Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Gabriel saw the big boatswain turn away and look down at the choppy water. Some of the Frenchmen wept openly.

  The tune came to an end as suddenly as it had begun, and Dominique, conscious of the impression he had made, flushed and quickly thrust the fiddle back into the unresisting hands of its owner. As he did so a storm of cheering broke out over the forecastle and Dominique found himself surrounded on all sides, some men reaching out to thump his narrow shoulders, others grasping his moist hands to reinforce a shower of extravagant compliments.

  In the middle of this confusion, which had begun to alarm both the officer of the watch and the corporal of the marine escort, Gabriel heard a high-pitched voice calling his name. He looked round, but could see no one that he recognized in the mob of prisoners and seamen. Yet there was no mistaking that unnaturally shrill voice. He called to Nicholas, who was watching the scene with one of his bitter smiles, a smile which did much to express his contemptuous pity for these monkeys whose pigmy enthusiasms he was forced to witness.

  At that moment a spare figure forced its way through the press, and two long, sinewy arms clutched Gabriel round the neck. Nicholas’s smile was instantly replaced by an expression of delighted astonishment. He bounded forward with a loud cry.

  “Jean! Dear God, it’s Jean!”

  The old sergeant thrust one arm over Gabriel’s shoulder and seized Nicholas by the hand. Dominique, catching a glimpse of the sergeant through his circle of admirers, burrowed through them like a fugitive stoat and began to caper about the deck, uttering shrill cries of welcome.

  Gabriel noticed that Jean was weeping unashamedly. The music and the sudden recognition of his lost children was too much for him. He did not weep as easily as most Frenchmen, but on this occasion he made no attempt to wipe away the tears that coursed down his prominent cheekbones, features concerning which Nicholas had often said: “Are you sure that your father didn’t campaign in China, Jean?”

  The officious corporal of marines began to hustle them back to their cage, and Old Jean, hastily slipping off his tattered coat, the sleeve of which betrayed his rank, crowded in with the others, jabbering away like a fishwife while he tried to shake four pairs of hands at once.

  In the artificial twilight of the pens they exchanged stories. Nicholas told the sergeant of their march in the rain to the British fortifications, of the hopeless weeks of mock siege and the disaster near the wrecked gunboat resulting in the death of young Claude.

  Jean looked solemn for a moment.

  “I wonder what’s happened to Nicholette,” he said.

  “She’ll manage all right,” replied Nicholas, and Gabriel thought that he detected a note of harshness in his voice, an eagerness to dismiss the topic of the slight, unsmiling woman in her rackety old wagon. He knew Nicholas very well by this time, and, looking at him now, he felt that he had learned his secret.

  They had all pondered about the future of Nicholette during the last few weeks. Gabriel had something of Claude’s awe for the woman, but, unlike Claude, his admiration of her extended beyond the physical. Plodding along the wheel ruts during the march across Spain and Portugal, he had often glanced up at her erect figure on the driving-box with a mixture of wonder and affection, marvelling that such a small frame could endure all that she did without an occasional wail of discontent. If she had been less attractive as a woman, he could have dismissed it as one of those freaks of circumstance that occur, from time to time, in all fields of human action. As it was, with her clear skin and healthy, pleasing figure, she could have taken her place at any time in the establishment of a senior officer in one of the larger garrison towns. Or, if she preferred security, she could easily have married into one of the civilian branches of the army and settled down to comfortable bourgeois life. Even whilst thinking of this, however, Gabriel concluded that either of these callings would have been too flabby and too isolated for Nicholette. Reared in the camps, on the move from earliest infancy, her only home the wagon or the bivouac (with slightly more expansive but equally temporary dwellings during the limited periods of garrison work that fell to the light infantry), Nicholette seemed to crave movement and the rough comradeship of men. This regiment, this company and, above all, this particular file represented for Nicholette the home, family and husband of a normal woman. Her childhood and girlhood had been abnormal; her womanhood followed the same course. Gabriel, whose artist’s eye was a shade keener than the eyes of the others, with the possible exception of Nicholas, had long since discerned that a lifetime of physical discomfort could never make Nicholette unhappy. Nobody who had grown up with Old Carla would expect anything from life but hard knocks and constant exertion.

