Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  He tore open the byre door, but no animals stampeded into the open. He had forgotten, in his wild panic, that the cows were chained to an oak bar that ran the length of the outhouse. He hovered a moment, uncertain what to do, and then leaped the fence and ran round to the back of the cottage. There was no sign of the girls or of Manny. He plunged across the little vegetable patch and laid his hand on the iron latch of the back door. The heat was terrific and he was blinded by smoke, choked by the pungent smell of burning wool where sparks were smouldering in his epaulettes.

  Then he heard a scream and a confused medley of sounds. A huge shower of sparks soared up in his face and a man’s arm was flung across his throat, dragging him back, across the vegetables, towards the woods. He clawed at the arm with all his strength, but it held on like the bite of a steel trap. The glare of the fire faded and the merry roar of the flames was shut off, as though somebody had slammed a heavy door on them. He lost consciousness.

  When he regained his senses he was sitting with his back to a tree and Manny was kneeling over him, forcing the neck of a small bottle of brandy between his teeth. The raw spirit made him retch and he gulped for air.

  Presently the brandy had its effect and his brain cleared. He looked round and saw Manny, naked except for his shirt, sitting back on his haunches and regarding him with an expression of mild concern.

  “I thought you were gone,” was all he said.

  They were silent for a while. Finally, Gabriel nerved himself to ask the question: “Were any of them saved?”

  Manny shook his head and slowly massaged his bare thighs.

  “After we got down Louise ran in at the front. I tried to stop her, but she’s got a punch like a mule’s kick.” He rubbed the side of his jaw, and Gabriel, in the soft light of the glow from below, noticed that his face looked lopsided. “That cripple must have fired the place,” Manny added. “He hopped out for a moment with his clothes alight. He was still holding a faggot and screeching like a fiend. I didn’t see either of the others. He’d probably staved in their heads before he put his torch to the place. You’d have gone, too, if I hadn’t caught you.”

  “I wish you had let me try,” Gabriel said quietly and suddenly began to sob.

  Manny made no attempt to comfort him. He got up abruptly.

  “I’m going to forage around for some breeches,” he said. “I might come across something.” Then he stooped and flung a bulky object at Gabriel’s feet. “I brought this out of the loft when I jumped into the yard. God knows why; it just happened to come to hand.”

  It was Gabriel’s sketchbook. Gabriel considered the incongruity of Manny’s act of salvage. Two men and two women burned to death. A farm and its livestock charred to a cinder. Yet here was his sketchbook, not even soiled by drifting smuts.

  Manny came back to him after a time. He had found a sack in one of the outhouses which had been saved from utter destruction by its wide drinking trough, filled to the brim before supper that evening. Tearing a hole in each corner of the sack, he slipped the course garment over his loins, belting it with a strip of linen wrenched from the hem of his shirt.

  “Let’s march,” he said, leading the way down the narrow path to the moored punt, and Gabriel experienced another shock in the realization that Manny had already thrust the tragedy into the back of his mind. To the Jew the gutted farm and its charred bodies were already as far away as the grenadier whom Gabriel had killed in the bedroom of the cottage at Essling. To Manny the incident was sad, but not overwhelmingly so. It was another unpleasant stage on the journey, a patch of mud they had not been able to circumnavigate on the march, a musket with a broken stock that had to be tossed aside on the route.

  A great cloud seemed to rise up and blot out Gabriel’s brain. He sat in the punt and watched Manny skilfully poling his way through the shadows. Last night there had been Karen, a girl with blue eyes and honey-coloured plaits, who had held his body close to hers in the coarse grass on the hillside. Today she was gone, along with all those huddled forms that he passed and repassed in the village street at Essling and in the cornfields at Wagram. Tomorrow this indifferent acrobat maybe, or Dominique the fiddler, or Old Jean, or himself, would cross over into the ranks of the newly dead and join the countless army of those who had once watched the sun setting on a bank of campion and cow-parsley, who had once smelled roasted meat and tasted the tang of the sea, had savoured wine and women’s kisses. There was no end to this process, and no beginning. A few short years of heat and cold, struggle and relaxation, hunger and satiety, a constant swing from one extreme to another, with nothing outside the pigmy limits of these crude contrasts.

