“So you see the loot was of some use to me after all,” he said, with a wry smile.
Jean worried his moustache. “It’s too early to say that. What are you going to do now?”
Soutier said nothing and Jean felt a slight pang of sympathy for the man. Soutier was unused to this kind of campaign. Before entering Spain he had never heard a shot fired but had mooched about putting on flesh in German billets. Jean reflected that a man’s luck didn’t last forever.
“I’ll crack a bottle in memory of you when we get into Prussia,” said Jean.
Soutier hesitated, as though trying to make up his mind to say something. When Jean moved away he reached out and caught his arm.
“I did fairly well for myself in the old days, Jean. I got married after the Jena campaign, and my old woman, she’s got a good farm near Erfurt. What would you say to a thousand francs for taking me along? We’ve lost touch with our own transport.”
Gabriel looked at Jean. The sergeant’s face was expressionless. Soutier watched it as a deserter might study the face of an officer presiding over his court martial.
“It’s company I need more than transport,” said Soutier.
“Can you walk?” Jean asked at length.
“I shall have to. I’m better now, anyhow; the rest did me good.”
“You’d better trail along after us, then, but we’ll make short work of your old woman’s stock when we do get to Erfurt!”
Soutier was so voluble in his thanks that he almost choked. He kept repeating his offer of a thousand francs over and over again until Jean cut him short.
“We don’t want your money, Sergeant-Major; we’ll take the geese, fat, tender geese, cooked with onions in a litre of dripping!”
Soutier sighed and poked about on the edge of the fire for a place to rest his kettle. They pooled half their rations to make soup, and Dominique brought in some horseflesh. There was no salt and so they made do with powder. It was a good meal, their best since leaving Vyazma.
Before it was light a section of the Guard held a muster in the principal street. Gabriel heard that they were recruiting a rearguard, and Jean told them all to keep out of sight. A few officers went round routing the stragglers out from the cellars, but the column that marched out of the east gate was barely two hundred strong. They were sent back to replace Marshal Ney and his corps, now given up as lost.
That morning the three voltigeurs tried to get news of Nicholas and the wagon, but all transport had moved out the previous day. Jean thought it probable that Nicholas was well ahead. He heard nothing to suggest the contrary and there seemed to be no sign of the vehicle among the mass of broken carts and carriages that were being used for firewood in the main streets of the town.
They left Smolensk after a twelve-hour halt and marched all that day and all the next, crossing the battlefield of Krasnoe with the remnants of Eugène’s corps. The blizzard caught them again in the forest and they weathered the storm in a crowded coaching-house. Towards evening of the third day Soutier began to lag. So far he had kept up remarkably well, but his right foot was causing him acute pain and several times Dominique had to go back for him. Jean was carrying his knapsack and musket.
Shortly before dark they saw a big village ahead of them, and as stragglers made very determined efforts to reach shelter before every building was occupied, Jean detailed Dominique to assist Soutier and hurried on with Gabriel to see what could be done to find a billet for the night. They came up with a party of artillerymen and joined them in a fight with men of Eugène’s guard, who had barricaded themselves in a single-storey hovel on the outskirts of the village. Unsuccessful in their attempt to storm the hut, the gunners began to pull it down from the outside, determined to have a fire if they were forced to sleep in the open. The Italians resisted bitterly and several were wounded in the fight. More stragglers came up to assist the gunners, and the hut was soon torn to pieces and converted into firewood. Jean and Gabriel established themselves on the inner ring and awaited the arrival of Dominique and Soutier. They cooked a couple of oatmeal cakes and thawed four potatoes, giving nothing away.
The men round the fire began to move on before it was light. There were Cossacks in the neighbourhood, and all who were able to continue the march were anxious to keep as close as possible to the Guard, now making for the Berezina. There were rumours that Marshal Oudinot’s fresh corps was covering the crossing, and every man who had struggled thus far made his best attempt to reach the river before the Russian armies hovering along each flank were able to concentrate.