  He turned from his reflections to listen to Old Jean. The sergeant’s tale was simple enough. After the capture of the Coimbra hospital he had been carted off to Oporto. He was more fortunate than most in that his wound had almost healed. He thus survived a journey that accounted for hundreds of the more seriously wounded men, to spend a dismal period of confinement in a crowded warehouse which had been converted into a ramshackle prison by the jubilant Portuguese. British supervision had done little to ease the plight of the prisoners. Up at Oporto English officers were few and appallingly overworked. They were faced with the task of welding the Portuguese levies into an army capable of facing the French. It was a grave responsibility. The British were not unaware of the fact that, however underfed and ill-equipped Massena’s veterans were, they could still scatter a Portuguese army with a single charge.

  At length British frigates took the surviving prisoners aboard and ran them down the coast to Lisbon, where they joined the voltigeurs’ convoy. Jean felt his captivity more keenly than the younger men. To him capture was still a disgrace, however much it might be excused by circumstances. He had been wounded nine times in various campaigns but had never before been taken prisoner. His only consolation was that at the time of capture he was not under arms. But he was immensely cheered by reunion with his file. It restored his sense of responsibility, and, with men whom he could trust at his side, there was always the possibility of escape, even from England.

  He did not return to the sergeants’ cage, though it was far less crowded than the den occupied by the other ranks. He sat propped up against a bulkhead, puffing at the same old broken pipe, the fumes from which did nothing to sweeten the poisonous atmosphere of the prisoners’ hold.

  Every day, when they were let out for exercise, the big boatswain beckoned to Dominique to climb over the rail and play a few tunes. For his services the British fiddler gave him a few handfuls of tobacco when he returned the fiddle.

  That was how Old Jean managed to smoke all the way to Plymouth Sound.

  PART THREE

  The Otter

  CHAPTER ONE

  They did not go to the hulks, those living hells concerning which rumours had penetrated as far as the French cantonments outside Lisbon. The hulks, at this stage in the war, were reserved for prisoners with a bad record, earned either in attempts to escape after breaking parole or on account of violent conduct in their places of confinement. Conditions aboard these beached, verminous vessels were indescribable. Men lay and rotted with scurvy and semi-starvation. Murderous assaults upon guards were frequent. Prisoners often went mad and leaped overboard at high tide, or hanged themselves with strips torn from their rags.

  The new prison at Dartmoor, specially built to receive French prisoners of war, was already full. Commenced in 1806, it was not yet complete, but all the blocks so far erected were crammed with soldiers captured in Spain and the Low Countries and with sailors from the French privateers and coasting vessels which had fallen into the hands of the blockading squadrons.

  The disposal of the new convoy of prisoners taxed the Plymouth Commandant’s ingenuity. He had had frequent requests from big landowners in the district for agricultural workers and labourers. Army recruiting, together with the activities of the press-gang, and the constant migration of rural populations to the
manufacturing towns were rapidly draining the farms and the smaller coastal communities of their manpower. Landowners in the West Country asked if they could engage paroled prisoners for routine work on their estates, and the military commissioners of various districts had been given permission to use their discretion in the granting of such requests. One such appeal had been sent in by Lord Rolle, a powerful landowner of East Devon, whose principal seat was at Bicton.

  Lord Rolle’s letter was placed on the Commandant’s desk a day or two after the new convoy had discharged. His Lordship was asking for two hundred men for special work in the East Devon area. He particularly wanted engineers, men with a knowledge of dyke building.

  There were not more than a dozen engineers among this latest batch. There were, however, a large number of men anxious to give their parole.

  Old Jean and Nicholas had a lengthy argument on the subject. Jean was strongly against the giving of his parole. He was determined to escape as soon as a chance offered itself. Nicholas took a more cynical view. Escape, he said, was practically impossible anyhow, and even if it proved successful it only meant prompt despatch to one’s regiment and a resumption of the old familiar round of marching, starving, fighting and, ultimately, dying.

