Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Then had come the second day’s battle, a nightmare of smoke and heat and screaming round shot. And, after that, sleep by the fire in the glade, to be awakened and told that he could draw straws for the cantinière with the brown eyes and the thick black tresses.

  Claude Dupont had not known of his pre-selection. The sergeant had explained the reason for the ballot in the briefest terms and thrust his hand holding the straws in the direction of the sleepy men; it had been easy to get the right man to pick the longest piece, but Jean thought it best not to tell him but to let him imagine merely that he had been lucky. It was good for a soldier to think himself lucky, and Jean felt certain that the girl herself would never tell him that he was her choice.

  Claude felt strangely elated at the prospect of the rôle he was to adopt now that the earth had been trodden down on the old woman’s grave, and they broke open the casks by the firelight that evening. He was a shy young man and his experience with women was more than usually limited. There had been a few boy-and-girl encounters in the hayfields, before he was drafted into the army, and, after that, a few minutes with a laconic harlot in a small town on the road to Saragossa. The latter experience had sickened him, as well it might, for the woman reeked of garlic and had been well past her prime. Claude had visited the brothel with Manny when both were drunk, and afterwards he had amused his companion by being violently sick on the way back to bivouac. Now, clumsily busying himself with the coffee, Claude stole a glance at Nicholette as she sat watching him from a seat on somebody’s knapsack. She seemed to him outrageously cool about the whole business.

  He had been conscious of her for more than a year now, and he had often wondered if Old Carla had treated her roughly in that ramshackle wagon of theirs. He had often talked to her when she seemed to him only a child, swilling out buckets and stacking up pyramids of leather cups, while they stopped beside the road during a long march. But since she had matured—and it struck Claude that she had matured almost overnight—he had never before been able to bring himself to address her.

  Several of the linesmen came over to the voltigeurs’ bivouac for the wedding. They all knew Carla and her daughter and had heard that a cask of the old woman’s Burgundy would be broached. Old Jean went out and trapped a brace of rabbits, and Nicholas, the best shot of the party, did better still, lying in wait in the sedges and killing a wild duck, whose dying outcry caused such a commotion that Austrian outposts on the east bank fired a volley into the wooded spur of the island.

  By ten o’clock most of the party were roaring drunk, and of this majority a dozen or more had eaten or danced themselves into an exhausted sleep in the long grass. Emmanuel was still sober. No amount of liquor seemed to have much effect on him. Grinning, he covered the drunkards with greatcoats and sat down to scrape out the stewpot and roasting-tins. Old Jean motioned to Dominique to put away his fiddle. The sergeant got up and looked in the wagon, showing no surprise when he found that it was empty. Then he locked the deep wine cupboards and lay down to sleep.

  Earlier in the evening Jean had performed the gipsy wedding rite, cutting the wrists of Claude and the girl and binding their right hands together with a piece of dirty bandage which he took from his tunic pocket. He did this as though in jest and the ceremony was greeted with cheers and laughter, but deep in his heart Jean did not jest. To him, who had lived in the camps the whole of his life, the ceremony was as binding as a marriage in a church. He had witnessed many weddings, and not one had been sanctified by a priest. To Jean the blood tie signified the willingness of a man and a woman to campaign together, to share the last scrap of food and to breed if they were so inclined. Of all the garbled utterances, half savage, half civil, that he made at a canteen wedding, only the phrase “till death us do part” meant anything. Sooner or later death was certain to take one or the other, not in the fullness of time, but tomorrow, or the day after, or next spring. Nor was the man more likely to go than the woman. The incidence of death among cantinières was as great, proportionately, as among frontline infantry regiments. Old Carla had lasted well and Jean was bound to admit that, young as she was, her daughter appeared to have learned most of the tricks of her trade. He could not say the same for Claude. The boy was too absent-minded to last long under present conditions.

