a dozen times since her first invasion of French territory during the Revolutionary Wars, had made another attempt to throw off the shackles. The attempt failed, but only just. On the evening that Gabriel combed the bivouacs in search of his regiment, six corps of the Grand Army were spread out along the right bank of the Danube, facing a concentration of Austrian troops, under the Archduke Charles, on the opposite bank. An attempt had already been made to cross the swollen river, and a bridge of boats had been constructed connecting the right bank with the large island of Lobau, the shores of which reached to within eighty yards of the enemy’s bank. A second bridge over this narrow but turbulent neck of the stream was in the process of construction.

  At advanced posts in the island were sections of two corps, troops of Marshal Lannes, the ex-dyer’s apprentice of whom every Gascon lad had heard so much (he came from Lectourne, the nearest town to Agen), and the corps of one-eyed Massena, whose exploits were almost as colourful as those of Lannes and whose ability in the field was second only to that of the Emperor himself. The cavalry of the Guard was there, too, under Marshal Bessières, and the three marshals had already pushed detachments into the villages of Aspern and Essling, which were just visible where the Austrian bank met the edge of the plain.

  It seemed to Gabriel, trudging across the crowded bridge to the island, that the entire male population of the world had been concentrated in this curve of the river. He would have liked to admire the scenery, which was refreshingly cool after his interminable journey across France and Germany. The evening sun was setting behind the woods of the opposite bank. The Danube, brown with flood water, seemed immense after the little Dordogne near his home. The early summer air was soft, and the thick foliage of the island was the greenest he had ever seen.

  There was little leisure to enjoy the scene. In the first place, he was hard tasked to keep a footing on the bridge. Cavalry, infantry, artillery and baggage trains seemed united in a conspiracy to pitch him into the Danube. In his efforts to cling to the narrow causeway, he forgot his two overpowering preoccupations, lacerated feet and gnawing hunger. His last meal had been breakfast, thin soup and biscuit, issued at an artillery park four leagues from the bridgehead. His feet, after thirty-two days’ marching, were still unhardened and felt almost liquid in their untallowed boots. His shoulders had ceased to ache under the weight of his knapsack and musket, but his cotton underclothes were clammy with perspiration, and the rim of his shako pressed like an iron clamp on his brow.

  At last he got through the press at the end of the island and asked, for the hundredth time that day, for directions.

  A sergeant of the Flying Artillery pointed towards the woods, where the undergrowth beside the track was beaten flat and the air was heavy with the scent of wild flowers, crushed under the wheels of ammunition caissons.

  “The Eighty-seventh? They’re in the forest somewhere. They came over before noon. They might be in action now; try the glades,” and he nodded towards a wood on the right of the main track, where bivouac fires were already winking brightly and ribbons of blue wood smoke crept from beneath the low branches of the trees.

  The glades were packed with armed men. Gabriel found there a riot of colour, the firelight sparkling on the brass casques of the dragoons and the gleaming silver of the cuirassiers as they lolled at ease beside their huge black horses. Blue and white of the grenadiers of the Guard, canary yellow of the Mounted Gendarmerie, green of the lancers, silver-grey of the hussars, a jostling, shouting, singing, sunburned multitude, some eating, some sleeping, a few cleaning their weapons for tomorrow’s engagement, and over all such an air of exultant confidence that a man might have staked every franc he possessed on the issue of Napoleon’s next hundred battles.

  Along the line of bivouacs he wandered, peering at the numerals on the shako of every infantryman he encountered. Up and down, with the maddening smell of soup kettles in his nostrils, directed here, redirected there, until his blistered feet seemed to have trudged over every inch of that teeming triangle of land. Dazzled by the setting of the sun and the glare of a thousand camp-fires, he felt himself growing lightheaded and paused to lean heavily against the trunk of a great beech whose roots spread almost to the water’s edge on the eastern bank.

  A camp-fire, its jets of flame spurting horizontally under a large pile of freshly gathered brushwood, threw a flickering light round the roots of the tree. Sprawled on the margin of the blaze, wrapped in greatcoats and pillowed on knapsacks, were five young men, all sound asleep. He could hear their regular breathing above the regular clump clump of the engineers’ sledgehammers farther down the bank, and the ceaseless murmur of sound that rose from the green arcades stretching away to the main bridgehead. Between the two men nearest to him was a dog, a long-muzzled, grey-brown brute, with absurdly small ears that stuck from its head like two little tents. The dog also was asleep, its lean jaws resting affectionately across the calf of a sleeping man.

  Gabriel saw all this and then looked beyond the men and the dog to a spit, made of two forked uprights and a bayonet for crosspiece. Turning slowly on a short length of chain attached to the bayonet was a large camp kettle, and as a spurt of flame shot up to its rim Gabriel saw the contents bubble and froth, as though stirred by an invisible hand from beneath the surface of the thickening stew.

  He stood there a moment longer, crouched in the shadow of the tree bole. He saw a fresh series of bubbles form and burst round the edge of the cauldron. Then a soft whiff of the evening breeze blew in his direction and he hesitated no longer. Groping softly for his tin pannikin, he dropped to his knees and crawled towards the fire, moving an inch at a time, his pannikin barely raised above the ground.