Dominique and Soutier had not yet appeared, but Jean showed no anxiety until mid-morning, when he and Gabriel were alone at the fire except for two or three dying men unable to move another step. Jean said that he supposed Soutier had collapsed and Dominique, obeying his sergeant’s orders to the letter, had remained with him throughout the night. Dozens of stragglers passed the bivouac during the morning, but neither Dominique nor the sergeant-major was among them.
By midday Jean was obliged to make a decision, either to push on and abandon the other two or to go back along the road and look for them. He considered the problem carefully. If he and Gabriel moved on to Orsha, Dominique must be considered lost. Jean knew that the farm boy would never abandon Soutier without orders; he would remain with him until both of them died or were taken prisoner. He felt certain that they were close at hand, for when Jean and Gabriel had pushed on into the village the previous night they were barely an hour’s march behind. The sergeant felt no qualms about abandoning Soutier. He and the sergeant-major had come to an understanding, but if Soutier could not walk any farther the arrangement was automatically cancelled. Regarding Dominique the position was quite different. Jean had never yet failed in his duty towards the men placed in his charge. After some thought the sergeant decided to return. He explained his reasons to Gabriel, at the same time releasing him from any military obligation to join in the search.
“It’s my own fault,” he told Gabriel gruffly. “I told Dominique to look after Soutier and I owe it to the boy to go back and give him permission to abandon the old fool.”
Gabriel observed that anyone except Dominique would have left the sergeant-major long ago, notwithstanding any instructions that he might have received from a sergeant.
Jean shook his head. “Dominique’s not like us,” he said. “He may be a bit weak in the head, but he’s a first-class soldier. I’ve got to go back, confound them.”
Gabriel understood Jean’s motives. He had not served with him all this time without discovering how the veteran’s mind worked.
“I’m coming with you, Jean,” he told him.
“Don’t be a fool; I’ll pick you up at tonight’s bivouac.”
“I’m not losing sight of you,” said Gabriel, and although he was jocular he meant it, for Old Jean had become a sort of talisman to them all. As long as the sergeant was marching alongside him Gabriel did not doubt their prospects of getting home. Jean possessed a toughness and ingenuity that no amount of privation and hardship could impair. Gabriel found it impossible to imagine Jean lying dead or Jean a prisoner, and his instincts told him to hang on to Jean even if the sergeant’s quixotic sense of duty impelled him to march east instead of west.
So they set off together, marching through the slush towards the wood where they had parted from Dominique.
They had not gone very far before they met an old chasseur blundering along, head down, and carrying his left arm in a sling. As they came abreast the chasseur looked at them with surprise.
Jean stopped, recognizing an old friend. “This is a bad business, Albert.”
They enquired after mutual friends, and Jean told the old soldier their reasons for retracing their steps. The chasseur shrugged.
“He must have been rounded up in the ambush. The Cossacks closed in on one of the fires about midnight and grabbed more than a score of them. I got off with this.” He glanced down at his arm and Gabriel saw that it was clumsily sp
linted with a pine branch. “Most of our fellows threw down their arms. You wouldn’t have a mouthful of brandy for an old comrade, would you? I could get on if only I had some brandy.”
Jean took out the flask and a small piece of sugar from his pocket; pouring spirit onto the sugar, he handed it to the delighted chasseur.
The man put it to his lips, sucking noisily. “This means twenty leagues to me, Jean,” he said.
“We’ll pick you up at the next bivouac,” Jean told him.
The chasseur grimaced. “It’s suicide to go back, comrade; the Cossacks are herding them all back to Smolensk. I got under cover and watched the column move off. They’ll all die en route. They might just as well have shot the prisoners on the spot, but you can’t expect the laws of war from savages.”
“How many hours have they been on the march?” asked Jean.
“Four to five; you won’t catch them now.”
“They’ll be marching at a snail’s pace,” Jean said and motioned Gabriel to move.
The chasseur readdressed himself to his sugar, wincing as the brandied morsel touched his cracked lips. He looked mournfully at the empty road.