  The younger men were inclined to agree with the corporal. Spain had drained away their enthusiasm for a military life, and the humane treatment of the British up to this point encouraged them in the belief that there were far worse fates than that of a prisoner of war in England—the fate of a free man in front of Torres Vedras, for instance.

  They ended by compromising. Jean, on behalf of the group, gave his parole for six months, comforting himself by the reflection that he would need this period to assess the chances of escape and to accumulate the means of making it likely to succeed. A few days later they all were packed into farm wagons and sent off under a light guard to Exeter. Here, in the castle yard, they were sorted for various assignments. One of Gabriel’s gold pieces, still snug in the broad leather belt which he wore waking and sleeping, ensured that the five of them were not split up. With nearly two hundred other men, the voltigeurs joined a column for Bicton Park, a large enclosure on the East Devon coast, midway between the little coastal towns of Sidmouth and Exmouth. They were housed temporarily in large stables behind the red brick mansion, and Lord Rolle himself came down with Mr. Duke, a neighbouring landowner, who required men for the execution of a scheme long dear to his heart.

  The prisoners, working under expert supervision, were detailed to erect a long, curving bank at the mouth of the River Otter, a shallow stream which had once seen a considerable amount of wool and wine trading to and from the Continent. There were two villages close by, Otterton, about a mile and a half up the river, and Budley, slightly to the west of its neighbour. Until comparatively recent times, both had been important centres for wool distribution, while returning vessels imported Continental wines. Now the villages were dwindling communities, their decay being due to the accumulation of a vast pebble ridge which all but sealed the mouth of the river. In summertime the stream was unnavigable for vessels of more than a few tons burthen.

  Mr. Duke, who owned most of the manors in the district, had won over Lord Rolle to his scheme of clearing the river mouth and restoring this channel of local prosperity. He planned to build a large earthen breakwater, running inland from high-water mark west of the river, and thus to confine the tidal water to a limited area. He had great hopes that this would have the effect of deepening the little estuary and opening it up once again for larger vessels; Birmingham contractors informed him that the pebble ridge could be cleared away as soon as the breakwater had been completed.

  Local inhabitants were more sceptical. They considered Mr. Duke a harmless crank and were perturbed by the invasion of two hundred Frenchmen. Fed for years on atrocity stories of the Napoleonic soldiers in Europe, they looked upon the ragged column as a horde of savages turned loose in their midst. Deputations were sent to Lord Rolle and Mr. Duke to protest against this open invitation to ravage the district. Such prejudice did not endure. Within a matter of weeks, the paroled Frenchmen were accepted as men whose savagery was limited to frog-eating.

  In the early spring of 1811 the first spadefuls of earth were turned and a curious gathering of farmers, gamekeepers and fishermen stood about watching the commencement of the bank with interest, and the usual rural jests. They dubbed the enterprise “Dukey’s Folly.”

  Jean and his four companions were billeted in a hayloft on the Bicton estate. Every morning except Sundays they marched without escort to the Otter marshes and went to work with pickaxe and mattock. Each night, when the sun was setting over the wide expanse of Channel that faced them, they stacked their tools in the storehouse of the resident engineer, who occupied farmhouse lodgings on the river bank, and marched home again to their loft.

  It was a pleasant, humdrum life and they were not sorry that they had taken Nicholas’s advice and given their parole. Food, in this agricultural district, was plentiful and wholesome, while the work, although physically hard, was no more arduous than building gun-emplacements on Lobau. All five of them, greatly reduced in weight by the rigours of the Spanish campaign, began to put on flesh again so that “Dukey’s Folly” was popular enough among the French, whatever local people might think of its comic futility.

  As warm spring days succeeded the drizzle of winter, and the south wind bent the rushes and flags along the diggings, Gabriel came to love the soft Devon land. He often thought of his sketchbooks, still in the common locker of Nicholette’s wagon, and wondered if she would take care of them during the inevitable retreat into Spain. He began sketching a little with pieces of charcoal, but paper was hard to obtain. None of the rustics possessed any and he made no serious attempts at drawing until he persuaded Nicholas to approach the local parson, who came over from Budley once a week to inspect the progress of his patron’s scheme.