  He reached the circle of the fire, paused a few seconds, and then reached forward and upward, turning his back on the dog.

  There was a snarl, a yelp and the crash of feet in the undergrowth behind the tree. Gabriel pitched face foremost into the fire, his clawing hands almost upsetting the kettle as the dog buried its teeth in his shoulder. In the first moment of pain and terror, as the red-hot embers burned into the palms of his hands, and the dog’s jaws tore at his thick epaulette, Gabriel was conscious of a harsh, high-pitched voice shouting, “Off, Fouché, off, you brute!” and felt himself seized, thrust sideways and rolled beyond the fire, to be pinned down by half a dozen arms, one of which lay firmly across his throat, almost preventing him from breathing.

  Every sleeper was sitting upright, and in the centre of the firelight stood a tall, thin sergeant, holding the yapping mongrel by its collar. The animal’s strangled yelps seemed to melt into the background of sound that rose from the glade. Above the treetops the moon sailed out, flooding the bivouac with dappled silver.

  Gabriel glanced round at the ring of faces. They were fierce and challenging. Only the sergeant who was holding the dog seemed impassive. Gabriel noted, almost unconsciously, that the numerals on his shako were “87” and thought: “Here, then, are my comrades, the men I have marched two hundred leagues to join. Any one of them would slit my throat for a pannikin of dirty stew,” and he struggled, pettishly, as a child might writhe in the grip of a brawny nurse and with as little result, for the arm only tightened its ho
ld.

  The sergeant released the dog, which slunk off into the shadows and continued to growl like a young wolf deprived of its prey. Then, sitting down on a log, he motioned to the men holding the thief.

  “Let him go, it’s only a conscript!”

  The men released their holds and wriggled nearer to the fire, but none of them took their eyes off Gabriel, who sat back and sulkily sucked his burns.

  “The dog’s earned his supper,” said a plump, red-faced young man with greasy black hair. “I told you he was worth taking along. Good boy, Fouché!” He foraged around for his pannikin and began to dip it into the cauldron, an example soon followed by the other four men, who, once the meal had begun, minded Gabriel no more than if he had been a field-mouse crouched at the roots of the beech.

  The sergeant did not eat. He sat worrying his long stringy moustache and screwing up his nose, as though engaged in solving a mental problem of some complexity.

  At length he came to a decision. Opening his knapsack, of rather more than regulation size, he took out a loaf, a clasp-knife and a small, battered tin bowl.

  “Come over here, conscript,” he said, while all the men stopped eating and looked at the sergeant with incredulous expressions.

  Gabriel rose stiffly to his feet and warily circled the fire.

  “When did you eat last?” asked the sergeant, beginning to carve the loaf into equal portions, some of which he tossed across the flames to the men.

  Gabriel told him that he had not eaten since early that morning.

  “Have you got any salt? You should have, you were issued salt at the depot.”

  Gabriel produced an oblong block of salt that had indeed, much to his mystification, been issued as part of his marching kit. He had not found occasion to use it and had wondered how he would do so, since it was as hard as stone.

  The sergeant took the salt and bent over the stew, rubbing the block vigorously against the rounded edge of the bayonet.

  “That will pay for your supper,” he said. “Another time offer to trade. A conscript should always have something to trade with. Don’t steal from your comrades. I’ve seen a man’s ears cut off for less!”

  He filled Gabriel’s pannikin and tossed him a large crust. The stew was highly flavoured with garlic and seemed to have more solidity than most of those at which Gabriel had sniffed earlier in the evening. There was a jointed rabbit in it and the sergeant fished about until he found a piece of the meat, which he splashed into the recruit’s pan. The bread was sour but fairly fresh. Gabriel ate slowly, trying to make it last. He never recalled a meal that was half as satisfying.

  When the soup bowls had been scraped clean with tufts of wiry grass and the dog was crunching what was left of the bones beside the empty kettle, one of the men unstrapped a small fiddle from his knapsack and drew a three-inch bow from a waterproof covering made of untanned skin. While the other four and the sergeant lit their short pipes the fiddler, whom they addressed as Dominique, began to play.

  It was a tune that Gabriel had never heard before. A wild, frolicsome air that might have accompanied the clash of a gipsy’s tambourine. Sitting back against the tree, he cast a glance at the player. Dominique was scarcely his own age and had a heavy mop of blond hair. His mouth was loose and his eyes were dreamy and vacant. He seemed to enjoy his music, and his feet, which were stretched toward the recruit, twitched to the rhythm as though at any instant the man would leap up and begin to dance.

  A delicious drowsiness stole over Gabriel, and with it came an odd sense of well-being and fulfillment. It seemed to him in some unfathomable way that the last hour had seen the transformation of his life completed, that he had marched all those leagues solely to take his place with these six men round a spluttering wood fire on an island in the middle of the Danube. He glanced again at the circle, at the vacant blue eyes of the shock-headed fiddler, at the chubby cheeks of the man who had praised the dog, at the meditative, unblinking stares of the others and, finally, at the hawklike profile of the sergeant, silhouetted against the glow of the next section’s fire, his pipe jutting from the apex of his drooping moustache, his lean, sunburned cheeks puffing in and out at long regular intervals.