  After the blood-letting Claude and Nicholette sat together on the outskirts of the circle. Neither consumed much wine, the girl because she was naturally abstemious, the man because he felt rather foolish and nervous. There was a good deal of badinage and a spate of stale jokes. Some of the linesmen nodded significantly towards the wagon, as though they expected, and rather hoped, that he would carry her in there at once. Someone crawled over and tied a set of harness bells on the axle-tree, while Claude grinned and pretended not to mind.

  Just before the moon came up, and immediately after Manny and Gabriel had damped the fire down with armfuls of fresh wood, Claude felt a slight tugging at his wrist. He turned and looked down upon the girl sitting beside him. She met his glance steadily and her head inclined towards the thicket behind them. He got up, as unobtrusively as possible, and followed her down the narrow path, away towards the northern point of the island.

  When they were clear of the bivouac he took out his clasp-knife and cut the bandage that coupled them. She glided on ahead, moving as though she was familiar with the outgrown track. He followed in silence, noticing that they inclined towards the bank and kept away from the long curving row of fires that winked and spluttered through the trees to the west.

  She led him to the head of a steep gully carved out by a brook seeking the main stream. There was just light enough to see their way down, and at the foot of the cleft, where the current ran turgidly, Claude saw a small raft. The girl stepped aboard, motioning him to follow. She cast off and the current took them gently downstream a few hundred yards, until the raft grated on the shingle beach of a tiny islet, barely forty yards from Lobau. Here she jumped ashore and took him by the hand. A few yards from the water’s edge he saw a tent which he recognized as Carla’s store, a complicated affair of hoops and spikes that she sometimes erected to protect her wine from the weather when the regiment had been stationary for a few days.

  An odd sense of pride grew in him. The girl, his wife, had conceived and planned this refuge. His head spun with the wonderment of it all, the girl’s slyness, her resource, the manner in which she had effected their escape from the bivouac and from the joyless choice of waiting until every guest was dead drunk or spending her wedding night in the wagon, surrounded by intoxicated practical jokers.

  The more he thought about it the greater was his respect for the girl, but with this feeling came a qualm of inferiority, a sense of being led and controlled. He wondered if Old Jean knew Nicholette for what she was, a woman capable not only of planning an undisturbed wedding night in the midst of a beaten army, but possessing sufficient strength and will to catch or build a raft and to transport and erect this unwieldy tent on an island in the Danube, then to guide her lover to it in almost complete darkness.

  The moon came out as they entered the tent, and its wan light revealed the cosiness of the interior. There were one or two cooking utensils, an iron stove, a small cask of wine and a soft bed of bracken spread with a new horse blanket.

  She sat down and looked at him. He noticed that her eyes were shining and her lips were parted. He could hear her breathing. Outside it seemed unnaturally still. Only the swirl of the water or the faint rustle of the night breeze in the woods broke the silence.

  “We can stay here until the day after tomorrow,” she said, and as he opened his mouth to protest she smiled and shook her head vigorously. “I’ve arranged it with Jean.”

  With her smile and the gleam of her small, even teeth he suddenly became aware of her as a woman. A great wave of tenderness swept over him. His mouth went dry and his heart hammered at his ribs. Reaching out gently, he laid his palms on her shining black hair, and at his touch she shivered. The movement inflamed
him; he seized her by the shoulders, holding her fiercely and kissing her mouth, eyes and cheeks. She did not return his kisses, but seemed abstracted. Presently she freed herself and moved across the tent. His disappointment was so keen that he almost cried out.

  He heard a prolonged rustling and a sound that might have been a woman’s laugh, choked back and smothered. The moon above the open flap of the tent rode in behind a cloud as she moved back to the couch. Her thick hair, freed of pins, brushed his cheek; she was bending over him. Her naked body glowed in the pale light and he held her close, speechless with pride and gratitude.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For more than a month the steady clump of sledge-hammers and the dry rattle of limber chains were heard in Lobau. The island was transformed into a vast fort, bristling with nine hundred large-calibre guns, hedged round with rampart, redoubt and complicated systems of abattis.