  He began to understand the fantastic but cunningly disguised melancholy of it all, and the constant staving off of the inevitable by the parrying instinct. On the retina of his memory he saw an image of a Saxon infantryman, one of those harried by the Austrian cavalry in the charge near the river. The fellow had been slashed by a dozen sabre cuts, his bare head was streaming blood, but he did not surrender life and lie down to die. Instead he kept running to and fro, like a worried ant, until even the callous troopers ceased to waste further blows on him and turned their attention to others. Then, with a sort of grotesque grace, like a savage in a symbolic dance, the man sank down and bowed his shoulders in death. The impulse to go on living was as unreasoning as it was universal. Gabriel wondered why nobody troubled to think it out, why sick men, numb with pain, stricken with wounds and disease, should nerve themselves to get up and struggle a few yards farther down the road, looking, with miserable envy, after their comrades, whose time had not yet come and who went on acting as though it never would come, right up to the final moment.

  Before they reached the outskirts of the city he thumbed idly through the book that lay upon his knees. His thumb moved a loose page and he took it out. It was his first drawing of Karen. Two days before he had asked her to lend it to him for retouching and she had done so reluctantly. He fingered the jagged edges of the rent made in the corner of the page by the cow’s horn. The playful moment seemed infinitely far off, something half-remembered from his childhood. He resisted an impulse to drop the sketch into the rippling water. Instead he pushed off the clip that gripped the pages and clamped the torn sheet in its place.

  Manny straightened his back. He looked absurd standing there in the stern, draped in his piece of sacking and the tatters of a shirt.

  “The Devil take that cripple,” he said lightly. “Unless I can lie well enough I shall have to pay for a new uniform. Here, take the pole now, we don’t want to attract attention.”

  He steadied the punt while Gabriel moved across and took the pole. As it began to grow light they passed the first of the suburbs. The streets were already astir. Far off, in the grounds of the imperial Palace, they heard the shrilling of a bugle as the Young Guard got under arms. A wagon, piled high with golden barley, splashed across the ford, heading for the main road to the north. Manny glanced after it, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle.

  “It’s time we made a move,” he said. “Hurry, we’ll make it before reveille.”

  Gabriel plunged the ten-foot pole into the weeds. A spot of water fell onto the buff covers of his sketchbook. Behind them the stream curved into the trees, and high above the thinning foliage he saw a small black cloud, stationary in the pale sky.

  PART TWO

  The Tagus

  CHAPTER ONE

  Massena’s army, eighty thousand strong, was marching down the broad metalled highway to Salamanca. For more than twenty leagues the motley caravan extended, winding back towards the frontier like a blue and silver snake, sending up clouds of choking dust that hung motionless above the route, marking out the army’s crawling progress to the watchful guerrillas posted along the chain of mountain observation posts that looked down on the valley of the Douro.

  Napoleon, impatient of sterile campaigns in the Peninsula, and irritated by the continued presence of a small British force that refused to be dri
ven back to its transports but remained to put new heart into the fanatical resistance of the Spanish peasantry, had made a decision. Regiments of the Young Guard, freed from service in Austria by the recent conclusion of peace, finally sealed by the Habsburg marriage, had been refitted for service in Spain. Line regiments, thoroughly rested after their brief but arduous campaign on the Danube, had been sent across Europe in relays of four-horse wagons, picking up recruits en route. Heavy cavalry under the bearded Montbrun, the light horsemen of Sainte-Croix and thousands of baggage wagons made up the cavalcade that wound its way over the Spanish frontier and down into Portugal.