“This is the craziest thing we ever did,” he muttered, sadly but without rancour.
Jean blew on his hands, one eye cocked at the ribbon of the Legion of Honour sewn on the chasseur’s tattered tunic.
“We got back from Acre, didn’t we, Albert?”
“Ah, Acre,” said the chasseur, with a rueful grin. “We were young bones in those days!”
He moved off slowly, picking his way over the hummocks. Jean and Gabriel unslung their muskets, looked at the priming and entered the wood.
They found the tracks easily enough, a wide area of trampled snow round a dead fire in a clearing. Beyond, a broad path of footprints curved off to the south through the more open portion of the forest. On each side of the tracks were the hoof marks of escorting horsemen.
They followed the tracks for the better part of two hours, and just before it got dark they came out of the wood and looked down on a small town huddled in a shallow valley a long musket shot from the last of the trees. Fires were already twinkling along the single street that ran between lines of one-storey log huts. More than a hundred Cossack ponies were tethered to a palisade of lances erected round a frozen pond close to the first house, while an incessant murmur of voices reached Jean and Gabriel in their cover on the edge of the wood. Jean guessed that the prisoners were all locked in one of the cabins and that their captors were busy getting drunk. The Cossacks were not popular with the peasantry. Their impact on a civilian community was usually as disastrous as that of the Guard had been in the heyday of the Empire, before the Emperor adopted conciliatory methods of ruling conquered territory.
“There’s the nut,” said Jean, biting his moustache. “All we have to do is crack it!”
Gabriel would not have given much for their chances of success. A company of well-armed and well-nourished infantrymen would be needed to storm a town held by two troops of Cossacks, whether they were drunk or sober.
“We’ll give them an hour or two,” said Jean, “and I hope one or two stray from the fold. It’s time we had some luck.”
They did have luck. Less than an hour after dark, when Gabriel was thinking that he would be unable to endure the torture of lying still in the snow a moment longer and was about to suggest that they go back into the wood and cook a meal, a single Cossack came out of one of the huts and untethered his horse, mounting and riding directly towards them. They saw him silhouetted against the rising moon as the pony walked leisurely up the slope towards the wood. The man was apparently setting out on some errand, perhaps to acquaint a larger body of troops with information or to ask for orders regarding the disposal of prisoners. As he came nearer they noticed that he swayed slightly in the saddle and they heard him crooning softly to himself as he let his horse find its own way through the drifts in the path leading to the forest.
The night was very still and they dared not risk firing a shot. Ordering Gabriel to remain where he was, screened by bushes on the edge of the path, Jean wriggled back towards the trees and regained the track where it was obstructed by a fallen tree. Jean had noted the spot before they settled down, and chose it now because he knew that the Cossack would have to dismount at this point. He crawled to the far side of the trunk and groped around for a piece of wood heavy enough to use as a club. Finding nothing but rotten twigs, he drew his sword-bayonet and waited.
The Cossack seemed to take hours to cover the short distance between the fringe of the wood and the fallen tree. As he approached, Jean heard his heavy breathing and once or twice the pony snorted. The sergeant had forgotten cold, hunger and the twinges of pain in the joints of his right hand, certain forerunners of frostbite. For the first time for days he felt warm, and he waited impatiently for the Russian to climb from his saddle and cross the log. As he did so, turning to urge his pony over the obstacle, Jean rose up beside him and drove his bayonet into the Cossack’s neck with the full strength of his arm. The hilt jarred against the base of the skull, and the man gave a loud hiccough. For a moment he stood there beside Jean, the reins still grasped in his right hand. Then he fell sideways, tearing the bayonet from Jean’s grip and crashing among the brushwood that sprouted round the fallen tree. His fall startled the pony and the animal reared, its forelegs slipping from the trunk and plunging into the drift. Jean grabbed at the reins but missed them, and the pony turned, slithering down the path towards the fires.
Gabriel heard it coming and ran into the open, waving his arms. The pony hesitated and a moment later Jean, leaping the trunk, had secured it and led it back into the wood.