  The priest, who was a good-natured fellow, returned a few days later with his saddle-bag crammed with scrap paper. Gabriel thanked him and that afternoon, during a rest period, executed one of his best landscapes, a view of the high red cliffs rolling away to the west, gashed by a series of little gullies that the local people called “goyles,” long, deep clefts running down to the beach, their steep sides covered with brambles and gorse. The sketch is one of two that he brought away from England.

  Summer brought a riot of colour to the overgrown banks of the Devon stream. Ragwort, speedwell, convolvulus, campion sprouted everywhere amid the tangles of cow-parsley and wild briar. Kingfishers flashed from rock to rock, and screaming gulls sailed upstream in their ceaseless hunt for eels. Back in their billet when the day’s digging was over, the French arranged concerts, occasionally attended by Lord Rolle and his lady and often by the beaming Mr. Duke, who was rapidly becoming a Francophile, so delighted was he with the progress of his scheme. Dominique had found time and materials to make another fiddle. Scores of curious cottagers came into the barn and guffawed uproariously when he capered a Gascon dance to his own accompaniment.

  At harvest-time all work on the bank ceased by Mr. Duke’s order, the men being put to work in the fields instead, and afterwards regaled, in the manor barn, with quarts of rough Devonshire cider that sent scores of the Frenchmen staggering to their huts and lofts shouting snatches from the songs that had helped them over weary leagues in Poland and Bohemia or through the passes of the Spanish sierras.

  Long afterwards Gabriel looked back on these months as the most contented of his life. He could have wished that they would go on forever and told Jean as much. The old sergeant looked glum.

  “You too?” he queried, in a low voice.

  Gabriel began to argue, but the veteran cut him short with a impatient wave of his hand.

  “It’s well enough for you, all of you,” he admitted, “but for me—I’ve followed the drum since I was a boy. A man can’t change that so easily at my age. I’m starved for the sound of a cavalry trumpet. I
stand here, week after week, swinging a pick when I ought to be shouldering a musket. I’ve been with HIM ever since he was a fledgeling in Italy, and I can’t help wondering what he’s got up to since that lunatic campaign in Portugal.”

  The sergeant resumed his digging and Gabriel looked at him with a tolerant smile, ignoring the gesture of a plump artilleryman at work in the same trench. The artilleryman, who had overheard the conversation, significantly tapped his forehead.

  To know Jean was to understand the years of unbroken success that attended French arms up to that unlucky day on the banks of the Danube in 1809.

  Nicholas put it into words: “Men of Jean’s generation were caught by the flood tide of the Revolution. Almost all of them went out with the volunteers to fight the professional armies of the old régimes. What happened? A miracle, perhaps. They smashed those armies, time and again, and chased them home to their own capitals. You can’t wonder that they learned to consider themselves invincible. Their battalions stormed across Europe half-naked, shoeless, sometimes dangerously short of firearms. Instead of artillery they used revolutionary slogans, they sang the ‘Sambre et Meuse.’”

  Gabriel interrupted. “Jean doesn’t identify himself with the Revolution,” he pointed out. “He despises it!”

  “He identifies himself with Bonaparte,” replied Nicholas, “and that’s the same thing under an imperial mantle. Every man of Jean’s generation feels that he shares personally in the glory of conquest. Don’t ask me to explain their idea of glory. Perhaps it’s a substitute, in men like Jean, for the land-hunger of mediæval Jacks, for education or for avarice. I don’t know; I only know that there have always been Western Europeans who have grown up and grouped themselves round a lucky adventurer. Caesar had his tenth legion; Gustavus Adolphus his pikemen; the English despot Cromwell had his psalm-singing cavalry; Bonaparte his Old Guard and the grognards, like Jean. Napoleon knows all this. He knows that this Empire of his is a thing of gilded tatters, held together by one thread. When the thread wears thin and breaks, as it must sooner or later, the whole thing will fall to pieces in less than a year. I advise you to stay here and watch the climax from a safe distance. Then you can go home and help to gather up the pieces, if the Habsburgs and Romanoffs leave any lying about!”