  That was how Gabriel found the six men and added a seventh to their number. The section’s corporal had been killed at Ratisbon a week or two before and they were to need him badly in the next two days, when the Grand Army received its first major check in the blazing villages on the plain across the river. That was when Gabriel discovered his principal error. A voltigeur is always stationed nearest to the enemy, just to make certain, for the benefit of the line regiments behind, that the enemy is still there. A voltigeur proves it by getting shot at.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Marching across the flimsy bridge at the head of his file of voltigeurs to take up positions in the granary of Essling, Sergeant Jean Ticquet experienced a qualm of misgiving. He had not served in fifteen campaigns and as many major engagements without learning how to draw conclusions from the close observation of facts. He had been uneasy all night, and this morning he found himself unable to share the exuberance of his little flock. If that young Jewish mountebank who called himself Emmanuel Jacobsen, for instance, had seen as many men blown to pieces as Sergeant Ticquet had, he would not, at this moment, be amusing the rest of the file by using his musket and bayonet as a drum major’s staff. Neither would the latest recruit, Gabriel Guillame, who had tried to steal soup the previous evening, be looking as though he were about to play a minor rôle in a May-time flower festival.

  The dog Fouché also followed them into battle. Ticquet would have credited the mongrel with more sense.

  The sergeant was old and wise in the ways of war, but his age and his wisdom had not endeared to him the whistle of approaching round shot, it had merely trained his ear to the point of knowing when and when not to grovel in the nearest ditch. He was considered by his officers a brave and steady soldier, but Jean was well aware of the fact that there were many occasions, particularly of late, when he was neither brave nor steady, merely observant and extraordinarily lucky; so lucky that he had begun to wonder how much longer his luck would hold out against the determined efforts of the thousands of men who had had designs on his life during all these years. For Jean, now approaching fifty, had been fighting since he was twelve years of age. He was conscious that he had had an exceptionally long run for his loot.

  He was a narrow-faced man, partially bald where his heavy shako had pressed for so long. His frame, above medium height, was painfully thin, so that his blue and white uniform hung on him loosely and looked as if the tailor had never intended it to fit. His height and thinness gave him a slight stoop, and without the artificial bolstering of red woollen epaulettes his shoulders looked rounded to the point of deformity. For all his emaciated body, however, he was as tough as a harness strap and as active as a mountain squirrel. Under fire he appeared to fold himself up like a clasp-knife and dart here and there with incredible swiftness. He had remarkably keen sight and could pick off a sentry at extreme musket range, aiming at the head and sending a long, drooping shot into the stomach or loins. He could march and fight on the barest subsistence allowance, and if the commissariat wagons were far behind, as they usually were when they existed otherwise than on muster rolls, he could often find a meal for himself and his file from a ruined cottage garden twice ransacked by the Guard. He seemed able to smell out water and vegetables. Marching along a highroad miles from any sign of habitation, he would suddenly disappear, picking up the line of march a league farther on with a haversack full of turnips or fruit. What was left of the file, after two campaigns in Spain and the present fighting on the Danube, worshipped him, as well they might. There was not one whose life he had not directly or indirectly saved during the last eighteen months.

  He had learned the art of warfare in the hardest school in the world, the Republican armies of ’92 and ’93. He had fought under Marceau in La Vendée as private second class, and und
er Bonaparte in Italy as private first class. He had been a corporal in Egypt and was one of those reputed to have made a good haul by fishing for dead Mamelukes in the Nile. If he had indeed been lucky enough to hook a jingling body-belt, he must have abandoned the gold as unnecessary baggage in the march back across the Sinai Desert, for he went through the Marengo campaign in debt, although he subsequently sent some pickings to the widow and children of an old comrade sabred by the Russian Imperial Guard on the Pratzen Heights of Austerlitz. He was like that about money. If there was loot to be found he found it, but he never let it accumulate in banks like his miserly old chief, Massena. If it came to choosing between carrying a piece of church plate or a piece of cooked horseflesh, Jean threw away the plate. He had once existed for more than a week on a piece of horseflesh, but no one ever made a meal out of an ecclesiastical vessel.

  He was a grim, solemn, practical man, not over-talkative, but friendly enough when his stomach was full and he could suck his pipe over the fire or watch Emmanuel dancing an eccentric, acrobatic measure to the scrape of young Dominique’s fiddle. He was often over-indulgent with his charges, treating them with the heavy playfulness of a busy father who watches his family’s games and listens to its prattle while pondering weightier matters of commerce and finance. He had never married, and he never even spoke to a woman unless it was Old Carla, the shapeless cantinière of the company. The two of them were cronies, having served together in all parts of Europe, and Jean had a real affection for the foul-mouthed old woman who had married, canteen fashion, at least three husbands from among his former comrades and was always plaguing Jean, in a half-humorous way, to become her fourth.