  At its head rode the reluctant Massena, worn out by twenty years of active service, longing for retirement and leisure to count his hoarded millions and toy with his latest mistress. This pretty lady was obliged to follow the line of march, and did so resolutely enough in the becoming uniform of a light dragoon. Veterans who passed her were not impressed; she was one more non-combatant mouth to feed in a country made desolate by three years’ ferocious warfare and populated, outside the big towns, by bands of ruthless partisans who swooped down on stragglers and small convoys and outdid the Turks of happier campaigns in the variety of the methods they employed to despatch their prisoners.

  Behind Massena rode his unruly lieutenants, choleric, red-headed Ney, the sardonic Reynier, softly spoken Foy and General Junot, already a little unbalanced by a wound in the head, all of them envying Marshal Soult and the others who had buried themselves and their self-supporting armies in far-off Spanish provinces, where they ruled like independent kings, out of reach of the War Department in Paris and cut off, by distance and guerrilla activity, from the hand that sought to coordinate this sprawling war.

  The army hated Spain. Most of the veterans had served in the earlier campaigns in the Peninsula, and had communicated their dislike to the footsore conscripts and to those soldiers whose garrison duties had kept them, fat and contented, in the well-stocked fortresses of Germany or the sunny billets of Italy. There was no loot to be had in these wretched little villages, which hardly broke the monotony of the main road. An hour’s lagging behind the column meant almost certain death, and death with the refinements of Oriental torture. There were few women to be found, most of them having fled to the mountains or starved to death on the untilled farms of the plains. Food was scarce, even at this early stage of the expedition. Draught horses and mules were almost unobtainable and beyond the reach of any but high-ranking officers with money to burn. The sun was pitiless, a fierce African sun far different from the golden sunshine of the Danube. It struck down on chafed shoulders as though it were an active ally of the Spaniards, intent on withering the French columns before they had accomplished half the distance between the Pyrenees and the Portuguese frontier. Several men in the Eighty-seventh went down with heatstroke and died, raving, in the stifling villages along the route. Others, with festering feet, lay in the springless wagons, happy to be carried along to the nearest hospital and not abandoned to the knives of the Navarrese and Castilian partisans.

  The voltigeurs marched in Ney’s division, sometimes acting as skirmishers along the flanks of the tortured columns, beating the open country and now and then surprising a ragged marksman, who would rise from the scrub and run like a hare toward the mountains.

  Old Jean was more cheerful than usual. He had served under Ney in several campaigns in the past and had implicit faith in the Alsatian’s courage and tactics, although he held a poor opinion of his ability to handle anything larger than a corps. Jean had fought in Spain under Lannes in 1808. He knew the Spanish and their crude methods of warfare. He reiterated the officers’ warnings to the young troops about the folly of straggling and was sometimes seen, like a grizzled sheepdog, hovering up and down the line of march, ordering this man to carry a weaker comrade’s musket, that man to fall out and grease his feet with a special preparation of tallow and goose fat, stored in an earthenware jar in Nicholette’s wagon and used sparingly for bad cases of blistering.

  Nicholette’s canteen travelled with the company, the file taking turns to ride on the box and tailboard. Fouché, the mongrel that had followed them from the Danube, panted along in the shade of the rear axle. The file had become attached to the dog and shared their food with it, but during the march down from the Pyrenees Fouché’s need was for water and he drank greedily at every ford. Nicholette, who held the reins of the two Flemish horses, seldom showed signs of the common fatigue, setting up her trestles at every bivouac and selling the light Spanish wines which she and Claude had managed to purchase at Tolosa, soon after they passed the Pyrenees.

  Claude was morose during the march. He was beginning to wonder whether the girl had tired of him during their long stay in Vienna. She was still dutiful and there had been no open quarrel, but he could never rouse in her responses equal to those of the first few weeks after the wedding. She seldom spoke to him except about business or routine duties in connection with the wagon and horses. Sometimes, when he sat beside her during his spells on the driving-seat, he realized that her mind was far away, moving purposefully along the lanes of a dream world where there were no uniforms, no battles, no dust-choked men to be served at each halt in the endless trek.