  Under the combined effects of strong sunshine and ceaseless physical labour the morale of the army improved. Emperor and marshals were everywhere, planning the forthcoming assault. Dressed as sergeants, Napoleon and Massena strolled down to the river and bathed opposite Enzersdorf, General Sainte-Croix following as a private. Splashing in the water, half a musket shot from indulgent Austrian sentries, they selected the spot for a night crossing. There was to be no repetition of the slaughter opposite Aspern-Essling.

  The voltigeurs became pioneers for the month. Stripped to the waist, the seven men worked with mattock and wheelbarrow at the gun emplacements on the northern tip of the island. It was hard but invigorating work. In the fierce sunshine everyone tanned to the colour of dull bronze.

  Gabriel became accustomed to encounters with Napoleon and the veterans of his staff. They often appeared at the emplacements, asking questions, joking about rations, promising lively days in the near future.

  One morning, when the seven infantrymen were sitting down to their midday soup, the Emperor himself came through the bushes and called across to Nicholas. The ex-schoolmaster had finished eating and was in the act of raising a long-necked wine bottle to his lips.

  “I hope the wine is good, soldier!” said the Emperor, with one of his pale smiles.

  Nicholas lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth.

  “It ought to be,” he grunted, “there’s our cellar!” and he nodded towards the river.

  The Emperor’s brows contracted. He moved into the centre of the group, checking a general movement to rise with an impatient gesture of his small hand.

  “I ordered the distribution of four thousand bottles of wine to this division only yesterday!” he said quietly.

  Nicholas grinned, sourly. Under his tilted shako, worn to protect him from the fierce beat of the noonday sun, he looked raffish and comical, like a character out of a camp burlesque.

  “It’s gone the way of most of our wine, sire,” he said, and, rising, picked up his spade and began to dig.

  The Emperor made no reply, but stood there a moment longer, fidgeting with his riding-switch. Then he turned and walked away. An infantry colonel accompanying him remained long enough to scowl at the oblivious Nicholas, who went on digging. “Time somebody told the Old Man,” he muttered to Jean when the group had gone out of earshot.

  The same night an officer of the Guard came down to the bivouac for a statement from Jean about the detachment’s wine supplies. Jean told him the truth. There had been no issue since before Aspern.

  Two days later there was a court martial, attended by the Emperor in person. Four commissary officials were found guilty of misappropriation and shot. Nicholas volunteered for the firing-party. Louis and Dominique went over to see the fun.

  Towards the end of those arduous but pleasant days on Lobau, Gabriel painted his first portrait group of the file. The sketch survived and was among the best found in the hair trunk. It is strangely symbolic of the First Empire, like the study of the young dragoon whom Gabriel sketched later on the road into Portugal.

  The six men are grouped against a background of summer foliage with the formality popular in daguerreotypes of later generations. Three are standing, three sitting or kneeling. Sergeant Jean occupies the central position in the back row, and the melancholy droop of his thin moustache, a soft growth that would never answer to wax no matter how determined the owner might be to emulate the Guard, converts the sergeant’s warlike stare into the expression of a disillusioned clown. It is a solemn face, but there is unexpected gentleness about the mouth, and although the cheekbones are prominent, helping to make the upper part of the face lean and harsh, the chin is as small and rounded as a woman’s.

  On Jean’s right is Nicholas, his more genuinely hardbitten features accentuated by the rakish tilt of his shako and its broad chin-strap. His powerful shoulders are slightly stooped, as though to bring him more closely in line with the slighter figure of Jean, and his square ruthless jaw is dark with the stubble of a three-day beard.

  Cross-legged in the foreground is Emmanuel, his swarthy, mobile features grinning into the eye of the artist with an expression half impish, half genial; an attractive, likeable face with unsmiling eyes.

  Beside him, on one knee, appears the farm hand, Dominique, and Gabriel must have posed this picture, for the young man’s fiddle has been placed in his hand and the bow is resting lightly across Manny’s shoulders.