It was no simple business to strip the dead Cossack. Here, among the trees, there was hardly any light, and Jean’s bayonet was so firmly wedged in the man’s neck that it required their united strength to extract it. The man wore a prodigious amount of clothing. They stripped off a sacklike jerkin and half a dozen waistcoats, some of them made of silk. He wore two pairs of breeches, one of serge and one of leather, a fur cap and a good pair of cuirassier’s riding-boots fitted with heavy spurs. In addition to his lance, which they recovered from the drift, he carried an ivory-hilted dagger of Oriental pattern and two long-barrelled old-fashioned pistols. Strapped to the pony’s saddle they found a leather portmanteau and a greasy blanket, but they had no leisure to examine the portmanteau and left it where it hung on the crupper. The Cossack was short and fat, and his clothes fitted neither of them. Gabriel, as the shorter of the two, struggled into the leather breeches and some of the waistcoats, belting the smock over his tunic and cramming the fur cap low on his forehead. They hardly spoke whilst the change was being made. All their plans had been worked out in detail whilst they lay in the bushes looking down on the camp.
The Cossacks kept notoriously bad watch. Once inside the village, Gabriel was able to move about unchallenged. It did not take him long to locate the hut where the prisoners were confined, a long, low building, probably a communal storehouse, situated at the extreme end of the street. It was negligently guarded by two or three Cossacks, stamping about on the platform outside the main door. Gabriel was able to effect a thorough reconnaissance, passing round to the rear of the building and probing the rotten planks. The hut had probably been chosen as a prison because it was the most ramshackle in the village. He found a section of the rear wall where one plank had fallen away from another, leaving a gap about the breadth of his hand. He peered inside, but the hut was in complete darkness. Gabriel then guessed the reason for the inadequate guard. Every prisoner was probably in the last stages of exhaustion. Every man except Dominique, Gabriel reflected.
Farther down the street the Cossacks were singing and Gabriel waited until the chorus reached its crescendo before tearing at the loose plank. It gave slightly, but the cracking of the rotten wood made him shudder. He waited for a moment and then tried again. By the time the Cossacks had roared their way through the ne
xt chorus a section of the plank was loose in his hand. He called softly through the small aperture.
“Dominique!”
There was a rustle in the dark interior. Somebody cursed in Italian.
Gabriel paused again, uncertain of what to do and wishing that Old Jean had not been too gaunt for the Cossack’s clothes. He was just about to make an attempt to wriggle into the hut when he heard a giggle, and instantly recognized the sound. Dominique always tittered when he wanted to express emotion. It was his way of saying: “Don’t look any farther, Gabriel, I’m here!” Gabriel had often heard Dominique’s giggle when they had been crawling through undergrowth together in the skirmishers’ line.
Gabriel said: “Is Soutier with you?”
Again the giggle, an odd combination of glee and excitement.
“Fetch him,” said Gabriel, “and for God’s sake keep quiet!”
The Cossacks began to sing again. The men on guard at the front of the shack joined in. Gabriel remembered hearing Russian prisoners sing the same song in Moscow.
Somebody dragged himself over the floor of the hut, colliding with someone who cursed. Presently Gabriel heard Soutier’s voice.
“Who is it?” The whisper failed to disguise the man’s weakness.
“Private Colonna, Sergeant-Major; you can get out if you’re quiet.”
“Is Jean Ticquet there?”
“Waiting in the wood. We’ve got a pony. Get Dominique to push you through.”
Six months ago Soutier would have laughed at an invitation to squeeze through a hole twice as large, but now it was a possibility.
There was silence for a moment and Gabriel heard Dominique titter again. Then Soutier said: “It’s no use; you’d better get off without me. I shan’t leave here in the morning.”
“I tell you we’ve got a pony!”
Something scraped against the edges of the hole, and Dominique’s head and shoulders appeared. Soutier was pushing from behind. Gabriel grabbed the farm boy by the stuff of his epaulettes and eased him gently to the ground.
Seven Men of Gascony Page 27