  Occasionally he caught her looking at Nicholas in a queer, concentrated way, and the first quirks of jealousy nagged him. Nothing had happened, however, to confirm this suspicion. She talked to Nicholas more than to any of the others because Nicholas usually had more to talk about. Very occasionally he made her laugh, and Claude, hearing her laugh for the first time, decided that he did not like the sound. It was a harsh rattle, like the sudden tug of a chain coupling on an artillery caisson rusty from disuse.

  He realized dismally that he knew no more about the woman now than on the night when she had sat beside him during the wedding carousal. She had never spoken her thoughts or described her feelings. She had no convictions about anyone or anything. Yet, despite this reticence, she always managed to convey the impression that she had already drawn her own conclusions about all of them, not only the members of the file but the army, the generals, the campaign and the war.

  It was uncanny that she never seemed to feel pain, heat, fatigue or even thirst in this Devil’s country. She was neat and competent in everything she did, and if she was required to do something beyond her physical strength, which was not often, she never attempted it but quietly asked him to accomplish the work and then came to inspect the results.

  Claude sometimes wondered if she would have a child; whether, in this event, it would break down her reserve and improve their relationship. She did not, apparently, do anything to prevent conception, but more than a year had gone by since their marriage and her figure was still as slender and graceful as on the day he had first seen her helping Old Carla to scour the wagon in Dresden. He was not anxious to be a father. What could one do with a pregnant woman on a trip like this? And even supposing that she was able to have the child in one of the strongly held towns between their present position and Portugal, what would they do with an infant in arms during a retreat or a general attack?

  He knew that she would never willingly abandon the canteen. When it came to money she had the tenacity of a Norman smallholder. He did not know how much money she possessed or even where it was hidden, if she carried it with her, which he felt was likely. It must, he thought, be a considerable sum, for Old Carla was known to have made steady profits over a number of years. As he lay beside her in the hooped tent throughout the stifling nights, Claude wondered if she would ever trust him as he felt that he ought to be trusted. After all, it was she who had chosen him when she might have had the pick of a thousand men. By this time he was aware of the facts regarding Jean’s straw ballot. She had whispered them in his ear during that first idyllic night on the islet. He had been immeasurably gratified at the time, but now he sometimes wondered whether other considerations had directed her choice. Perhaps she did not want a man who would require anything more tha
n her body. Perhaps she cherished her solitary thoughts and had an active aversion to sharing them with anyone.

  The march was proving a lonely one for Claude. Jean was often at some distance from the company and rejoined them only when it bivouacked. Louis and Nicholas scouted on the right flank, Claude pairing with Dominique on the left. The farm boy chattered like a magpie and went hallooing over the rocks in pursuit of stray Spaniards, as though he enjoyed moving at the double under full equipment and the scourge of a noonday sun.

  Gabriel and Manny were farther to the rear, having been assigned as guards to a column of would-be deserters, conscripts marshalled at Pau after individual attempts to evade service.

  Apart from wrist fetters the men were no longer shackled. Escape in this countryside was impossible now that the army was well inside Spain. On arrival at Salamanca they were to be split up among various units, but the company’s orders had been to keep them under close guard and secure them at night, until they could be absorbed into regiments where they would be under permanent observation.

  Captain Vidal, the company’s senior officer, was a strict disciplinarian. Obeying the letter of his commands, he had the men marched under guard and each night, after supper, saw them yoked together in batches of twenty by lengths of light chain carried in one of the ambulances. Captain Vidal had won the Legion of Honour at Raab after more than twenty years’ active service. He was a ruthlessly efficient soldier, and if he had been given his way he would have shot the prisoners en masse before they left France. To clutter up the march with a mob of men who had already done their best to evade service, nursing them along in the slender hope that one or two, finding no alternative, might turn out to be good soldiers in the end, seemed to him the outside limit of idiocy. So he dispensed with outlying flank guards and enclosed the conscripts within an oblong of veteran infantrymen. He also made sure that his charges were not overfed during the march.