  Claude Dupont, bridegroom of a few days, is the only member of the group wearing full uniform. Perhaps he had just come off guard duty, for he carries musket and fixed bayonet, or perhaps he dressed specially for the sitting. He was the only member of the file who studied his personal appearance. He recurs farther on in the sketchbook and is always well turned out, as though he were proud of his profession. It is easy to see why Nicholette chose him. He has a softness of feature lacking in the others, but, for all that, is sufficiently masculine to please any woman, even a woman like the cantinière’s daughter, with an army to choose from.

  Louis, the coachman’s son, is not looking towards the artist. Perhaps he had seen a thoroughbred straying out of the cavalry lines, for Gabriel has caught his expression of mild abstraction, as though Louis had shouted: “Hurry and finish, Gabriel, I’m going down to the hussars’ bivouac before supper!”

  But Gabriel took his time and went on painting until the light failed and blue wood smoke began to drift through the glades where a hundred and fifty thousand men cooked and quaffed and sharpened swords against tomorrow’s new challenge to survive.

  The sketch is dated July 3rd, 1809.

  At 9 A.M. on July 5th a violent storm broke over the teeming island. In a tempest of rain and wind the French columns assembled opposite Enzersdorf and defiled across a bridge that seemed to take shape actually under their blundering feet, so swiftly and silently was it built. By the time the storm had blown itself out seventy thousand men were across the river, and the reserves followed, turning the flank of the Austrians’ entrenched positions from the rubble of Aspern and Essling and marching on over the field where, six centuries before, the armies of the first Habsburg had struggled for a throne.

  On the following day the battle began in earnest, battalions hurling themselves at one another through fields of breast-high corn, squadrons of glittering cavalry galloping across the plain under a cloudless sky, adding the thunder of their hooves to that of a thousand guns.

  All day the battle swayed across the Marchfield, Davout and Oudinot’s grenadiers carrying the villages on the right, Macdonald, son of a Highland exile, earning his baton and the Emperor’s long-withheld favour by a suicidal attack on the centre. Fifteen hundred from Macdonald’s sixteen thousand marched out of that battle.

  On the French left, where the voltigeurs fought alongside Boudet’s infantry of the line, old Massena slowly yielded ground to the enemy’s main attack, sitting all day in an open carriage amid a tempest of shot, calmly directing a withdrawal to lure the enemy within range of the Lobau batteries. All day the miserly old Italian sat there, his thin knees spread with maps. Vainglory, obst
inacy or both had caused him to choose four white horses for his carriage, well knowing that such an entourage would attract fire. His coachman Pils kept his place on the box, constantly steadying the plunging animals. The marshal sat there, massaging his injured thigh, rubbing his chin and screwing up his one sound eye, as though he were turning over a gardening problem in one of the ornate summer-houses on his country estate.

  The issue of the battle was never in doubt. It was combat after the old style, stirring the veterans’ memories of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, but the artillery fire was weightier and more destructive than at any of these battles, and the losses, on both sides, were proportionately heavy.

  Marshal Bessières, charging at the head of the Guard, after Macdonald had carved his way through the Austrian centre, was hurled from his horse by a cannon ball but escaped with a slight wound. Other high-ranking officers were not as lucky. At the end of the action three generals had been killed, twenty-one wounded. Among the dead was the dashing Lasalle, whom Louis, an excellent judge in such matters, considered the best horseman in the army.

  The victory was complete and Austrian resistance collapsed, but there had been a moment on the French left when the infantry feared for another Aspern. Forced back along the river banks, raked by crossfire and harried by heavy cavalry, Boudet’s light troops had been almost cut to pieces. Bernadotte’s Saxon corps broke under the strain and fled in all directions, mercilessly sabred by the Austrian cavalry. The voltigeurs of the Eighty-seventh were sent up in support, firing their first shots of the day, forming a square and shouting to the fugitives to take refuge in their ranks. The Saxons, however, were too demoralized to heed advice that might have saved their units from extermination. They swept over and through the squares, opening up lanes through which the Habsburg troopers pranced and slashed.